GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Posse Trumpitatus

Federal law generally prohibits the use of federal troops on American soil. The rule dates to the disputed 1876 election, when incoming President Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to remove the Army from southern states, where they were stationed to protect former slaves and the Reconstruction-era reforms designed to assimilate African Americans into the larger polity.

Hayes had won a disputed election, garnering a minority of the vote but being awarded the White House when a dispute over delegates from three states was decided in Hayes’ favor in exchange for an end to Reconstruction and the removal of troops.

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed a year later and went into effect in 1878, prohibiting the Army from being used for domestic law enforcement purposes. The law was amended in the 1950s to include the Air Force, while the Navy and Marines are prohibited from law enforcement duties by a Defense Department order.

I offer this little history lesson, because President Donald Trump is now looking to the military to address a problem that he has blown out of proportion — immigration from Mexico. Trump announced on April 3 that he plans to have the military “guard the US-Mexico border,” the Washington Post reported, “further escalating his rhetoric on illegal immigration but offering few details on how and when such a plan might be implemented.”

Trump appeared to be reacting to a caravan of immigrants heading north fro Honduras, a story that had been hyped by Fox News and has been inflaming Trump’s nativist base. Trump and Fox have consistently sensationalized the immigration issue, especially as it relates to Mexico and Latin America. Trump has offered a hyperbolic narrative — that dangerous criminals are flowing across the border bringing drugs and violent crime, using isolated incidents to stoke the fire among his supporters. The facts belly this narrative: The number of unauthorized immigrants has remained stable in recent years and studies show that crime rates among immigrants are generally lower than in the nation as a whole.

Trump, however, continues to beat his anti-immigrant drum. As the Post pointed out, “Trump has for days taken to Twitter and used his public remarks to warn of threats posed by immigration,” and he has been fuming since signing a budget deal that did not include money for a new border wall.

“Until we can have a wall and proper security, we are going to be guarding our border with our military. That’s a big step,” Trump said on April 3 (the Post). “We cannot have people flowing into our country illegally, disappearing and, by the way, never showing up for court.”

As the Post and other papers reported, the National Guard has been used in support roles along the border, but not as a functioning military force. But it’s unclear if Trump knows this or what Trump is actually proposing.

Sending in the troops would be catastrophic, because it would erode the separation of military and domestic affairs, but focusing so closely on the military may obscure a little discussed reality: the southern border already is highly militarized.

The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights says the “border has become an imagined war zone, where the war on drugs, crime, and aliens are fought.” They define “border militarization” as “the systematic intensification of the border’s security apparatus, transforming the area from a transnational frontier to a zone of permanent vigilance, enforcement, and violence.”

The region, they add, has become a “post-constitutional territory.”

This began in earnest under George W. Bush, who more than doubled the Border Patrol budget and refocused its mission on terrorism. Barack Obama further accelerated this shift, increasing the BP budget by another 50%.

Trump has doubled down, at least rhetorically. He speaks of a hands-off approach that lets not only the Border Patrol, but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency act with impunity. Detentions are up from Obama’s own historical highs, and Trump has not let up in his verbal assault on immigrants. Where Obama spoke of enforcement as a necessary evil while describing immigrants in humane ways, Trump has tossed that language our the window and has recast the debate as an existential crisis. Immigrants, in his imagination, are violent criminals and terrorists; they are insidious, infectious, invading monsters that must be eradicated — by military force if necessary.

Trump’s latest proposal focuses on the border, but what happens at the border on immigration is likely to happen in immigrant communities through out the nation — as the already overly zealous enforcement and legal but far from humane detention policies show.

This is about immigration, but it’s also about who we are as a nation.

Hank Kalet is a journalist and poet in New Jersey. Email: hankkalet@gmail.com; tumblr, hankkalet.tumblr.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2018

Populist.com