DACA Deadline Looms:
Fascist Regime Moves to Embed White Supremacy, Drive Out Immigrants

February 20, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

UPDATE: On Tuesday, February 20, the U.S. Supreme Court took no action on an appeal by Trump’s Department of Justice of an appeals court order that temporarily prevents the federal government from deporting Dreamers. For now, the March 5 DACA expiration deadline is not firm. However, as SCOTUSBlog reports, “The justices likely will consider the case again at their conference on Friday, February 23,” and Trump is determined to proceed with the March 5 deadline.

More than ever, there is an urgent need for mass resistance to all attacks on immigrants. No U.S. court ruling, congressional vote, or presidential action can legitimately determine the “legality” of millions of people!

~~~~~~~~~

For anyone who doesn’t want to allow a fascist America to be consolidated, for everyone who opposes the attacks on immigrants and wants to see them end, now is the time to stand up. On March 5, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) ends, and with it the legal status of about 700,000 young people, the “Dreamers.” (See sidebar).  A major crisis is looming.

The Trump/Pence fascist regime has  dangled the possibility of a “path to citizenship” for about 1.8 million youth as a spearhead for intensifying their racist onslaught on all immigrants. Trump’s viciously cynical approach to the Dreamers has the appearance of “generosity” – providing a “pathway to citizenship” to undocumented youths who have been “good immigrants” and done everything they were supposed to do. To qualify, these youths must provide information about themselves and their families (documented and undocumented) to the very regime that has been promising to attack and deport them.  In return they can work or go school. 

Trump has dangled this offer to create an opening to drive through increased attacks on all immigrants and all potential immigrants. Through zeroing in on these youth, the Trump/Pence fascists are targeting, terrorizing, and delivering a message to millions of people, with and without papers: “you are not welcome here and we intend to drive you out of the country.” And they are inflaming an overall racist atmosphere so toxic for immigrants that fewer and fewer will be able to or want to come to this country, and more and more who are here will “self-deport.” 

This is a nodal point and escalation in a year-long, coordinated, strategic plan aimed at driving millions of Black and Brown immigrants out of this country and dramatically limiting those who can enter the U.S. in the future. The Trump/Pence fascists have done this through the “Muslim ban”; a huge increase in raids and arrests; threats against sanctuary cities; singling out immigrants' rights leaders for arrest; and ending Temporary Protected Status for nearly a quarter of a million immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and other countries. Hand-in-hand with these moves, a propaganda offensive has been underway aimed at turning immigrants into dangerous “criminal aliens” in the eyes of millions. All of this is aimed at “Making America White Again,” and establishing white supremacist political and social norms.

A “Debate” that Covers Up Reality

The “immigration debate” underway in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Senate and the White House focused on the looming DACA deadline is based on lies that conceal the reality of immigrants’ lives.  

The United States has robbed, ransacked, and ruined entire countries in this hemisphere and all over the world. It has impoverished tens of millions of people, and imposed economic conditions that force people to leave their farms and ranches. People have had to try to find to find a way to survive in dilapidated, makeshift housing in teeming barrios. In their homelands, people are locked in a desperate struggle to survive with others like themselves. Many are forced to leave.

If they somehow make it to this country--across a heavily fortified border, past the Border Patrol checkpoints that dot every road in the Southwest, across torrid deserts and freezing mountains–many of them are forced into the lowest paying menial jobs this system has to offer. For decades, immigrants in this country have been forced to live “in the shadows,” work endlessly, and try to provide for their children. And now the fascist leaders of this system have decided immigrants are the source of all the ills of this society, and that the U.S. needs to even more viciously “protect its borders”. 

As a letter from Refuse Fascism put it, the systematic campaign against immigrants is a “Monumental horror in its own right, creating terror and untold suffering.  At the same time, it is a major escalation in the consolidation of a fascist America.  From Trump’s election campaign to the opening days of the regime, anti-immigrant, xenophobic nationalism has been the battering ram and lynchpin of the Trump/Pence Regime. Trump’s ‘Wall’ is a potent symbol and instrument of terror that concentrates the shattering of old norms and cementing Trump’s new order of: America First…Make America Great White Again.”

The Treachery of the Democrats

The top Democrats have accommodated the Trump/Pence regime as it has advanced its program of ethnic cleansing, and poisoned the atmosphere with disgusting lies about “criminal aliens.” With every new attack, the Democratic Party leaders have refused to condemn these lies or the program they serve. 

Trump and the fascists have held out the possibility of a “path to citizenship” for about 1.8 million youth in return for $25 billion for Trump’s border wall and a major increase in “internal enforcement.”  One DACA organizer called this offer “a white supremacist ransom note,” yet the Democrats have already agreed to fund Trump’s border wall. 

The Democratic Party leadership and the fascists don’t differ over whether to exploit and control immigrants. They differ over how best to do that. The Democrats pose as friends of immigrants and sometimes call for reforms – if they don’t conflict with how the Democrats perceive the larger interests of the empire they represent. And both Democrats and Republicans represent the interests of the same system of global imperialist plunder. The top Democrats will act on whatever they think will best serve to preserve and extend the capitalist-imperialist system. 

They have normalized the fascism of the Trump/Pence regime. The Democrats have demonstrated, over and over, that relying on them to defend and protect the interests of immigrants is suicide.

First, They are Coming for the Immigrants – What Will You Do?

This is utterly illegitimate, and it is intolerable! All sections of people must step forward now and stand shoulder to shoulder with Dreamers and all immigrants. 

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.