The Shock-and-Awe Deportations Will Get WorseTrump’s immigration policy has quickly become a stain on the country. But it’s just getting started.
Last night, Donald Trump sounded relieved as he announced an Israel and Iran ceasefire. “CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!” he wrote. “This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will!” A short time later, he sounded triumphant: “The ceasefire is unlimited,” he told NBC. “It’s going to go forever . . . I don’t believe they will ever be shooting at each other again.” A few hours later, he seemed worried: the “CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT” he announced, before warning, “PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!” This morning, after Israel said Iran had already violated the ceasefire with another missile barrage—and that it would respond in kind—he seemed angry. “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” he posted shortly before 7 a.m.¹ “IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” And as he boarded a flight to the NATO summit, he was undeniably steamed, telling reporters he is “not happy” with Israel or Iran. Neither country, he said, “knows what the fuck they’re doing.” The pressure seems to have worked, at least momentarily: Axios reports that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu responded by scaling back his planned response to Iran’s violation of the ceasefire. Whether that holds or for how long, we’ll see. Happy Tuesday. Brutality Upon Brutalityby Andrew Egger Within hours of Narciso Barranco’s arrest on Saturday, the video had gone viral. Masked ICE agents had surrounded and tackled the Orange County, California landscaper, allegedly an illegal immigrant. In the video, his weed whacker lies discarded while they pin him to the ground and beat him around the head and neck. The more details came out, the worse the story got. Barranco’s son Alejandro told local news his father had been pepper sprayed and suffered a dislocated shoulder; in more than 24 hours since entering ICE custody, Alejandro said, his father had not received food, water, or medical care. Alejandro and his two brothers, Emanuel and José Luis, are U.S. citizens. They also happen to be U.S. Marines. Barranco’s arrest may have prompted the largest recent outpouring of indignation, but his is an increasingly common story—one that represents a stain on our collective consciousness and a black mark in our nation’s history. As they chase ever more stringent immigrant detention quotas—whipped along by mass-deportation ideologues like Stephen Miller—federal agents are increasingly abandoning the slightest concern for optics or basic human decency. Instead, they are bringing the hammer down on any migrant they can find. These are just some of the stories that we’ve seen in the last few weeks:
If anything, we should expect stories like these to multiply in the days ahead. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a remarkable assist in its efforts not merely to detain illegal immigrants, but to short-circuit their due process in order to quickly deport them. In an unsigned and unexplained ruling, the court’s conservative majority paused a ruling from a lower judge who had blocked the administration from deporting migrants to countries with which they had no connection without giving them a hearing to make the case they could face torture there. The immediate effect of the ruling was to give the White House clearance to move forward with deporting a clutch of convicted criminal aliens to South Sudan. Their deportations had been paused last month. But the ruling also seemed to cut in a different direction from other SCOTUS decisions this year, which have forced the White House to stop ignoring migrants’ rights to due process as they seek to deport as many as possible as quickly as possible. That’s all good news for the White House. The president and his aides have responded to every story of injustice in immigration enforcement with insistence that the media is either misrepresenting the story or ignoring other cases in which actual, hardened criminals are being taken off the streets. Now, they don’t need to pause all that long to differentiate between the immigrants they’re going after—if they were ever pausing in the first place. In fact, they seem poised to accelerate a deportation strategy of moving the maximum number of bodies allowed by law, no matter the individual circumstances of the migrants in question or the public reaction. |