Trump’s “Immigration Crime Stories Round Up”: Copying from the Hitler Playbook

February 12, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The White House is now issuing a weekly “Immigration Crime Stories Round Up”—to highlight alleged crimes committed by immigrants. Right after taking power, Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an “office to serve American victims,” or VOICE—Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. Its aim—“To better inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions.”*

In a piece in the February 9 Washington Post, Philip Bump describes an email to reporters from the White House featuring the most recent weekly “Round Up.” It contained nine clips from news articles claiming to show evidence of criminal behavior by immigrants in the U.S. Bump dissects the Round Up, showing that in only two of the cases were undocumented immigrants charged with crimes. The rest of the articles either didn’t identify crimes, or those accused were not undocumented immigrants. Bump points out the irony that on average, 23,077 violent crimes are committed per week in the U.S.—if two were committed by undocumented immigrants, the other 23,075 were committed by native-born Americans or legal residents.

This fascist operation mirrors the way that Hitler used Nazi propaganda for the same purpose—to convince Germans that all Jews were “criminals” who must be forced to leave Germany. Bump describes a 1935 article from the Nazi periodical Neues Volk, titled “The Criminal Jew,” which included photos of Jews alongside text about their alleged crimes.

The Trump/Pence fascists know that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens, but facts are not important to them. Today vilifying immigrants, and those who would stand with them, plays a crucial role in the regime’s program for “Making America White Again.” At this moment, Trump’s cronies in Congress are rewriting the current immigration laws with the goal of dramatically reducing the overall number of immigrants admitted; restricting immigrants from bringing all but the closest family members to join them; and allowing far fewer immigrants from non-white areas of the world such as Africa and the Caribbean that Trump has called “shitholes” while increasing those immigrants “more qualified,” and white.

To serve these ends, the official machinery of government is cranking out anti-immigrant propaganda to whip up hysteria and poison the atmosphere to such a degree that the lives of immigrants are put in even greater danger than they are already.

* “Sanctuary jurisdictions” refers to cities or other jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with the federal government’s enforcement of immigration laws. [back]

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