Immigration groups have been warning us for months. Things were going to be different during a second Trump administration.
They painted a picture of a nation at war, one in which the military and police would be empowered to round up and remove anyone without legal authorization to be in the country. They described raids at work places and schools, families broken, and a highly militarized border.
Immigrant advocates in New Jersey described an atmosphere of impunity, of immigrant workers being abused by management that hold their power over these workers, and threats of sexual violence.
“We’re already seeing that people are at fear of continuing to do normal things,” Ana Paola Pazmino of Resistencia en Accion NJ told me in November. “They want to stay with the secure stuff, right?”
This is what Donald Trump promised as he stumped for a second term — a nation openly hostile to Black and Brown people, that treats difference as criminal, that narrowly defines what it means to be an American as mostly White, straight, and cisgender.
And this is what Trump is pushing ahead with, using the limited power of the executive order to remake American immigration policy in his image. Trump 2.0 begins as expected: with extreme, apocalyptic rhetoric and a slew of executive orders that put many of the nation’s most vulnerable in the crosshairs.
News reports pegged the number of orders signed by Donald Trump at about 100, with immigrants and the trans community as particular targets. An asylum scheduling app for mobile phones was shuttered, a national emergency declared at the border, and an unconstitutional order ending birthright citizenship. He also signed a sweeping order declaring there to be just two unchangeable sexes that will apply to all federal facilities.
This frontal assault on human rights is not normal, even if the American press has attempted to cover both the 2024 election and its aftermath as if it was no different than as in the past. His attempt essentially to end birthright citizenship, protected under the 14th Amendment, is not just norm-breaking but a broad attack on the constitutional order, a signal that Trump is likely to ignore legal and historical checks on power.
Many of the executive orders are “likely to face steep legal challenges and might be difficult or impossible to enforce,” reports The New York Times. They send “an unmistakable message that Mr. Trump was serious about fulfilling his frequent campaign promises of clamping down on the border, and escalating an anti-immigration agenda that he has made the centerpiece of his political identity.”
Trump’s language during and after the inauguration was — like his campaign rhetoric — hyperbolic and full of lies. He said he will lead a “complete restoration of America” and a “revolution of common sense.” His designation of national emergency on immigration and energy will allow him to bypass Congress and treat the nation as if it is on war footing.
Still the press — as the language used here by the Times indicates — sees this as relatively normal, as if Trump is functioning as just another president. The Washington Post offered an obsequious editorial critical of Trump but acknowledging his popularity and his promise that we are about to enter a “golden age of America,” a time when the country will “flourish and be respected again.” He promised to make the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dream a “reality” and said he wanted to be “a peacemaker and a unifier.”
The nation, the Post said, “can easily agree with such goals,” and, if “Trump can help pull in this direction, he will have widespread support.” This assumes a normality that does not exist. There is nothing normal about what Trump is proposing. American history has not been kind to immigrants, but what his first-day actions point to is something more extensive and brutal than anything we’ve seen.
“What the Trump administration is readying goes well beyond immigration policy,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration think tank, told the Times. “The push to gut 150 years of settled law and hard-won progress by attacking birthright citizenship, for example, seeks to reshape America’s future by moving this nation backwards.”
I’m not even sure “backwards” is the right word. That implies going somewhere we’ve been, and I’m not convinced that is the case. It is more like driving us somewhere new and ominous, someplace that looks familiar, but like in those mind-bending sci-fi films, is a place of extreme vulnerability and danger. I worry that the media — and much of the public — are not seeing this, that they think of Trump as just a blip, an anomalous presence and that normality will return or that the office will force normality on him.
That amounts to false optimism, I fear, and false optimism can be fatal.
Hank Kalet is a journalist in New Jersey and lecturer of journalism at Rutgers and is a member of the executive committee of Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union. Email grassroots@comcast.net. His blog, Channel Surfing, is at www.kaletblog.com. Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2025
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us