With the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 the United States set itself on a mission that involved the exporting of violence and terror unparalleled in human history.
For decades American weapons of war pulverized Indochina and the Middle East. Only fifteen years after 9-11, a negligible amount of time, Trump has unleashed the power of the security state to its full potential, a naked authoritarianism that I believe Barack Obama built for eight years.
The gloves are now off. The intention is not only the militarization of the southern border but a full assault on the most vulnerable sectors — namely immigrants — in our society.
The wall along the southern border has a profound political and economic context. It is an impractical waste of money. Additionally, much of the border consists of the Rio Grande river. Many are pinning Republican legislators for their “fiscal conservative” hypocrisy concerning the wall as if Republicans ever shied away from insane spending.
“Ronald Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter,” Dick Cheney said. Both Reagan’s nuclear arms race and Cheney’s wars in the Middle East spent trillions of non-existent tax dollars, but there is another dimension to these delusional conservative projects. The deficits created by this spending justify the gutting of social welfare programs, education spending and environmental regulations, all under the pretenses of “fiscal conservatism.” Not only are we, the people, bankrolling the wall, but we will pay for it ten-fold over with the destruction of our social services and environment.
Trump’s executive order also calls for the construction of private detention centers along the border and the hiring of 10 thousand Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers, which is part of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. The contracts given out to security and prison corporations throughout this militarization of the border will no doubt be generous. The U.S. already operates a sprawling immigration detention complex where entire families are kept in horrible conditions for years at a time.
ICE was at the center of Obama’s deportation machine, which over his eight years in office deported 2.5 million people. Last week in San Francisco, ICE officers “accidentally” entered a preschool in a Hispanic neighborhood while allegedly looking for a sex offender set for deportation. Even though entering a “sensitive location” like a preschool is prohibited by Homeland Security, the ICE officers did it anyway and terrorized 30 preschoolers in the process. In the age of Trump, ICE is the immigration Gestapo arm of Homeland Security. Sheltering those sought for deportation from ICE officers is an important step in fighting back.
In the narrative of the War on Terror, Trump, an America-first pop-culture dictator that further consolidates the power of the ruling class, is the next logical step. Woody Guthrie once sang “I’m gonna tell you workers, ‘fore you cash in your checks / They say ‘America first,’ but they mean ‘America next!’”
luwrobin@umail.iu.edu
