Immigrants are again political football this silly season
As of May 25, 2024, we were 164 days away from the general elections on November 5. Yet, it is already the “silly season,” and immigrants are once again being used as political pawns in a landscape where the American voter’s choices are limited to two elderly white men—who arguably should have retired long ago, considering America’s own retirement age.
On one side of the political field is Joe Biden, who leveraged the immigrant vote in 2020 by promising to overturn Donald Trump’s xenophobic policies. To date, we are still waiting for that promise to be fully realized. Biden has adopted a stance on immigration that mirrors Trump’s, including the deportation of Haitians back to Haiti—a country the U.S. has deemed unsafe for travel since July 2023, even airlifting out all non-essential embassy staff in March.
Three years into his administration, Biden’s actions indicate a commitment to continuing harmful and ineffective immigration policies rather than supporting and welcoming immigrants as he pledged during his 2020 campaign. His administration continued to enforce Title 42, a Trump-era policy ostensibly aimed at protecting public health but primarily intended to limit immigrant entry. It was ended by the courts, not Biden.
The White House is also considering executive action to restrict migrants’ ability to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border if they crossed illegally—a maneuver reminiscent of controversial action in the Trump era. Biden also endorsed a bipartisan Senate border bill that includes funding for the Trump border wall, which he previously vowed not to finance.
On the opposing side is the former president, the Xenophobe-in-Chief, who continues to rally his base with divisive, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric. His inflammatory statements, such as claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” cater to his followers’ racist inclinations. He has promised to implement unprecedented measures against both legal and unauthorized immigrants, including a massive deportation blitz.
The indicted former president and front-runner for the Republican nomination is relying on the same hard-line immigration tactics he used in his 2016 campaign. He has pledged to build more miles of border wall and impose strict limits on asylum, including reviving a program that required migrants to await their asylum hearings in Mexico.
Trump has also vowed to execute the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history, modeled after the Eisenhower administration’s infamous Operation Wetback in 1954, which deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants and American citizens. To facilitate these mass deportations, he plans to authorize the National Guard and state officials to arrest and deport immigrants living in the U.S. in an undocumented capacity, a move that would challenge long-standing legal limits on the military’s involvement in domestic law enforcement.
Trump has also pledged to invoke the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to deport suspected migrant gang members, a law cited during World War II to justify the surveillance and detention of Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants.
While Trumpy is barking away like a fat Chihuahua, it is funny to note that Barack Obama deported more immigrants than Trumpeto, despite the latter’s policies of caged children and Muslim bans.
And so the political theater continues unabated. Who will emerge victorious in this match-up remains to be seen. For now, immigrants will continue to be scapegoats and political footballs, with the justice system being their only potential safeguard. Who can immigrant voters trust in this fraught political landscape come November 5? That remains the billion-dollar question.
Felicia J. Persaud is the publisher of NewsAmericasNow.com, a daily news outlet focusing on Black immigrant issues.
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