President Donald Trump spent the entirety of his 2024 campaign spreading what any objective observer would pan as hate speech against Black and Latino migrants. He outdid his first term’s bigotry, when he generalized Mexican migrants and rapists and drug dealers, by comparing Sount American migrants to Hannibal Lecter, and calling them “animals” who are “not human.” He and his VP, JD Vance, spread malicious disinformation about Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio. He claimed migrants coming over the southern border were being emptied out of the prisons and insane asylums of their countries.
His campaign promoted images of Black migrants simply existing as evidence that the U.S. would have become a third-world nation under Kamala Harris’ leadership. He claimed they have “bad genes” that predispose them to commit murder. He has made it abundantly clear that the only immigrants welcome in America with open arms are white Afrikaners escaping an imaginary “white genocide” in South Africa. The Great Replacement Theory, which has been promoted by prominent Republicans, including the president, insists that immigrants are being flooded into America to replace white people.
Trump’s immigration stances and policies have been transparently racist — and now his administration is playing around in our faces and pretending racial profiling has played no role in the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On Monday, the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “Fears of racial profiling rise as Border Patrol conducts ‘roving patrols,’ detains U.S. citizens.”
The article quoted the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which said, “We are seeing ICE come into our communities to do indiscriminate mass arrests of immigrants or people who appear to them to be immigrants, largely based on racial profiling.”
The Department of Homeland Security — the federal department headed by that lady who failed to show a clear understanding of what habeas corpus is — claimed the allegations made in the Times article are “false.”
One might call the people who make up the Trump administration masters in the art of gaslighting if anyone found them to be believable outside of MAGA minions who hate Black and brown migrants as much as they do.
Look, we already know ICE has gone far beyond prioritizing people with criminal records for arrest and eportation. Data shows that nearly half of ICE detainees either have no criminal record at all or have only been convicted of minor offenses, including traffic violations. According to Reuters, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention statistics show the number of detainees arrested by ICE with no other criminal charges or convictions rose from about 860 in January to 7,800 this month – a more than 800% increase.”
But these are little pesky things called facts; we haven’t even gotten to the logic (or lack therof) behind the DHS’s defense of ICE.
Part of the reason millions of people engaged in “No Kings” protests across the nation over the weekend is the people’s opposition to ICE tactics, which include raiding schools, workplaces and immigration courts to arrest allegedly undocumented migrants and set them up for deportation, often, without due process.
Earlier this month, White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller reportedly set a new quota for ICE agents to arrest 3,000 undocumented migrants each day.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” an ICE official claimed, according to a report in The Washington Examiner.
So, if ICE agents are to increase the agency’s deportation numbers by going to Home Depot, 7-Elevens and other places they might expect to find undocumented migrants, how else would they know who to target for questioning, unless they were looking for people who looked and sounded like they might not be American?
Yeah, there’s a term for that. It’s called racial profiling.