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america s voice
'Hitlerian': Trump Vows to Deport Haitians Legally in Ohio to Venezuela
"The lies and conspiracies about Haitians are part of a larger volume of anti-immigrant and dehumanizing rhetoric that actively courts political violence," one immigrant rights advocate said.
Sep 14, 2024
U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his attack on the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio on Friday when he promised to begin his mass deportation plan there if elected president.
"We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio, large deportations," Trump told reporters at his golf course near Los Angeles, California. "We're going to get these people out. We're bringing them back to Venezuela."
Trump's remarks come despite the fact that most of the immigrants in Springfield are from Haiti and are in the country legally. Trump had previously pledged to deport the 15 to 20 million people who he says are or will be in this country illegally by the time he takes office. Speaking on Friday, he repeated his vow to carry out the "largest deportations in the history of our country," starting in Springfield and Aurora, Colorado, where online rumors have exaggerated isolated incidents of Venezuelan gang activity.
"This is Hitlerian rhetoric," USA Today columnist Rex Huppke wrote on social media in response to Trump's statement. "That's not being hyperbolic. He's dehumanizing legal immigrants, and for some reason saying he'll deport Haitians to Venezuela. I've followed Trump since the beginning. He has devolved to his most base, hateful level, an often incoherent racist."
Schools and city buildings in Springfield have received bomb threats in recent days after Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance elevated unfounded online rumors that newly arrived Haitian immigrants in the city were stealing and eating pets. One journalist referred to the Trump campaign's rhetoric as "blood libel."
Around 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield in recent years, and the overwhelming majority are there legally with temporary protected status.
"The majority of Americans who reject this dark and dystopic vision and the lies courting violence should come together to denounce this outrageous spectacle of hatred and to chart a different direction for our nation."
"It's essential to recognize the larger strategy on display from the Republican Party and their allies," Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America's Voice, said in a statement Friday. "The lies and conspiracies about Haitians are part of a larger volume of anti-immigrant and dehumanizing rhetoric that actively courts political violence."
Cárdenas continued: "In addition to the lies about Haitians, which echo tropes like the antisemitic blood libel, Trump described this nation in increasingly violent and graphic terms... What's the potential response from an unhinged supporter hearing those words and believing those threats? It is violence like the Haitian community is fearful of, and Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans have already experienced in places like Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo."
Cárdenas also referenced a promise Trump made last Saturday that his mass deportations would be "bloody."
"The majority of Americans who reject this dark and dystopic vision and the lies courting violence should come together to denounce this outrageous spectacle of hatred and to chart a different direction for our nation," Cárdenas said.
Meanwhile, an immigrant rights group in Colorado also spoke up against Trump's deportation threats.
"Trump's fear mongering is as dangerous as it is dishonest," Gladis Ibarra, the co-executive director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, said in a statement. "He doesn't care about Aurora or Colorado. He's using us as political pawns to push a racist agenda that paints our entire community in a bad light, and we won't fall for it. Immigrants are our teachers, our neighbors, our parents, and our children. We will not let them be demonized or ripped from our communities."
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In Victory for Migrant Rights, US Court Blocks 'Cruel' Biden Asylum Restrictions
"The administration now faces a choice: Follow the law, or try to block the ruling from taking effect in 14 days, leaving people seeking safety in grave danger," said the ACLU.
Jul 25, 2023
Immigrant rights advocates on Tuesday applauded a ruling handed down by a U.S. district judge blocking the Biden administration's anti-asylum rule, which places restrictions on migrants who aim to exercise their internationally recognized right to seek asylum at the southern U.S. border.
Judge Jon S. Tigar, an Obama appointee who serves in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, ruled that the new policy is unlawful, as he did when former Republican President Donald Trump imposed similar restrictions.
The measure, which was introduced in May and immediately prompted the ACLU and other legal groups to file a lawsuit on behalf of several rights organizations, requires migrants to prove that they previously sought protections in a third country before applying for asylum in the United States. The Biden administration has said migrants who want to seek asylum should schedule an appointment using an app that connects them to Customs and Border Protection instead of attempting to cross the border.
"To justify limiting eligibility for asylum based on the expansion of other means of entry or protection is to consider factors Congress did not intend to affect such eligibility," wrote Tigar in his ruling.
Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, which joined the ACLU in representing the plaintiffs, said the policy "violates our laws and makes a mockery of our asylum system."
"The court got it right," Crow said. "We urge the administration to stop defending this illegal policy, and instead take immediate steps to establish a fair and humane process that upholds the rights of all people seeking refuge at our nation's doorstep."
Crow noted that the Biden administration recently admitted that "under the ban, people with meritorious legal claims can be barred from asylum and deported to countries where they face grave harm."
"To them, that is an acceptable price to pay for the illusion of border management," she said. "But they are breaking the law, sowing chaos, and putting vulnerable people in harm's way."
Tigar granted the Biden administration's request for a 14-day stay of the ruling, giving officials time to appeal the decision. The White House is expected to appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and, if the appeals court also strikes down the policy, to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"The ruling is a victory, but each day the Biden administration prolongs the fight over its illegal ban, many people fleeing persecution and seeking safe harbor for their families are instead left in grave danger," said Katrina Eiland, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. "The promise of America is to serve as a beacon of freedom and hope, and the administration can and should do better to fulfill this promise, rather than perpetuate cruel and ineffective policies that betray it."
In the lawsuit, the ACLU and other groups representing the plaintiffs wrote that President Joe Biden "doubled down on [his] predecessor's cruel asylum restrictions" despite having campaigned on "a promise to restore our asylum system."
"The agencies claim the rule merely provides consequences for asylum-seekers circumventing lawful pathways," reads the lawsuit. "But seeking asylum is a lawful pathway protected by our laws regardless of how one enters the country."
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America's Voice, welcomed the ruling and its "strong message to the Biden administration that it must adhere to the law."
But she emphasized that even if Tigar's decision is upheld on appeal, "it does not fix the broken asylum system."
"Only Congress can fully fix the broken asylum and immigration system, giving people the option of coming with visas for family or work and legalizing those who already work here," said Cárdenas. "Congress must deliver the modernization we need."
"In the meantime," she added, "we call on the administration to use the tools it has, including dedicating more resources to the border to address asylum backlogs, while using parole programs, [Temporary Protected Status], and the refugee admissions process to stabilize the system and provide additional pathways for those in need of protection."
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The Dehumanizing Cruelty at the Texas Border Is Part of a Larger GOP Pattern
While investigations should proceed to ensure accountability for those responsible for the horrors near the Rio Grande, we also need to fight against the other fronts of the GOP’s all-out nativist assault on our values.
Jul 25, 2023
Horrific details emerged last week of Texas state troopers deployed by Gov. Greg Abbott denying water to pregnant women and pushing children back into the Rio Grande and the accompanying dangers of deployed razor wire. The barriers are designed to harm and ensnare people seeking asylum in the U.S. Rather than treating it as a vile story that soon fades from the news and our consciousness, we must view the revelations through their larger context.
Unfortunately, it’s just the latest—and a particularly troubling—example of a larger pattern of dehumanizing, dangerous, and politically motivated nativism advanced by Republicans and right wing media. It’s predicated on a false portrayal of immigrants and asylum seekers as threats, invaders, and replacers. And its relentless and accompanying messaging barrage is helping to mainstream dangerous white nationalist conspiracies that are directly linked to real acts of deadly violence.
All of this should be a wake-up call about the consequences of dehumanizing immigrants and should be a focus of real and bipartisan accountability, alongside policy efforts focused on solutions to a broken immigration system. Instead, we expect Republicans to continue in a dangerous, alternate direction.
The GOP prefers chaos and obstruction, designed to keep a sense of crisis involving non-white immigrants in the headlines and portraying “us” as under siege from threatening invaders.
While investigations should proceed to ensure accountability for those responsible for the horrors near the Rio Grande, we also need to fight against the other fronts of the GOP’s all-out nativist assault on our values and its dangerous implications for our country. This includes House Republicans’ effort to pursue a sham impeachment of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—an effort that will hurtle forward this week when Secretary Mayorkas testifies before the House Judiciary Committee in the latest installment of right-wing alternate reality TV.
Keep in mind, domestic extremists—predominantly right-wing extremists—pose the greatest lethal terrorism threat to the U.S. per our government’s own assessments. Yet Republicans are intent to impeach the leader tasked with protecting our homeland, while basing their supposed case on immigration falsehoods, using many of the same talking points as the domestic extremists themselves.
This is impeachment over policy differences, and the GOP’s refusal to admit that their apocalyptic predictions about the end of Title 42 got it exactly backwards. Border encounter numbers have plummeted since the overdue end of Title 42, including because of new legal pathways announced by the Biden administration that alleviate border pressures and provide alternatives to the trek to the border.
Yet instead of acknowledging these facts, Republicans are suing to block these legal pathways while proceeding with their pre-baked attacks on Secretary Mayorkas as if their predictions got it right. None of the Republican alternative approaches would advance real solutions or move us closer to the full-scale modernization our immigration system needs—or even greater management and control—but the GOP keeps blocking anything like solutions.
The GOP prefers chaos and obstruction, designed to keep a sense of crisis involving non-white immigrants in the headlines and portraying “us” as under siege from threatening invaders. It’s dangerous, and it’s motivated by keeping the GOP base animated and inflamed. In reality, their latest impeachment push continues a political attack that GOP and right-wing leaders started long before President Joe Biden was even in office, when they blamed candidate Biden’s immigration policies for a rise in border encounters occurring during the Trump presidency.
It's all independent from the facts, moves us farther from the solutions we need, and opens the door to dangerous violence and dehumanizing treatment of immigrants by amplifying dangerous white nationalist conspiracies about “invasions” and an effort to “replace” white Americans with immigrants. In the 118th Congress alone, tracking by America’s Voice has revealed that 33 Republican Members of Congress have employed the “invasion” conspiracy, including GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee that Secretary Mayorkas will testify before.
From the horrific revelations emanating from Texas to the renewed sham impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, we need to fight against the dehumanization of immigrants and the normalization of extremism in all its forms.
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