Raids: Cruelty and terror as the North Star

Access HERE

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:

The U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear installations last Saturday dominates media coverage, but that doesn’t mean Donald Trump’s internal war against immigrants has lowered in intensity. On the contrary.

Reports abound of ICE operations with masked agents, armed and in unmarked cars, entering diverse places and businesses and terrorizing immigrants and people in general, because several citizens and authorized residents have been ensnared in the wide net of terror of this administration.

Trump has assigned quotas of at least 3,000 detentions daily. Since they know the number of immigrants with a criminal history is insufficient to carry out the “largest deportation operation in the history of the United States,” they detain immigrant workers, even some with visas and permits to live and work in the United States.

Reported stories show that cruelty is the North Star of this administration, and its objective is to sow terror. It doesn’t matter if they take people while they are working and those who, in many cases, are mothers and fathers of U.S. citizens, people who have been working and paying taxes in the United States for decades. Not even the pride of serving in the armed forces exempts parents from being the targets of detention, in this case violently, like the landscaper Narciso Barranco, the father of three Marines in Santa Ana, California, as the Los Angeles Times reported.

One of his sons, Alejandro Barranco, a Marine Corps veteran, told the newspaper that his father was detained while he was mowing the grass at an IHOP restaurant, and “had been sprayed with pepper gas and punched, and had a dislocated shoulder.” Barranco added that “his father had not received medical treatment, food, or water after more than 24 hours in a detention center in Los Angeles.”

The agents’ conduct is not only disturbing but deplorable. Who guarantees that they even were ICE agents, and not individuals acting and detaining people on their own accord?

Not only do they resort to violence, but they use racial profiling to make indiscriminate stops. It’s an issue that affects everyone because immigrants are just the tip of the spear in a campaign to undermine due process and democracy itself.

Hence the activation of the National Guard and the Marines in California, to test the use of the military apparatus against civilians, with the excuse that they are rounding up undocumented “criminals.”

The stories are terrifying. Los Angeles store owners affected by the operations have said that ICE agents behaved like “criminals” and “terrorists.”

In the affected communities, neighbors and activists have been denouncing the operations and confronting the agents. Although polls outline the fact that the public is not looking kindly upon the way in which Trump is managing this issue, I don’t know if they are processing the danger of these developments on various fronts, from the economy to our liberties.

Worst of all is that Trump’s excesses are validated, in some instances, by the nation’s Supreme Court which, on Monday, allowed deportations of migrants to third countries with which they have no ties, and where they run the risk of being tortured or even dying, to resume.

But returning to the topic of Iran (because it’s all related), it’s curious that the military offensive was launched the same week that the Senate is discussing Trump’s “big and horrible” budget reconciliation bill that would skyrocket the debt, including millions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, leaving millions without health insurance; contains millions of dollars in reductions to nutrition assistance programs; and giving billions of additional dollars to DHS and its immigration agencies, especially ICE, to continue terrorizing our communities.

It would not be the first time that a war conflict has occurred to distract the public’s attention from a legislative problem, economic issues, or other woes that plague the administration. Trump was already using his immigration offensive to such ends, but he added another element with Iran to shock and awe the audience.

With Trump, you do not have to read between the lines. He is doing all that he said he was going to do, and more. He’s an open book, where cruelty and instilling terror are his calling cards.

The original Spanish version is here.