We ain’t going anywhere…
“Families can be deported together.” Tom Homan,the border Czar, has declared.
“Families can be deported together.” Tom Homan, Trump’s nominee to head ICE, October 2024 interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” re: mass deportations and families wherein parents are undocumented and the children are U.S.-born citizens.
“Send them all back.” President-elect Donald Trump, saying he would deport U.S. citizens as part of mass deportation campaign, December 2024, “Meet The Press” interview
We don’t care `bout no stinkin’ citizenship…
For Mexican Americans, President-elect Trump’s promise to conduct mass deportations of undocumented people is of grave concern. Trump and Tom Homan, whom Trump has said he will appoint to head ICE, have both said outright that they would have no qualms about deporting U.S. citizens.
To be clear: A person born in the United States is a full-fledged U.S. citizen and cannot be deported. Birthright citizenship is not debatable. It is a constitutional guarantee, one that Trump wants to scrap. [In December, 2021, during his quest to overturn the 2020 election, Trump called for the termination of the Constitution of the United States.]
We’ve been deported before…
Birthright citizenship is not debatable.It is enshrined in the Constitution.
Trump and his cultists and apologists claim that only undocumented people will be targeted, but history and reality say otherwise. As has been extensively documented:
* In the late 1920s and early 1930s, on the eve of the Great Depression, the U.S. deported as many as 1.8 million people of Mexican descent. A large majority (over 60%) of the people deported were U.S. citizens, including American-born children of non-citizen Mexicans.
* In 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, 1.3 million people of Mexican descent were deported. Hundreds of thousands of the deportees were U.S. citizens. Many died while in detention camps set up for those awaiting deportation.
Racial profiling was the modus operandi in the 1920-1930 and the 1954 mass deportations, as it will be in Trump’s. American citizens don’t usually carry their birth certificate with them. So, as they were during the previous deportations, looks, last names, and accented speech will be the criteria by which “Americanism” will be determined in the Trump mass-deportation campaign.
Trump: Let’s put our felons back on the street…
Trump and Homan are talking about conducting indiscriminate raids on Farmworkers doing stoop labor.
Attempting to make the mass deportation plan palatable, Trump and his cultists are claiming the intent is to get rid of felons in our midst, to get them off the streets. That is utter BS. Study after study after study has shown that undocumented people commit very few crimes. Trump and Homan are talking about conducting indiscriminate raids in certain communities and work sites. Farmworkers doing stoop labor – harvesting beets, carrots, strawberries, etc. – are not committing any felonies.
If getting felons off the streets were really the intent, Trump, an adjudicated felon many times over, would deport himself and a slew of his cultists. A quick review:
* A jury of regular people found Trump guilty of 34 felonies revolving around falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to an adult film star.
And that’s not all:
* In a civil-case trial, a jury of regular people found Trump liable for sexually assaulting a woman. The presiding judge characterized what Trump did as “rape.”
* A Manhattan jury of regular people found the Trump Organization guilty of felony tax fraud.
In reality, rather than taking felons off the streets, Trump is putting felons back on the streets, viz.:
On his first day in office Trump pardoned 1500 criminals who attacked the white house on January 6th, 2021.
Referring to them as “hostages” and as “patriots,” Trump has said that on Day One of his upcoming presidency he will pardon the more than 1,250 people who have been convicted or have pleaded guilty in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. One insurrectionist taunted the judge presiding over his case, saying, “Trump’s gonna pardon me anyways.”
These insurrectionists assaulted and attempted to kill police officers (some died later as a direct result of the Jan. 6 events). The insurrectionists also set out to murder Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence. One of the insurrectionists was found guilty at trial of conspiracy to murder federal officials who had investigated him in connection with the Jan.6 insurrection. Tons of felonies here.
Trump has already pardoned and put back on the streets several felons (most of them members of his administration or his campaign staff) who pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes ranging from tax fraud to racial profiling.
Clearly, the notion that Trump and his cult want to get felons off the streets is unmitigated BS. The undocumented workers being targeted are hard-working folk who are great contributors to the U.S.
Undocumented workers are philanthropists…
Trump, his cultists, and his apologists rely on two cornerstone lies to justify the mass-deportation plan: (1) undocumented workers are a drain on the economy (local, state, federal) through their use of government services and (2) they take jobs away from Americans.
The fact is that undocumented workers are huge philanthropists. They donate billions to local, state, and national economies, viz.:
Undocumented workers pay billions of dollars in Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance taxes.
* Undocumented workers pay billions of dollars in state and federal income taxes but do not claim tax refunds for which they are eligible. These unclaimed refunds amount to the donation of billions of dollars to the public coffers.
* Undocumented workers pay billions of dollars in Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance taxes. But because of their legal status, these workers will not be able to access these programs. These tax payments amount to outright donations to the U.S. treasury.
* Undocumented workers pay billions of dollars in local and state sales taxes when they purchase appliances, cars, furniture, clothes, and other goods and services.
A 2024 study by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reported that undocumented people paid $97 billion in taxes in 2022, which amounts to a $97 billion donation to the American treasury!
* Trump, his cultists, and his apologists purvey the falsehood that undocumented workers come here to get on welfare and utilize other government services. The reality, as documented by study after study, is that the overwhelming majority of undocumented workers don’t receive any assistance under government safety-net programs.
Trump’s undocumented workers pay more taxes than he does…
Undocumented workers pay thousands of dollars in income taxes.
It is absolutely shameful that undocumented workers pay thousands of dollars in income taxes, while Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, paid only $750 in 2016 and $750 in 2017 in taxes and zero dollars in 10 of the 15 years between 2000-2015, according to a 2020 analysis by the New York Times.
Also in 2020, the New York Daily News reviewed the W-2 forms of undocumented people who worked for Trump. All paid more taxes than Trump. One, a cook, paid $29,366 in federal income taxes over the 10-year period (2008-2018) he worked for Trump. That averages about $2,936.60 per year, which amounts to $1,436.60 more than Trump paid in taxes in 2016 and 2017 combined. Another undocumented former Trump employee showed a reporter his W-2 form that showed he paid $5,332 in income tax in 2014 while working for Trump. That’s more than seven times what Trump paid in taxes in each of the years 2016 and 2017.
Them Meskins are takin’ our jobs…
Yet another egregious falsehood to which Trump, his cultists, and his apologists use to justify Trump’s deportation plan is that undocumented workers take away jobs from Americans. This is easily refuted by a simple eyeball test.
Mass deportations will in effect wipe out the country’s agricultural work force, and farmers will lose billions as their crops go unharvested and rot.
Drive by the fields where stoop labor in 12-hour shifts is performed. You’ll see no line of Americans clamoring to be hired. Nor is there a single instance of white folks suing growers for “reverse discrimination” for not allowing them the opportunity to be exploited shamelessly.
Ditto for the other industries that exploit these workers. Bottom line: a U.S. Department of Labor study determined it is a fallacy that immigrants take jobs away from American workers. That study found that the majority of farmworkers in the United States are undocumented. According to government data analyzed by The Associated Press in 2010, most Americans simply don’t apply for farmworker jobs and those who do usually don’t last long on the job, often not showing up for work after the first day.
The reality – as one study found – is that as a result of the immense spending by undocumented workers and of the founding of small businesses by them, they create jobs.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that it’s not all about money and jobs: Thousands upon thousands of Mexicans crossed the border to volunteer to fight in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Many of them were killed, wounded, or maimed fighting under the American flag and saving American lives.
And you thought eggs were expensive…
Trump’s mass deportation plan will have a massive economic ripple effect. For example: Mass deportations will in effect wipe out the country’s agricultural work force, and farmers will lose billions as their crops go unharvested and rot. What little produce and fruit survive will be mighty scarce and mighty expensive (as will produce- and fruit-based products), dwarfing the cost of eggs people complained about before.
Education funding would also suffer. School districts in states that contain large numbers of undocumented workers with children and whose funding is based on school attendance would lose billions of dollars. This could precipitate wholesale closing of schools.
MAGA cult: un-American, undemocratic, racist…
The MAGA cult, apart from being un-American and undemocratic, is a racist movement. It rests on the Nazi-inspired “replacement theory.”
The MAGA cult, apart from being un-American and undemocratic, is a racist movement. It rests on the Nazi-inspired “replacement theory.” Trump, his cultists, and his apologists tremble in fright as they see the U.S. becoming browner and browner. Many communities, and seven (7) states, are already majority-minority – i.e., comprised of a collective majority of non-white people – which entails the potential transfer of power from white folks to non-white folks. The entire U.S. is projected to become majority-minority this century. This scares the bejesus out of Trump, his cultists, and his apologists. In their panic, they’re diving into the cesspool of racist tricks and pulling out the tired old tactic of mass deportations. These didn’t work before and they won’t work today. We’re still here, and we ain’t going anywhere. c/s
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