Trump and his false “invasion,” with real consequences

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

In recent days, the Donald Trump administration has transitioned from trampling on the due process rights of immigrants that he has deported, or seeks to deport, to arresting the Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, for protesting in front of a detention center, to threatening to arrest three Democratic congresspeople from the same state who sought to enter the enclosure to exercise their oversight rights.

All this while the president and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, repeat the lie about an “invasion” of undocumented people to justify the extreme immigration measures they try to implement to this day.

On this same week the nation’s Supreme Court hears arguments regarding Trump’s attempts to eliminate birthright citizenship, the president and his team redouble efforts to convince the country and the courts that, essentially, there is an “invasion” that justifies all of their actions, including the possibility of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which is the right that every person has to challenge an accusation before a judge. This is reserved for true emergencies, in times of war or rebellion, to guarantee public safety.

In his Truth Social network, Trump wrote: “Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order.”

But not even the US intelligence agencies themselves have endorsed the veracity of this “invasion.”

“If we aren’t allowed to remove them because of a radicalized and incompetent Court System, the USA will quickly and violently become a CRIME RIDDEN THIRD WORLD NATION, NEVER TO SEE GREATNESS AGAIN. Our lawyers should state this FACT when going before the United States Supreme Court, and all other courts,” Trump added, according to La Opinión.

On the other hand, Miller’s declarations to the press would make anyone’s skin crawl for various reasons, among them because he affirms with a straight face that there is an “invasion” at hand, and because he threatened judges, indicating that if they don’t do “what’s right,” the president could suspend habeas corpus. “What’s right” seems to be to stop blocking Trump’s summary and unconstitutional deportations. And while the Trump administration boasts of having reduced the crossing of undocumented immigrants at the southern border with Mexico, at the same time, he affirms we are being “invaded” by millions of undocumented people.

“The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended during invasion. So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at,” Miller insisted, according to a report from Telemundo.

We also cannot forget that the “invasion” is a conspiracy theory previously limited to fringe supremacist groups, that is now the narrative of the president of the United States. This theory has prompted domestic terrorism, resulting in dozens of deaths.

Now the Trump administration uses it to justify its machinery for mass deportations and an assault on due process. Although, in the beginning, this assault seemed only directed at the most vulnerable sectors with the least rights, like undocumented people, in practice we have seen that it affects authorized residents, asylum applicants, students with visas, U.S. citizens — both naturalized and those born here — especially if they do not fit the racial profile of who is considered “American”— and people with a certain amount of power, like judges or politicians who Trump considers “enemies,” or those who “get in the way” of his exercise in authoritarianism.

Because this entire act and escalation from the Trump administration, and its threat of suspending habeas corpus, reeks of desperation. After all, almost every one of their extreme immigration measures has been stopped or delayed by the courts. Their entire strategy is to intimidate, to see if they achieve anything.

And it’s this desperation to accomplish the promise of mass deportations for his base that leads Trump to continue promoting a false “invasion” that, unfortunately, has real-life consequences for all of us.

The original Spanish version is here.