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Immigration Justice Must Be a Climate Fight, Too
We need to work together to forge a bold vision to protect displaced people in a climate-disrupted world.
Nov 19, 2024
Donald Trump’s return to the White House poses an existential threat to the climate movement’s goal of a livable future. In the face of this magnitude and multitude of threats, it is imperative that we resist the impulse to retreat into our niche issue silos and limit our vision. If we hope to preserve a stable climate, we must prevail in the fight of our lives against authoritarianism. And to do that, climate movement leaders must commit to an unprecedented level of solidarity with the communities targeted by Trump, in particular immigrants and refugees.
For a number of years now, we have taken part in, and led, conversations between immigrant and climate leaders aligning our movements for this moment. To meet it, the U.S. Climate Movement must grapple with the connections between climate disruption, migration, and rising authoritarianism; commit to the fight against mass detention and deportation of migrants; and help build a narrative and vision of climate resilience that includes protections for displaced people.
Trump’s electoral victory comes in the midst of a global wave of authoritarian politics stretching across Western democracies. These movements share a worldview of scarcity in a chaotic, disrupted world, and their politics are defined by brutal scapegoating of migrants and displaced people. Wherever they win power these authoritarians are climate disasters, expanding the fossil fuel economy, and delaying action. The threat of eco-fascism lurks in authoritarian ideology like the great replacement theory and has motivated terrible acts of individual violence. The authoritarian movements gaining political power by demonizing migrants and refugees are firmly aligned with fossil fuel billionaires and their interests. Climate and immigrant rights movements succeed or fail together; our political fortunes are inextricably bound.
Climate advocates can deploy the legal and political tactics that blocked tar sands pipelines and new coal-fired power plants to challenge the construction of the vast network of detention centers, camps, and militarized sites essential for the administration’s agenda.
As climate-disruption accelerates it creates the conditions these authoritarian movements thrive on. More frequent and severe domestic disasters, like back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton, feed the psychological sense of scarcity of disruption. Globally, increasing climate impacts intensify factors like persecution, conflict, and economic desperation, driving internal displacement and forcing some to cross borders to seek safety. Authoritarians like Trump prey on these conditions, falsely blaming asylum seekers for stealing FEMA funds from hurricane survivors in a calculated attempt to pit the victims of the climate crisis against vulnerable immigrants instead of billionaires.
One reason these manipulative tactics have been so effective is that they go unchallenged. On both sides of the Atlantic, climate and other progressive organizations have seen defense of immigrants and refugees as a political third rail, remained silent in the face of growing attacks, and ceded the narrative to the worst political actors. In advance of June’s European elections where parties advancing anti-immigrant ideology made significant gains, advocates were advised to avoid “being distracted” by engaging with anti-immigrant rhetoric and focus on mobilizing voters with a message of climate action. American climate groups took a similar approach in the recent election, with similar results. As climate disasters continue to rise, so will the fear-mongering, finger-pointing, and manipulation. We cannot afford to let it go unchallenged.
With the incoming administration’s imminent threat of mass detention and deportation, the first step for climate organizations must be to actively and materially join the defense of immigrant communities. This means participating in the political resistance to the program, including mass marches and strikes, but also directing chapters and members to join ICE raid rapid-response networks, immigration court accompaniment projects, mutual aid efforts, and the like. These actions will go a long way in building needed trust with immigrant rights leaders, who can be wary of the environmental movement’s checkered past and recent silence on this issue.
Climate and environmental organizations also bring a critical skillset to the table—their experience stopping the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. Climate advocates can deploy the legal and political tactics that blocked tar sands pipelines and new coal-fired power plants to challenge the construction of the vast network of detention centers, camps, and militarized sites essential for the administration’s agenda. Groups like the Prison Ecology Project and the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons have experimented with using these strategies to challenge the construction of new jails, with some success. If the climate movement applied the same grassroots, legal, and inside political coordination that brought down the Keystone XL pipeline, we could challenge every new building, airstrip, and cage linked to mass deportation. In this fight every delay will be valuable in preventing measures of suffering and cruelty.
Second, climate organizations need to launch a massive program of popular education to help their members and leaders understand the connections between climate and migrant justice and reject authoritarianism. It’s time for a movement-wide reckoning around climate and migration similar to those around racial justice and Indigenous rights that have already transformed the movement’s language, analysis, and agenda. Pre-election polling shows alarming support for the concept of mass deportation and the militarized internment of undocumented people—including among Democrats. Our conversations about climate and migration with a wide swath of environmental leaders and activists showed us that these sentiments are more pervasive in the climate movement than many would like to admit. Luckily research shows support for deportation programs collapses when respondents better understand the details of who is targeted, pointing to an opening for popular education.
Part of this project will need to be confronting the damaging narratives the movement has used, which too often cast increased migration as a threat comparable to storms, fires, and heatwaves. Some research shows that these kinds of stories, often highlighting unreliable numerical predictions of mass climate displacement, actually increase anti-immigrant sentiment, even among highly motivated climate activists. Both of our organizations have worked to shift these narratives in recent years, and see elevating the complex stories of displaced people in our communities as the key.
Lastly, we need to work together to forge a bold vision to protect displaced people in a climate-disrupted world. For too long the climate movement, and the progressive movement writ large, have ceded this issue to those who offer guns, walls, and cages as their solution. In the absence of an alternative, these have become the only solutions in our discourse. Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on one of the most restrictive border bills in the modern age, while President Joe Biden’s climate negotiators fought the creation of tools for global climate reparations, like the United Nations Loss and Damage Fund.
The authoritarian narrative paints climate disruption as a competition for survival, and tries to pit vulnerable people against each other. But this is a lie, crafted to protect the fossil fuel billionaires. The truth is that the climate crisis can only be solved through cooperation and interdependence. It profoundly illustrates how our fates are bound together, and demands an expansive vision of safety and resilience. The climate and migrant justice movements need to bring a new urgency to calls for global investments to protect vulnerable people’s ability to stay in their community and thrive, and safe and orderly pathways for them to leave if and when necessary, as a counter to the militarized borders currently on offer.
Taking this path will require real commitment, resources, and dedication. But our opponents want us divided because the world we deserve can only be won together.
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We Must Create a Political Home for Americans Who Love the Whole Planet
Trump has offered his base a spiritual sanctuary, a home allegedly secure from perceived (and invented) enemies. Instead of creating a different enemy, the opposition must craft something far, far more complex than that.
Nov 17, 2024
“America is for Americans—Americans only!”
The words are those of Stephen Miller, speaking last month at the infamous Madison Square Garden rally, but they define Donald Trump. This is the message—the cry from the mountaintop—he brought to the country... at least to approximately half of it. It’s the unifying force behind his campaign, both pragmatically and spiritually. It transcends politics and cuts to people’s deepest values and deepest fears.
It’s why he won: Donald the Outsider, standing up to the Washington status quo, opening the doors of the American government and letting its citizens flow in (legally this time, without breaking doors and windows). America is for Americans—sieg heil!
The irony of Miller’s concern about the fictional deaths of little American girls is the Trump team’s beyond-Biden embrace of the actual U.S.-funded slaughter of Palestinians, including multi-thousands of children.
God save America! Are we on the brink of fascism? There’s a great deal to be concerned about as Trump prepares for his second term—as he prepares to carry out whatever it is that he actually plans to carry out. One obviously looming concern is this: How nutball crazy-serious is he about deporting millions of non-white (allegedly illegal) residents—all those people who are “different from us”?
At the very least, Trump’s focus on emigrants and walling off the American border was his gift of a new “other,” a new enemy, to so many confused Americans who have been uncertain whom to hate and fear ever since the civil rights movement undid Jim Crow and our good old tradition of racial segregation. Trump and his team clearly understand the value of an enemy to unify the base.
Here, for instance, are more words from Miller, the soon-to-be White House chief of staff for policy: Trump, he said, has fought for our right “to live in a country where criminal gangs cannot just cross our border and rape and murder with impunity. Think about how corrupt and hateful and evil a system is that allows gangs to come into this country and rape and murder little girls. I’m not just saying that. You’ve read the stories. It happens every day!”
Be afraid, America! Be very afraid! Our new enemy is still people of color, but now they’re flowing across our porous border. They’re also... fascinatingly, occupying swaths of land God had given to Israel. The irony of Miller’s concern about the fictional deaths of little American girls is the Trump team’s beyond-Biden embrace of the actual U.S.-funded slaughter of Palestinians, including multi-thousands of children.
America is for Americans and Planet Earth is for white people. As Michel Moushabeck wrote at Truthout: “President-elect Trump even went as far as saying President Joe Biden was ‘like a Palestinian,’ using the word as a slur or an insult to prove his greater love of Israel.”
Yeah, the irony is almost beyond comprehension. Biden’s enabling of Israel’s assault on Gaza—and beyond!—is small potatoes compared to what Trump would do. Trump’s anti-Biden rhetoric continued. Acknowledging that Israel has no intention of instituting a cease-fire, he said: “...you should let them go and let them finish the job. (Biden) doesn’t want to do it. He has become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. He is a weak one.”
And here we come to the crippling paradox of the Democratic Party. They’re wedded to militarism and the military-industrial complex as much as the Republicans, but they purport to acknowledge both sides of these global issues. They speak with responsible lesser-evilism, you might say. Thus: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But (unrelatedly): “Too many Palestinians are dying.”
The Dems have trapped themselves in what might amount to a neoliberal cluelessness. In essence, they stand for nothing—or at least for not much, as compared to the Republicans under Trump. As Marianne Williamson put it recently: “There are millions of politically homeless people out there; no, they’re not Trump supporters, but they wouldn’t call themselves Democrats anymore either.”
Can the Democratic Party transcend lesser-evilism? Can it actually present a future to the American public that transcends militarism and endless war, that celebrates multiculturalism, that goes beyond “securing” the border and actually embraces the entirety of Planet Earth, that explores the ecological necessity of saving our planet... and securing our future?
I ask these questions in the wake of Trump’s victory. The takeaway for the rest of us goes well beyond the need for coming up with a better political strategy: leaning further left, learning further right. Trump has offered his base a spiritual sanctuary, a home allegedly secure from perceived (and invented) enemies. I’m not suggesting that the Democrats need to invent a different enemy but, rather, something far, far more complex than that. The Democrats—or whatever political convergence takes shape during the Trump era—must create a political home for Americans who love the whole planet.
This may sound idealistic (i.e., crazy), but the Trump takeover of American politics shows, I believe, that now is the time for serious political change. The Democrats’ strategy of linking economic liberalism to a trillion-dollar annual military budget—especially as the climate crisis manifests itself ever more consequentially every year—has plunged the country into a void of cynicism.
I know that politics is mostly about money, and sheer idealism isn’t going to gain a movement political traction. But all I can do is repeat what I just said: We must create a political home for Americans who love the whole planet.
What do you think? Is this possible?
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Trump's Planned Immigrant Purge Sends Stagnant Private Prison Stocks Soaring
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment... and the opportunity that it will bring," said the firm's chair.
Nov 08, 2024
The chairperson of a leading U.S. private prison corporation on Thursday gushed over the "unprecedented opportunity" presented by the prospect of Republican President-elect Donald Trump delivering on his campaign promise to begin the mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants on his first day in office.
As
Common Dreamsreported Thursday, Trump's campaign confirmed that "the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants" ever is set to start immediately after the former president returns to the White House on January 20.
GEO Group stock surged more than 56% from the close of trading on Tuesday, Election Day, to Friday's closing bell. Competitor CoreCivic shares skyrocketed 57% over the same period. By contrast, GEO Group stock saw just a 21% rise in the three months preceding Election Day. CoreCivic inched up just 11% over the same period.
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company's [and] country's history, and the opportunity that it will bring," GEO Group founder and chairperson George Zoley said during a Thursday earnings call call in which he hailed the "unprecedented opportunity" ahead, according to a company statement and coverage by HuffPost.
"While our third-quarter results were below our expectations due to lower-than-expected revenues in our electronic monitoring and supervision services segment, we believe we have several potential sources of upside to our current quarterly run rate, with possible future growth opportunities across our diversified services platform," Zoley continued.
"We have 18,000 available beds across contracted and idle secure services facilities, which if fully activated, would provide significant potential upside to our financial performance," he noted. "We also believe we have the necessary resources to materially scale up the service levels in our [Intensive Supervision Appearance Program] and air and ground transportation contracts."
Zoley added that "as we evaluate and pursue future growth opportunities, we remain focused on the disciplined allocation of capital to further reduce our debt, deleverage our balance sheet, and position our company to evaluate options to return capital to shareholders in the future."
According to a study published last month by the American Immigration Council, deporting the estimated 13.3 million people in the U.S. without authorization in one massive sweep would cost around $315 billion, while expelling 1 million undocumented immigrants per year would cost nearly $1 trillion cumulatively over a decade.
On Thursday, Trump insisted "there is no price tag" on his deportation plan. He dismissed concerns that such an operation would require the use of concentration camps like the mass detention centers—which one Trump official euphemistically compared with "summer camp"—of his first administration.
The private prison industry has also thrived during the Biden administration, which is on pace to match the 1.5 million people deported during Trump's previous presidency. Although President Joe Biden signed an executive order "on reforming our incarceration system to eliminate the use of privately operated criminal detention facilities" early during his tenure, the directive did not apply to detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
The number of immigrants detained by the Biden administration doubled between 2021 and 2023. In July 2023, more than 90% of immigrants detained by ICE each day were locked up in private facilities. In January 2020, the last month of Trump's first term, 81% of daily detainees were held in private lockups.
In 2022 a bipartisan U.S. Senate probe corroborated allegations of staff abuse against migrants jailed at facilities owned by LaSalle, a private prison company that
claims to be "run with family values." Whistleblowers and others have also revealed abuses from torture and medical neglect to sexual assault of children and forced sterilizations at privately run immigration detention centers.
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