SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
joe arpaio
Trump Is Following Arizona's Playbook On Immigration. We Know How To Fight Back
What can happen when a “Circus Maximus” takes over the halls of power.
Jul 01, 2018
The "total chaos" of the Trump administration's handling of immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border is deja vu all over again for Arizonans.
The same goes for this week's Supreme Court ruling to uphold President Donald Trump's travel ban, a proclamation "motivated by anti-Muslim animus," as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissenting opinion.
Years ago, many of us warned of the Arizonification of America -- and the unhinged extremists like former Gov. Jan Brewer and disgraced former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio who manufactured a border crisis for political gain and it effectively wrote the Republican platform on immigration.
Today, from his fearmongering and racist tweets to his "build the wall" sloganeering, from his support of travel bans and the criminalization of immigrants to the growing crisis over the "tent camps," President Trump is essentially using the Arizona playbook, page-by-page. He's following the state's disastrous "show me your papers" policies.
The good news: Following decades of resistance, a broad coalition of Arizonans stood up to the extremists, including long-time human rights groups and Dreamers. Today's "Resistance" should look to Arizona's grassroots activists to do the same with Trump. Consider these examples.
A grassroots movement took down Sheriff Arpaio in 2016, even as Trump won.
"Sheriff Arpaio didn't lose by coincidence; he was taken down by the people he hunted," as Puente organizer Carlos Garcia told the Arizona Republic, after Arpaio's defeat in his bid for a seventh term as sheriff of Maricopa County in 2016. A grassroots campaign had stood up to Arpaio's racial profiling and brutal "tent city" policies for years, and effectively organized against his re-election. The same must happen nationally in midterm elections this year.
Arpaio's tent city was closed in 2017. Proposed tent cities should be shut down as well.
After 24 years of operation, in defiance of human rights violations, Arpaio's infamous "tent city'' in the Sonoran Desert city of Phoenix was finally closed last fall, bringing down a cornerstone of the sheriff's policies. Today's tent cities for immigrant children and families are arising in similarly unsafe and costly situations, as temperatures soar above 100 degrees. Just as Amnesty International led a campaign to end Arpaio's "inhumane" tent city policy two decades ago, civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have decried today's "abhorrent" policy, also making comparisons to Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
In making a visit to an Arizona internment camp in 1943, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt called for their closure: " To undo a mistake is always harder than not to create one originally, but we seldom have the foresight." She added with a chilling foreshadowing of today: "We have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us are loyal: We cannot progress if we look down upon any group of people amongst us because of race or religion."
A grassroots movement recalled the once invisible Tea Party architect of Arizona's SB 1070 "show me your papers" law.
Overlooked by the national media in 2011, an extraordinary grassroots campaign in the Phoenix-Mesa area recalled former state Senate President Russell Pearce, the self-proclaimed Tea Party president, who was then trounced in a local election.
Just as Democrats have already flipped numerous state legislative seats across the country in supposed Trump districts, today's "Resistance" should carry on the unabashed boldness of the Pearce recall campaign in often unchallenged districts.
Operation Streamline's mass deportations have been a disaster -- the resistance must join frontline human rights groups.
The Trump administration's plan to ramp up prosecution of irregular border entries doubles down on Arizona's Operation Streamline, a process launched in 2005, where up to 80 defendants are tried en masse in an assembly line for entry violations.
Human rights organizations in the state and across the borderlands have been protesting Operation Streamline for over a decade. The Resistance must join them.
As Texas attorney Joseph Cordova told NPR this week, "Operation Streamline has been going on for a number of years, and it doesn't seem to be deterring people from coming into the country."
Two years ago, an independent study found that Operation Streamline had been a failure, resulting in costly mass incarceration and little deterrent to border crossings.
The private prison lobby must be confronted.
NPR reported in 2010 that the private prison lobby essentially rode the same elevator with the American Legislative Exchange Council and immigration policy lobbyists in Arizona. This resulted in the writing of Arizona's SB 1070 law and a lucrative expansion of private prisons for incarcerated immigrants.
And among the more than 300,000 immigrants detained annually, Mother Jones reported, "nearly three-fourths of those held each day are kept in privately run facilities, according to an ICE facility list obtained by the nonprofit Detention Watch Network."
The end result, according to the Center for Responsive Politics: Trump's hardline approach to immigration "is a boon for private prisons and security companies."
Arizona tried to ban Mexican-American studies. A 7-year resistance campaign prevailed, as a federal court struck down the ban.
In an unabashed effort to dehumanize Mexican-American students and strip the Mexican American experience from the roots of Arizona's history, Arizona's Tea Party legislature attempted to ban the teaching of ethnic studies/Mexican-American Studies in the Tucson school district. After a seven-year battle and resistance campaign, a federal judge ruled last winter that the Arizona law was passed with "an invidious discriminatory racial purpose and a politically partisan purpose," and struck down the ban.
Despite the Supreme Court's travel ban on largely Muslim countries, we must continue to challenge any laws or practices that carry out the same discriminatory purpose.
Finally, Arizona elected a governor like Trump and impeached him -- the resistance can do it again.
Thirty years ago, Arizona became the laughing stock of the nation when a hair-impaired, executive-order-wielding, right-wing extremist, Evan Mecham, became governor after a surprise victory. After rescinding the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, appointing dubious extremist figures to political positions, and issuing non-stop racist and anti-gay slurs, Mecham was impeached in 1988 after a statewide recall campaign.
His impeachment for "high crimes, misdemeanors and malfeasance in office" should serve as both a how-to lesson and glimmer of hope for what can happen when a "Circus Maximus" takes over the halls of power.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Saying 'A Handful of Pardons' Won't Cut It, NFL Players Demand Sweeping Prison Reform
"If President Trump thinks he can end these injustices if we deliver him a few names, he hasn't been listening to us."
Jun 21, 2018
In a New York Times op-ed, several current and former NFL players rejected President Donald Trump's request for a list of people they would like to see him pardon, demanding instead that he enact far-reaching reforms to end the crisis of mass incarceration, which has seen black Americans sent to prison at more than five times the rate of white Americans.
Trump has displayed a strong reliance on his executive pardon power, granting clemency to racially-profiling sheriff Joe Arpaio and right-wing propagandist Dinesh D'Souza, and saying numerous times that he believes he has the power to pardon himself should he be found guilty of wrongdoing.
But pardoning a handful of victims of racial injustice at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system will not undo the damage the system continues to inflict on communities of color throughout the country, argued the players.
"President Trump, please note: Our being professional athletes has nothing to do with our commitment to fighting injustice. We are citizens who embrace the values of empathy, integrity, and justice, and we will fight for what we believe is right." --NFL Players Coalition members"These are problems that our government has created, many of which occur at the local level. If President Trump thinks he can end these injustices if we deliver him a few names, he hasn't been listening to us," wrote Doug Baldwin, Anquan Boldin, Malcolm Jenkins, and Benjamin Watson of the Players Coalition.
The players expressed appreciation for Trump's decision, made at the request of TV star Kim Kardashian West, to release Alice Marie Johnson from prison earlier this month. Johnson served more than 20 years of a life sentence for a non-violent drug offense, similar to those that have landed more than 450,000 Americans behind bars, including 79,000 who are in federal prisons--tearing them away from their families and communities.
"People like Alice Johnson, for example, should not be given de facto life sentences for nonviolent drug crimes in the first place," wrote the players. "The president could stop that from happening by issuing a blanket pardon for people in that situation who have already served long sentences. ...Imagine how many more Alice Johnsons the president could pardon if he treated the issue like the systemic problem it is, rather than asking professional football players for a few cases."
The players also urged Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to eliminate life sentences without parole for non-violent offenses.
Before meeting Kardashian West at the White House this month, Trump had been openly hostile and derogatory toward NFL players who have used their platform to call attention to racial injustice by kneeling while the national anthem plays before football games. The players strongly pushed back on the notion that celebrities should keep quiet about matters of politics and social justice.
"President Trump, please note: Our being professional athletes has nothing to do with our commitment to fighting injustice," the players wrote. "We are citizens who embrace the values of empathy, integrity, and justice, and we will fight for what we believe is right. We weren't elected to do this. We do it because we love this country, our communities, and the people in them. This is our America, our right."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Citing Rhetoric and Policies, US Tourism Industry Blames Trump as Foreigners Flock Elsewhere
"It's not a reach to say the rhetoric and policies of this administration are affecting sentiment around the world, creating antipathy toward the U.S. and affecting travel behavior."
Jan 24, 2018
The tourism industry is blaming President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant policies and xenophobic rhetoric for a decline in foreign visitors to the U.S. since Trump took office a year ago.
The National Travel and Tourism Office saw a nearly four percent drop in foreign travelers entering the U.S. in 2017 and more than a three percent drop in spending by tourists.
The slump translates to $4.6 billion in lost tourist spending and 40,000 tourism jobs lost.
The data was released at the end of a year in which Trump ordered bans on travelers from several Muslim-majority countries; pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty of racially profiling Latinos and abusing inmates; touted his plans to build a 30-foot wall separating the U.S. from Mexico; and moved to repeal deportation protections for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S as children and have lived and worked there for years.
Most recently the president was accused by Republican and Democratic lawmakers of referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and the nations of Africa as "shithole" countries and advocated for more immigration from European countries such as Norway.
"It's not a reach to say the rhetoric and policies of this administration are affecting sentiment around the world, creating antipathy toward the U.S. and affecting travel behavior," Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, told the New York Times.
The decline has bumped the U.S. out of its place as the number-two most visited country in the world, with Spain taking its place.
The number-one spot went to France, as it did in 2016.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular