“Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement, and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations. . . We are all, therefore, simultaneously separated by and bound together by the violences of border imperialism.”
― Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism
As I've explained in other threads, the simple truth is that I'm a one-woman news analysis operation here in the "flood the zone with shit" era of what I've come to understand is a fascist variation on "the shock doctrine" Naomi Klein wrote about. No matter how hard I try, so many stories that I know are crucially important to my readers and their understanding of the bigger picture surrounding the Trump regime and the installation of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, fall through the cracks; including, perversely a topic I used to write about a lot more *before* Trump's return to the White House and his unleashing of fascist Gargamel aka Stephen Miller on brown people in general - the white nationalist war on immigrants and the highly-profitable (for some) migrant carceral complex.
Of course, if you understand how important punishing migrants is to the regime as both a fascist political strategy, and a permission gate for installing a larger Christian Nationalist dictatorship in the United States, you already know that it's impossible for readers to get the "big picture" of America's descent into *overt* fascism (as opposed to covert fascism) without being aware of, and understanding those stories. So, I'm going to start taking steps to correct that going forward in this thread. Unfortunately however, we're quite a bit behind the fascist machinations of the Trump regime on this subject at the moment, so I'm going to need to make a bunch of short posts establishing the evidentiary support necessary for a larger discussion about this topic; I hate it too, but the story just got away from me while I was busy writing about a fascist administration that's been black bagging student protestors and re-writing history.
One of the most important necessary illusions to maintain (largely bipartisan) public support for the American war on migrants, is the idea that the fascist repression structures used to target brown noncitizens are only been used on "bad hombre" criminals who have snuck across the border for nefarious purposes. Bizarrely, this delusion remains popular with a US public that would rather not see how the sausage is made, even as the Trump regime actively targets migrant communities in America who have been granted state protection, are seeking asylum, and are otherwise "playing by the rules" that supposedly justifies brutalizing anyone who isn't following "the process" to enter and reside in the United States.
For example, since Trump took office back on January 20th, 2025, the regime has revoked the protected status and demanded the "self-deportation" of hundreds of thousands of law abiding immigrants registered with and monitored by government programs designed to curb illegal entry into the United States by offering a legal pathway to residency; including many people who are residing in America precisely because US foreign policy and exploitation has rendered their countries of origin objectively unsafe to return to. These folks aren't drug smugglers, or coyotes running undocumented people across the border, they are for all intents and purposes refugees created by US imperialist policy and they are precisely the kind of migrants apologists for our fascist deportation regime claim won't be targeted - a fact that has changed drastically under the tender mercies of Trump's unofficial Secretary for White Nationalist Shit, Stephen Miller.
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-cbp-one-trump-biden-border-95b89a3bb0859ec8b6a39f2eef78f672
Trump’s DHS revokes legal status for migrants who entered the US on Biden-era CBP One app
"CBP One was a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s strategy to create and expand legal pathways to enter the United States in an attempt to discourage illegal border crossings. By the end of December, 936,500 people had been allowed to enter with CBP One appointments at border crossings with Mexico. President Donald Trump ended CBP One for new entrants on his first day in office, stranding thousands in Mexico who had appointments into early February.
Trump has ended and revoked temporary status for many who benefited under Biden’s policies. Homeland Security said Monday that Biden’s use of parole authority — more than any president since it was created in 1952 — “further fueled the worst border crisis in U.S. history.”
Homeland Security said last month that it was revoking another form of parole for 532,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who flew to the country at their own expense with a financial sponsor. It ends April 24.
The Trump administration has also announced an end to Temporary Protected Status for 600,000 Venezuelans and about 500,00 Haitians, though a federal judge temporarily put that on hold, including for about 350,000 Venezuelans who had been scheduled to lose TPS on Monday. TPS is granted in 18-month increments to people already in the U.S. whose countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife."
Ultimately I chose this story to demonstrate how week after week, the Trump regime is quietly enacting an immigration policy designed to produce and entrench an American white ethnostate, and by and large this news doesn't really penetrate the public consciousness. When you combine the figures provided in this article alone, we're talking about the rapid expulsion of almost two million people who are objectively *not* the bloodthirsty "illegal" predators the regime claims these policies are designed to stop; newsflash, hardcore narco-terrorists don't register with the US government via phone app when they arrive in America. They are however nonwhite people Stephen Miller can parade in front of an extremely racist American public in a sort of fascist theater show designed to assure crackers that the government is "keeping them safe" from people with the wrong skin tone. Furthermore, despite what the Trump regime would have you believe about deterrence, anyone who has studied the history of US immigration laws can tell you that shutting off the legal pathways for, again, what amount to refugees of US imperialist policy, to enter and remain in the United States will simply *increase* the number of undocumented people who sneak into the country illegally. The conditions that caused them to flee to America aren't going to change, migrants just aren't going to register with the US government anymore because it means inviting DHS and ICE to pick them off as low hanging fruit to make the white nationalist regime's quotas.
#Fascism #Trump #StephenMiller #Migrants #Immigration #DHS #MigrantCarceralComplex #ICE #WhiteNationalism #Ethnostate #WhiteSupremacy #Imperialism #BorderImperialism
The Department of Homeland Security is telling migrants who entered the country using an online app to leave the United States immediately. It was unclear how many beneficiaries would be affected. The department confirmed Monday that authorities notified some migrants who came under the Biden administration's CBP One app but didn't say how many of the more 900,000 beneficiaries were told their permits were being revoked. CBP One was a cornerstone of President Joe Biden's strategy to create and expand temporary legal pathways to entry. Trump has rapidly dismantled those policies, including another form of humanitarian parole for more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Another consistent feature of the American war on migrants, is a sort of fascist two-step surrounding the term "criminal." Typically, and even long before Trump, white supremacists in government office will justify hunting down and brutally suppressing migrants by claiming that they are only going after dangerous "criminals," often while invoking largely isolated stories of migrants committing violent crimes, to generate the necessary fear and outrage needed to maintain public support for these policies. The reality however is that once you see the system functioning in real time, the "dangerous" or "violent" part stops mattering, and folks end up being targeted for minor offenses, or even the civil "crime" of overstaying their visas in the United States; particularly under right wing reactionary governments, but even more so under the Trump regime and the modern fascist GOP.
Take for example the recent news that nearly forty international students had their visas cancelled and were ordered to leave the United States by the Trump administration for minor civil offenses, including in one case, a speeding ticket.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/trump-student-visas-deportation
Deported over a speeding ticket? Dozens of US students’ visas abruptly revoked
"Lisa is one of several students across states who found their legal status revoked by the US government on 4 April, without prior notice or clear explanation. University statements show that at least 39 students have been affected, including UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, Stanford, Ohio State, the University of Tennessee, the University of Kentucky, Minnesota State University and the University of Oregon.
An online self-reported data sheet created by affected students suggests the issue may be more widespread. Students from 50 universities reported their visas were canceled around 4 April, with many noting that they had prior records, some limited to citations or non-criminal offenses.
This secret wave of revocation came a few days after the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced the revocation of 300 or more student visas. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” he said at a news conference on 27 March, referring to students he described as national security threats.
Lisa’s university had included a screenshot of her Sevis record in the message. Termination was logged on 4 April by a system administrator, with a note: “Individual identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked.”
Please keep in mind here that I couldn't find any evidence, anywhere, that the students targeted in this story participated in anti-genocide protests or any activities Downmarket Mussolini has defined as "anti-American." The purpose here doesn't appear to be a question of ideological policing, or political reprisals - this is the regime deporting foreign students because it hates foreign students and ruining these young people's lives helps the nazis make their nativist deportation quotas. The only relevant "crime" any of these folks committed appears to be that they were foreign students who could have their visas revoked and then be deported under the guise of purging the US of foreign "criminals."
#DHS #ICE #Trump #StephenMiller #Immigration #WhiteNationalism #BorderImperialism #StudentRights #Nativism #Xenophobia #Fascism
In an early March announcement that was underreported at the time (but just became a lot more relevant in early April) the Trump regime revealed its intention to collect and presumably monitor social media handles of folks applying to legally work and reside in the United States:
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/23/trump-immigrants-social-media-citizenship-green-card/
Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship
"Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”
The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.
The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”
USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.”"
Of course, observers immediately noted the connection between this proposed policy and Trump's ideological policing, kidnaping, and attempted deportation of foreign students who participated in anti-Genocide protests and/or oppose the Trump regime:
"In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.
“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”
Furthermore, as a representative of the EFF presciently observed, there are few if any limits on the scope of what the government can do with this data if they get it, and modern AI technology allows for the regime to ideologically police and target a terrifying number of people who oppose our fascist overlords. It's also, strictly speaking, a violation of Constitutional rights:
"The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.
Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.
“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”
Finally, it should be pointed out that the regime's proposal gives no indication whatsoever of when the government would stop recording and monitoring the social media activities of the people it's targeting:
"CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.
“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said."
#Fascism #DHS #ICE #Trump #AI #WhiteNationalism #SocialMedia #OnlineSurveillance #Immigration #MigrantRights #Islamophoba #Palestine #Genocide #PoliceState #McCarthyism #USCIS #Nativism
Of course, the other shoe of the regime's proposed online surveillance of immigrants using legal pathways to work, study, and reside in the United States, would eventually drop; the Department of Homeland Security has announced that it is now monitoring the social media activity of law abiding immigrants for "antisemitism" - a word that no longer has meaning when used by a regime (itself littered with antisemites and nazis) that seems to think criticizing a genocide, opposing US funding for Israel's bloodthirsty fascist government, and saying Palestinians have human rights too, is antisemitism.
DHS Announces It’s Surveilling Immigrants’ Social Media for “Antisemitism”
"In a chilling statement, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin effectively said that the administration is carving out an exception to free speech rights to punish certain viewpoints.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism — think again. You are not welcome here,” McLaughlin said.
Advocates for Palestinian rights noted that the clear goal of the administration is to suppress speech critical of Israel, as well as punish Muslim and Arab rights groups — similar to the implementation of the Patriot Act after 9/11.
“It doesn’t matter what you actually say. We are at the point where anything short of pledging allegiance to Israel is, in the eyes of the U.S. government and its many institutions, a criminal offense worthy of the infliction of state violence,” said media analyst Sana Saeed on social media."
I don't think anyone with a functioning brain needs to be told that a Trumpenreich regime full of literal fucking nazis, does not at all care about antisemitism. What it does care about is protecting its investment in a MENA region client state it uses to ensure American dominance of fossil fuel availability, and the US-funded genocide of Palestinians that state, Israel, is conducting in Gaza. Furthermore, the Pork Reich is also very concerned with creating ideological justification to unleash its Gestapo (ICE) on foreign students and Muslims in general, as part of a white nationalist agenda to establish America as an ethnostate.
The story here however isn't really about the hypocrisy of a fascist regime hell bent on both punishing dissent and bleaching the demographics of the American population; when you factor in the regime's use of online surveillance, AI technology, and ICE's Investigative Case Management database, what we're looking at here is the expansion of our police state panopticon during a period where the US government under Trump is actively looking to obliterate civil rights and apply its fascist ideological policing policies to an ever widening circle of people; a circle that consists of both immigrants and "natural born" US Citizens. You should care about this not just because immigrants are human beings who have rights just like anyone born in the US does, but because this digitized fascist repression does not have to, and almost certainly will not, stop with immigrants; who it must again be pointed out, are in the US legally and are actually "following the process" to study, work, and reside in the country.
#Fascism #Panopticon #DHS #ICE #Trump #Stephen Miller #Israel #Gaza #Genocide #Palestine #PoliceState #WhiteNationalism #KristiNoem #TriciaMcLaughlin #StudentProtests #CivilRights
As the fascist Trump regime moves to revoke the protected status of literally millions of law abiding, mostly non-white migrants who are, effectively, refugees from US imperialism and economic predation, I think it's instructive to take a look at what type of immigrants the administration *does* want to protect and provide a pathway to US citizenship for:
As a white Afrikaner, I can now claim asylum in Trump’s America. What an absurdity
"Imagine my bewilderment when Donald Trump and his “first buddy”, South African-born Elon Musk, declared that we Afrikaners are a threatened species; that our black compatriots are engaged in a “genocide”; that we are victims of oppression and discrimination and as such offered special refugee status in the United States – at the very point in time that thousands of migrants to that country are being repelled or deported. The US state department is even preparing “refugee centres” in Pretoria to house these “victims”.
The criticisms and threats coming from Trump, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Musk outraged the majority of South Africans because the claims were patently false and were seen as unacceptable meddling with internal affairs. A section of the white population, however – the ethnic Afrikaner nationalists and separatists – welcomed the US intervention, leading to harsh exchanges with racial undertones on social and other media.
Just for the record: Afrikaners are generally better off today than prior to 1994, when they gave up political power; materially, culturally and in terms of personal freedom.
South Africa’s progressive constitution with its extensive bill of rights is intact; the rule of law is maintained and the judiciary is independent and functioning; we are a genuinely open society with free speech and media that many other democracies, especially Trump’s America, can be jealous of."
So let's review here for a second. According to the regime, hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing a country destabilized by US policy to the point that it's being run by armed gangs, Haiti, are not deserving of US protection and harboring. But specifically white Afrikaners whose rights and liberties are being protected by a coalition government in South Africa that has a better human rights record than the US does, are endangered refugees who need to actively lured to the United States and offered the smoothest possible path to US citizenship because, um, Trump read fake fascist "news" stories about white farmers having their land seized by the South African government? A thing that objectively did not happen, but probably should have given the vast racialized wealth inequality still remaining from the fallout of the white nationalist Apartheid regime that ended in 1994. Well that sure sounds "about white."
Is this policy about appeasing white nationalists littered throughout the Trump regime? Yes. Is this policy about Trump doing a favor for his billionaire South African-born nazi donor Elon Musk; a man raised under the Apartheid system? Also yes. Is all of this just straight up racism and ethno-nationalist policy? Yes yet again. Finally of course, I don't think anyone should sleep on the fact that at the precise time the Trump regime is enacting objectively white nationalist edicts to fully restore and entrench white supremacy as official government policy, these cracker fascists are actively looking to import people who liked fucking Apartheid in South Africa.
#Trump #ElonMusk #SouthAfrica #Afrikaners #EthnoNationalism #WhiteNationalism #Immigration #Imperialism #Haiti #Apartheid
I've spent much of the past eight and a half years avoiding unproductive arguments with people who insist that "you can't compare Trumpism to Hitler and the Nazis" despite knowing that those people rarely, if ever, have much understanding of what made the Nazis the definitive genocidal fascist movement in human history. At some point however, you have to stop relying on Godwin's Law to avoid naming the beast when the Trump administration continues to actively borrow policies and methods of operation from the actual Nazi Party; particularly when those policies ended in the literal fucking Holocaust last time.
To understand what I'm talking about, let's take a look at what Trump's Gestapo (ICE) Director had to say at a recent "border security" conference about his hopes to logistically optimize the process of snatching up migrants for deportation in the streets of America:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/todd-lyons-ice-amazon-prime
Trump's ICE Chief Craves Deportation Process Like Amazon Prime, 'But With Human Beings'
"While speaking a 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons outlined a chilling vision for how deportations in the United States ought to be carried out: with the swift efficiency of Amazon Prime.
"We need to get better at treating this like a business," said Lyons, explaining that he wants to see a deportation process that is "like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings." His comments citing the e-commerce giant's subscription servicewere first reported by the Arizona Mirror.
"This is a chilling example of drawing inspiration from Nazi Germany to deploy logistics for mass deportation and ethnic cleansing," wrote journalist Luis Feliz Leon in response to Lyons' statement."
Although this article doesn't mention it, other sources online (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/ice-todd-lyons-deporation-amazon) have revealed that part of what Lyons is talking about here is a plan to "implement a system of trucks that rounds up immigrants for deportation in a system similar to how Amazon delivers packages around the US."
First of all, this is nightmare dystopian fascist shit that absolutely mirrors the process of rounding up Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Additionally Lyons is implying that the US government intends to deport so many people, that it would make sense logistically, to requisition a fleet of trucks for that ongoing purpose. Finally, don't sleep on the fact that Lyons is talking about running ICE like a business and modeling its operations on Amazon, because for the people who own or invest in a private prison sector getting filthy stinking rich on anti-migrant policies and ICE detention contracts, this absolutely is a business; it might be costing the American taxpayer public money, but it's making a whole lot of nazis huge bank.
Ultimately however, I think the most important part of the story is what Common Dreams alluded to in its short article above; the employment of the government's extensive logistical abilities to streamline and optimize the mass deportation process and speed up the establishment of a white nationalist ethnostate, is more or less how the Nazis ultimately facilitated the Holocaust using the punch card computing system IBM helped them build for that purpose. Speaking frankly, what separates the Nazis and the Holocaust from other eliminationist campaigns by fascist governments in human history is the creation of an optimized system to apprehend, detain, and eventually exterminate whole classes of people; this was systemic fascist murder, and it ended in the deaths of millions of people, most notably but not exclusively over six million Jewish people from all over Europe.
If you look at the overarching theme of the Trump regime's employment of AI technology, mass surveillance, and the integration of data from all government sources into ICE databases, it becomes very clear that we're looking at systemic, logistically organized fascist repression that sure looks an awful lot like the Nazis under Hitler. You might say to me that I can't prove the administration is working itself towards an eliminationist program targeting migrants, but I'd respond by reminding you that mass deportations have historically been part of the process of genocide, bullets in the head are cheaper than airplane flights, and the very same systemic fascism this regime is now admitting is necessary for its mass deportations to function, can just as easily be purposed for mass executions when the time comes.
#Fascism #ICE #DHS #ToddLyons #Trump #Genocide #NaziParty #MassDeportations #MigrantRights #MigrantCarceralComplex #EthnoNationalism #Eliminationism #WhiteNationalism #Logistics #SystemicFascism
In what must be understood as a tightening of the digital panopticon the fascist Trump regime is deploying to target migrants, the administration has negotiated an agreement between ICE and the IRS to share tax data with the American Gestapo for the purpose of facilitating mass deportations, without the consent of the IRS's acting commissioner - who has since resigned in protest:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/08/irs-ice-tax-data
IRS agrees to share tax information of undocumented immigrants with Ice
"A memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the IRS was filed late on Monday in a case brought by immigrants’ rights groups Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, represented by Public Citizen and other lawyers. The memo says Ice can request information from the IRS for its investigations into undocumented immigrants who have not left the country after receiving a final order of removal from a judge. It is signed by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday evening that the acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, is planning to resign, in part over being bypassed in the decision.
The lawsuit over the plans to share IRS information, filed in March, says Internal Revenue Code makes clear that tax records for all taxpayers must be confidential, disclosed only in ways authorized by statute.
“Taxpayer privacy is a cornerstone of the US tax system,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “This movement by the IRS is an unprecedented breach of taxpayer privacy laws – confidentiality which has been respected by both political parties for decades.”
Although every expansion of the regime's ability to hunt down and target migrants is an important stepping stone to a white nationalist dictatorship, this policy is particularly cruel and nonsensical. For starters, it deprives the US government of tax revenue because an overwhelming number of undocumented people do in fact pay their taxes. More importantly however, the US government and the IRS have been encouraging migrants to do so for decades, under the promise that this information won't be used to target and deport them. In one single agreement signed by two members of the Trumpenreich, the US government has simultaneously harmed the American people, and forced more migrants further underground, to break our collective promise to folks who otherwise would have stayed below the radar:
"The Trump administration has been working to get the IRS and Ice to agree on some information sharing for weeks, a way to use tax filings to aid in his mass deportations. The Washington Post reported on a draft of the agreement in March, citing current and former IRS workers who said the move would be an unprecedented change in access to tax records and upend immigrants’ willingness to file taxes.
“It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes,” one former IRS official told the Washington Post."
#Fascism #DHS #IRS #ICE #Trump #MigrantRights #WhiteNationalism #PoliceState #Panopticon #MassDeportations #KristiNoem #ScottBessent #MelanieKrause
Thanks to a Trump-appointed judge once again playing legal Simon Says, the Trumpenreich has taken yet another step towards a type of apartheid system and the mass deportation of migrants who overwhelmingly represent no threat to America. Ruling that the rights groups opposing the move have no standing to challenge it, Judge Trevor Neil McFadden has allowed the Trump regime to move forward with a requirement that all noncitizens register with a government hell bent on enacting mass deportations, and carry documentary proof of registration or suffer criminal consequences.
Judge allows requirement that everyone in the US illegally must register to move forward
"While questions remain about how the registration requirement will function, its impact is potentially far-reaching. The Trump administration — which has worked to make good on campaign promises of mass deportations — has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected.
One of the groups that sued, the National Immigration Law Center, called the Thursday ruling “disappointing” in a statement.
“This disappointing ruling unfortunately means that, for now, Trump’s scheme to force people into an impossible choice moves forward. As we weigh next steps in our case, we urge affected community members to consult with an immigration attorney to better understand the consequences of registering or not,” said Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at National Immigration Law Center.
Homeland Security officials announced Feb. 25 that it was mandating that all people in the United States illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. Failure to register is considered a crime, and people will be required to carry registration documents with them or risk prison time and fines.
Registration will be mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status. People registering have to provide their fingerprints and address, and parents and guardians of anyone under age 14 must ensure they registered."
This one is a little complicated because the Trump administration has argued that this requirement has existed for decades, but just wasn't being enforced. As the article notes, there's some truth to that line of (motivated) reasoning, but the reality is that these rules haven't been enforced since almost immediately after they were introduced in the 1940's because by and large, migrants are *not* a criminal threat to the United States. Furthermore the requirement to provide fingerprints and carry documentation of registration or face *criminal* penalties is as far as I know, a new and disturbing wrinkle the regime has thrown in to make their arguments that they're only deporting "criminals" a de facto reality in retrospect. As any student of history can tell you, if law enforcement can demand "papers, please" and then lock you up for not producing them, what you're talking about is the criminalization of human beings in something akin to an apartheid system, and a racialized legal pretext to arbitrarily detain anyone who *looks like* (this is crucial) they might be a foreign national; since after all, the authorities won't know if you have "papers" until they ask, and not having papers will be treated as a crime until such a time as you can prove that you (even US citizens of the wrong complexion) aren't legally obligated to carry them.
Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reality is that no matter what the rules say, this is an openly white nationalist government that has falsely argued migrants don't have *any* Constitutionally protected rights, and have already begun the process of revoking legal status for hundreds if not thousands of people lawfully residing in the United States, while brazenly deploying deportation to engage in fascist ideological policing to target its perceived enemies. This is a regime that hates migrants, does not care if they "follow the rules," is willing to play legal Calvinball to deport literally anyone who isn't white and a natural born citizen, and has overwhelmingly targeted immigrants following the legal process to remain in the US as a sort of "low hanging fruit" to easily generate big numbers of deportations to brag about to its deeply racist base of support. They *are* going to use this registration system to locate and detain migrants for mass deportation, and they know full well you'd have to be some kind of crazy to willingly turn over your location and identity to a nativist regime dead set on bleaching the American population demographics through the force of law. What the administration is doing here is purposely criminalizing migrants to justify more and more repressive crackdowns on folks it has now effectively made truly "illegal."
#Trump #Fascism #DHS #ICE #Apartheid #MassDeporations #PoliceState #IdeologicalPolicing #Panopticon #MigrantRights #WhiteNationalism #McFadden
A federal judge is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with a requirement that everyone in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government. Judge Trevor Neil McFadden made the ruling Thursday, one day before the requirement is to go into effect. The Department of Homeland Security announced the mandate in February, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. Failure to register would be considered a crime, and people would be required carry registration documents with them or risk prison time and fines.
So, how ominous of a sign is it when the white nationalist government that's openly violating the US Constitution to facilitate fascist mass deportations, decides to declare thousands of immigrants legally dead for all intents and purposes? This week Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (aka Cracker Fascist Barbie) and acting Social Security commissioner (and gammon-y human thumb) Leland Dudek, got together and "terminated" the "financial lives" of 6,000 immigrants the regime claims are "convicted criminals and 'suspected terrorists,'" by moving their Social Security numbers into the agency's "death master file."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-social-security-immigrants
'Outrageous Abuse of Power': Trump Weaponizes Social Security for Deportation Spree
"The Trump administration this week reportedly classified thousands of immigrants living in the United States as dead in a Social Security database in an effort to force them out of the country, a scheme that was met with furious uproar from advocates and lawmakers.
By entering the names and Social Security numbers of roughly 6,000 immigrants into Social Security's "death master file," the administration has revoked their ability to legally work in the U.S. and receive benefits in a bid to get them to "self-deport," several news outlets reported Thursday.
"This is an outrageous abuse of power," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said in a statement. "It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people. Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more."
"If they get away with this, it would be no surprise if they then move on to marking their perceived enemies as dead—citizens and non-citizens alike," Altman added. "This is a total misuse of the dedicated revenue that workers contribute to Social Security, with every paycheck. Though Trump claimed he wouldn't cut benefits, he essentially is by diverting dedicated monies from their intended purpose of paying Social Security benefits to the immoral purpose of maliciously ruining lives."
First off let me start by noting that some, if not the majority of folks targeted by the Trump regime for financial termination are people with valid social security numbers, and while undocumented immigrants can pay into Social Security, they can't collect even when they reach retirement age anyway; so this has nothing to do with migrants stealing benefits, or preventing fraud. Additionally it should be pointed out that while we're being assured that those targeted are all "convicted criminals and "suspected terrorists," our source for that is the very same administration trying to deport student visa holders for traffic tickets and telling you anti-Tesla protestors are "domestic terrorists," so who the fuck knows what that assertion even means anyway; it appears that at least some of the targets are simply people "who were allowed to enter and remain temporarily in the United States under programs instituted by the US president’s predecessor Joe Biden" according to The Guardian.
Finally, it should be understood that this is about a lot more than collecting Social Security benefits in your late 60's; in modern American society you typically need a Social Security number to open a bank account, get a credit card, rent an apartment, obtain health insurance, access car loans, and so forth, so when Dudek says they're trying to "exterminate" the "financial lives" of targeted immigrants, he's only partially employing a metaphor here; the opponents of the plan calling this "digital murder" are absolutely right to do so. This is definitely going to destroy lives and get people killed, and as the article notes the regime is reserving the right to expand the list of targets to "others in the country without authorization," which sounds rather ominous when we're talking about a government that's taken to having Marco Rubio instantly revoke visas and legal status for student protestors before ICE kidnaps them.
All of which means that even if the regime's actions are taken in the best possible light, this is fascist bullshit designed to push a nativist, white nationalist agenda while harming folks the administration deems illegal primarily for their skin tone and place of birth. As both a target of the regime's ongoing anti-trans pogrom, and a student of history however, I can't help but notice an ominous déjà vu quality in all of this. Historically speaking, mass deportations have always lead to mass graves, and when a fascist regime declares you and folks like you legally dead, it's usually because they mean to eventually make that a literal reality.
#Fascism #DHS #KristiNoem #ICE #LelandDudek #SocialSecurity #SSA #Trump #WhiteNationalism #MigrantRights #Nativism #Genocide #History #DigitalMurder #MassDeportations #Immigration
"Though Trump claimed he wouldn't cut benefits, he essentially is by diverting dedicated monies from their intended purpose of paying Social Security benefits to the immoral purpose of maliciously ruining lives."
AnarchoNinaAnalyzes
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