When the Criminal Poses As Victim...

Trump Unleashes Fascist Tirades and Military Force Against Immigrants

April 9, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Last week Donald Trump unleashed a Twitter torrent of lies and venom against immigrants and refugees on a scale previously unmatched. Trump started his racist barrage on Easter Sunday, seizing on a caravan of some 1,000 refugees, including 700 women and children, making a 2,000-mile trek through Mexico toward the U.S. These are mainly people fleeing the misery and murder epidemic that the U.S. has spawned in Honduras.

Trump shamelessly twisted this courageous journey of oppressed people fleeing reactionary violence into a specter of an “army” of criminals, bent on rape and drug-dealing, rampaging toward the border. “We don’t know if they’re murderers, if they’re killers, if they’re MS-13,” he brayed to “a campaign-style rally” of supporters—aka, a racist mob—in West Virginia. “This is the kind of stuff and crap that we’re allowing into our country.”

To listen to the bald-faced lies of Trump and the fascist media, hordes of immigrants and refugees were descending on the U.S. to steal jobs and welfare, and get on DACA. (Never mind the fact that a person would have to have been in the U.S. 11 years ago to be eligible for DACA.)

The U.S. already has 21,000 Border Patrol agents, nearly 700 miles of border walls and barriers, along with high-tech sensors, aircraft and weapons. Yet Trump portrayed America as the defenseless, soft-headed victim. “We have no border, because we had Obama make changes ... that basically created no border.”

Reversing Right and Wrong in a Vicious Escalation

Here, right up front, two things need to be said: one, that the United States, far from being in any sense of the word an “aggrieved party,” has a 300-year history of imperialist plunder and predation that stretches from the tip of Chile to the Rio Grande. As part of this, it has sucked the blood from the immigrants from Latin America, super-exploiting them in jobs that native-born U.S. citizens won’t take and hounding them outside of work.

Now, Trump has taken this in a different and even worse direction. He rode to the presidency in part by demonizing and scapegoating immigrants, promising to drive them out of the country. Meanwhile, those who remain are even more deeply exploited. And he promised to even more viciously prey upon the nations of Latin America. In the last two weeks, Trump has doubled down on all of this.

Fascist Tweets, Fascist Assaults

Without exaggeration, Trump’s rampage equaled the racist, anti-Semitic venom spewed out by Hitler’s Nazis. Think about it: referring to human beings fleeing for their lives—from a disaster that the U.S. fundamentally created—as “crap.” And Trump backed up his hate-filled diatribes with a bevy of life-threatening assaults on immigrants and refugees that mark another serious lurch toward full-on fascism.

The pig went further. On Sunday he declared DACA “dead.” Mid-week he ordered 4,000 National Guard troops to “defend” the border, and National Guard units from Texas and Arizona are already being deployed. He also ordered that at least one new military base be built on the border.

Crossing the border has been a perilous journey for decades, as the U.S. rulers have deliberately forced migrants to travel through ever inhospitable deserts and mountains to reach refuge. As if this wasn’t bad enough, rabid anti-immigrant vigilantes and Border Patrol pigs deliberately empty or foul water that immigrant rights activists leave in the border deserts for the men, women, and children making this dangerous trek.

The result: since 1998, the remains of over 7,000 human beings have been discovered in areas near the border—and no one knows how many more died whose bodies were never found. Each of these people was intentionally murdered by the rulers of the U.S. who set this policy before Trump. But now, the Trump/Pence regime is turning the border region into an even deadlier killing field.

The Trump/Pence IN-Justice Department has also ordered that starting October 1, every immigration judge will be required to complete 700 deportation cases each year. This will greatly speed up deportation proceedings, effectively gutting the legal rights of many immigrants and refugees.

Meanwhile, the regime is making it far harder for people to claim “credible fear” of persecution or violence in order to gain refugee status, while making it easier to deny asylum applications—even for things like merely being accused of drunken driving.

Unaccompanied children will no longer be protected when they enter the U.S. but could be barred or promptly removed, while families can be detained for longer periods. ICE, Trump’s immigrant Gestapo, is already cruelly separating immigrant children from their parents.

And on Friday, April 6, Trump signed a memorandum ordering the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to “expeditiously end” the current practice of “catch and release,” which allows many undocumented immigrants to be released from detention while their cases go through the legal system. This in all likelihood will lead to a vast expansion of what is already the world’s largest immigrant detention system, with many thousands of immigrants locked up in hellholes where they can be treated as slaves. Trump’s order raised the specter of massive concentration camps, directing his agencies to provide “a detailed list of all existing facilities, including military facilities, that could be used, modified, or repurposed to detain aliens for violations of immigration law at or near the borders of the United States.”

Monster That’s Sucked Blood from Latin America’s Veins for Centuries Now Poses as the Victim

Donald Trump is the embodiment of the monstrous leech that is the United States, a leech that has sucked the blood out of the veins of the lands to the south for nearly 300 years. It has extracted mountains of silver, tin, copper, and oil. It has plundered and profited from sugar, fruit, beef, coffee, vegetables, and more. In 1848 it stole half of Mexico.

And what has the “greatest country on Earth” sent south, back to Latin America? It sends back bullets, misery, gangs, drugs, death squads, torture, and genocide. It organizes military coups, supervises death squads and torture, and carries out invasions. Trump claims NAFTA is Mexico’s “cash cow,” but it’s U.S. imperialism that has flooded Mexico with its manufactured goods and agricultural products, with disastrous consequences for the people. Cheap corn produced by big agribusinesses in the U.S., for example, and pouring into Mexico has driven millions of small farmers in that country off their land. It’s the U.S. that has built sweatshops from the U.S.-Mexico border to the southern tip of Latin America, exploiting tens and tens of thousands.

When people have rebelled against its predations, the U.S. has cruelly slaughtered them. In the 20th century alone, in just Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and counting just some of the bloodiest instances of U.S. invasions, CIA subversion, and backing for military coups and paramilitary atrocities, the U.S. has been responsible for at least 434,000 deaths! And now the shit-headed Donald Rump claims the U.S. to be victims!!! (See the revcom.us series “American Crime” for numerous examples.)

Look at Honduras, the country from which most of the immigrants and refugees on the People Without Borders (Pueblo Sin Fronteras) caravan are fleeing. The U.S. has backed a series of military coups in Honduras and reactionary butchers, like the current president Juan Orlando Hernández, to rule over the people. The latest coup was in 2009, directed by Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Because of these machinations and overall U.S. domination, Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world: “[T]he police and military themselves kill and beat people with impunity,” according to Human Rights Watch. Activists are executed by security forces. Honduras is one of the world’s poorest countries, preyed upon by imperialism for bananas, coffee, and cheap sweatshop labor. Hondurans work for very low pay while the foreign owners reap huge profits. Even young children are murdered by gangs or the state. (See “What’s Driving the Children of Honduras to Come to the United States?” and “American Crime Case #75: Obama, Clinton and the 2009 Military Coup in Honduras” at revcom.us.)

Now, when just a tiny bit of the humanity subjected to those horrors becomes visible in the caravan heading north, America’s predator-in-chief screams bloody murder—like a rapist lashing out at his victims for daring to speak up. Even worse, all this is a prelude and an excuse for taking U.S. crimes, oppression, and exploitation to a whole new, fascist level—bringing down and justifying even worse suffering, deprivation, ignorance, and violence.

Attacks on Immigration: Battering Ram and Leading Edge of Trump/Pence Fascism

After all this, those claiming that Trump hasn’t “accomplished” much of anything are engaging in sheer chauvinist self-delusion. It amounts to saying the lives of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and of the hundreds of millions living in countries the U.S. has turned into hell on earth, mean nothing.

Trump’s anti-immigrant rampage this week was a multifaceted assault, aimed at taking further leaps toward all-out fascism. Trump battered those within the ruling class who pose some obstacles. Even though they have quietly stopped even going through the motions of  defending immigrants, Trump still tweeted that “The Democrats stand in our way—they want people to pour into our country unchecked....CRIME!” He whipped up white supremacy and racism and pushed forward his “Make America White Again” agenda of ethnic cleansing, now focused on forcing out and deporting millions of immigrants. This is one key cornerstone of the full fascist program of the Trump/Pence regime.

And through all this, Trump went on the offensive ideologically to harden the hearts and dull the consciences of people in this country. To condition them to passively accept violence, abuse, and worse against “the other” and to tolerate monstrous crimes in the name of the “security” and “safety” of Americans, and its “laws and order.” In short, to cohere this society around a fascist ethos and fascist values.

Meanwhile, far too many people, the liberal media, and the Democrats continue to normalize Trump/Pence fascism, with its openly Nazi-like racism, by labeling it simply “nationalism” or “populism.”

The hour is getting very late. Now is one of those moments when everyone must decide where they really stand, what they’re really about, who they really are. On the side of the world’s most dangerous and murderous oppressors? Or on the side of the seven billion people on Earth who are increasingly threatened by this fascist regime? Those who stand with humanity need to act on that, with urgency!

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