Roundups,
Concentration Camps, What Comes Next?
By David Cay Johnston, DCReport
Editor-in-Chief
Abundant signs reveal Trump administration planning for mass
roundups. News of these plans is out there but easily missed in the endless
flurry of stories about Trump White House chaos.
This story needs, but has not received, focused attention from
our mainstream news media, from the minority party and especially from
principled Republicans.
The Trump administration acknowledges planning on mass detention
camps designed, initially, to hold 20,000 people.
Much more disturbing is a U.S. Navy memo obtained by Time magazine that
outlines plans to build concentration camps to hold 94,000 people in California
alone.
When Time reporters sought comment the Navy’s top spokesman,
Capt. Greg Hicks said, “It would be inappropriate to discuss internal
deliberative planning documents.”
The official statements and the memo, whose contents the Navy
did not deny, show that the Trump administration is preparing to round up as
many people as it suspects because they are not Anglo or African American, but
appear to be Latino or Middle Eastern.
Our
Constitution is a piece of paper. The liberties of the people depend on office
holders acting with respect for it.
This was exactly what Trump promised voters, at least as it
applies to people who are in the country without permission or live here with
permission but have any record, even an unpaid parking or traffic ticket.
Never mind that the uncoordinated local computer systems for
vehicle tickets are riddled with errors or that you carefully kept a copy of
the check to pay for your 1989 ticket for riding a bike on the boardwalk after
the midmorning biking time ended in, say, Ocean City, N.J. (No, I didn’t get
such a ticket, but I know someone who did and still worries they may get
arrested by mistake.)
During the campaign, Trump said again and again that he would
round up every person. When critics pointed out that perhaps 11 million such
people live in America, Trump didn’t back off, he doubled down.
The Trump campaign’s written statement was more cautious,
but still chilling: “Illegal aliens apprehended crossing the border must be
detained until they are sent home, no more catch-and-release.”
Think mass roundups of people Trump regards as enemies can’t
happen here? Who would stop it?
Our Constitution is a piece of paper. The liberties of the
people depend on office holders acting with respect for it, especially federal
judges and Congressional oversight.
But at the end of the day, the president is commander-in-chief
and the civilian bureaucracy, like all bureaucracies, does as it is told.
Already people who are American citizens or lawful residents are
being caught up in raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the shock troops
in rounding up suspect immigration violators.
ICE’s own data reveals that it has seized about 1,000 lawful residents including a father only because of his Hispanic features,
a story The Los Angeles Times has covered well.
To build popular support for mass detentions, dictators and
would-be dictators rally crowds with language designed to dehumanize people
–Jews in Nazi Germany, intellectuals in Mao’s China, the Rohingya currently being slaughtered in Myanmar under
a government led by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Trump
launched his campaign in 2015 calling Mexicans who enter the United States,
legally or not, murderers and rapists.
Trump launched his campaign in 2015 calling Mexicans who enter the
United States, legally or not, murderers and rapists.
This year he has called some Latino people “animals” and
“vermin,” though his defenders insist he meant only to refer to gangsters, not
all Latinos.
Given Trump’s history, we’re not giving him the benefit of the
doubt.
For years he insisted he had proof that former President Barack
Obama was illegally holding office because he was born in Kenya, a lie that
surveys show millions of Americans still believe.
Trump calls journalists “enemies of the people,” another slogan
often used to justify rounding up and executing people en masse as well as to
discredit inconvenient facts.
Just this month ICE agents in Memphis arrested a Latino journalist,
Manuel Duran, in what his lawyers say was retaliation for his reporting on
policing issues including immigration enforcement.
And who are these brown-skinned people that white Americans are
supposed to fear? Are they murderers and rapists and, perhaps, a few of them
good people?
More than half the people apprehended at the Mexican border in
the first four months of 2018 came with children under age 7, while 23% had
children three or younger.
Extensive additional details on border
arrest statistics are available here. It’s worth your time to look
over the numbers to get a sense of reality to counter Trumpian rhetoric.
Most of these people tell immigration officers and judges that
they are fleeing gang violence, often after family members have been
assassinated or girls forced into sex slavery.
Trump has never been to Honduras. I have. I’ve run into a
burning building, survived six riots, exposed spies and foreign agents and
hunted down a cold-blooded murderer, so I obviously don’t scare easily.
None of those events scared me the way my travels to Honduras,
the most recent in 2015, where gangs shoot people with impunity even if they
give up the money in their pockets.
Owners of nice homes, not safe behind their iron gates, pay men
with shotguns to patrol 24 hours a day and hire servants just to go to the bank
and the grocery store.
Why is Honduras such a scary place? The failed but ongoing American
war on drugs, which corrupts some of our police, prosecutors and judges.
It also corrupts whole countries including Honduras and
Guatemala, from which many families seeking asylum come. That our
government-trained right-wing death squads, who bragged of their work to my
late colleague Laurie Becklund during the Reagan era, only adds to the reasons
decent people flee north.
There are two trends that should be noted, not to reassure us
that everything will be all right, but that Trump’s incompetence limits the
effectiveness of his assaults on the liberties of the people. At least for now.
Under Trump, arrests of people suspected of being in the country
without permission and picked up more than 100 miles from America’s borders,
are way down. Data from ICE show such arrests
are just half what they were five years ago under Obama.
That matters because if he tries to seize power we may have
enough loyal American officers to prevent what happened in Rome, when the Roman
Republic, through force, became an empire with one ruler at a time until Rome
collapsed. (For an excellent and readable history of this see Mary
Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.)
Don’t just assume everything will be all right tomorrow. It
might be. But events could also quickly take a very dark and deadly turn so
long as Trump holds the reins of our federal government.
