Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Deporting US Citizens: Trump’s New Fascistic Use of Law

This week’s chilling revelation that the Trump administration has jailed and initiated deportation proceedings against United States citizens who possess official US birth certificates exposes the absurdity of the far-right myth promoted by Trump and his supporters that xenophobic policies are merely about legality rather than racism.

The State Department is calling into question the legal status of Latinx citizens along the southern border based on the claim that “there has been a significant incidence of citizenship fraud” in the region, though there is evidence of no more than a handful of cases. In 2009, the government seemed to have settled the matter in court with the ACLU before Trump’s State Department recently resurrected this xenophobic conspiracy theory. As a result, Latinx citizens residing near the southern border have been denied passports, prevented from re-entering the country without warning, detained in immigration camps and scheduled for deportation proceedings.

For years right-wing pundits have harped upon the importance of coming to the United States legally — “doing it the right way.” But if they mean what they say, then how can they support the denial of citizenship to documented Latinxs who were born in the US? If the hackneyed reactionary refrain that anti-immigrant policies are about legality rather than racism is true, then why is the Trump administration planning to make it harder for legal immigrants to obtain green cards and citizenship?

There are two basic sets of answers to these questions that are not mutually exclusive: first, because it is about race, because Trump and many of his advisers are racist and because the history of immigration enforcement in the United States is a story of race. Second, because Trump and his administration have no real allegiance to the law and have “trampled on all manner of constitutional principles,” as CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic and countless critics have pointed out. After all, Trump bemoaned the “archaic system” of government in the United States as “a really bad thing for the country” because it limited his personal authority to “get things done.”
https://truthout.org/articles/deporting-us-citizens-trumps-new-fascistic-use-of-law/