Since the election, The Border Chronicle has spent a lot of time speaking with border advocates and experts about what to expect from Trump 2.0. Having covered the first Trump administration’s border policy, I can tell you it was like sticking your head in a blender. Before Trump announced one badly formed (and possibly unconstitutional) idea, another two would already be in the works. We struggled just to determine the legality of all his actions. Can Trump deploy active-duty military to U.S. communities during peacetime? Can he send plainclothes Border Patrol agents in white vans to abduct protesters off the street in Oregon? Can he separate children from their parents with zero plans to reunite them? Turns out the answer in each case was yes. He did all those things. The unthinkable quickly became normalized.
So what can we expect from Trump’s second go in the White House? As January approaches, we’ve been reaching out to border experts to hear what they’re expecting. In November we spoke with Jessica Pishko about the role that sheriffs might play in Trump’s mass-deportation plans, and how some sheriffs might resist, as they did last time. We also spoke with Pedro Rios, an immigrant rights activist in San Diego, who expects the incoming administration to use “tactical dehumanization” and to expand open-air detention camps. Rios advocates robust community organizing as a means to push back. You can also check out our conversations with prolific author, photographer, and activist David Bacon on undocumented workers’ rights, and sociologist Nandita Sharma, who says in this podcast that now is not a time to become apathetic or despondent. It’s a moment for solidarity and mutual support.
In today’s post, we feature Zachary Mueller, political director for the immigrant rights nonprofit America’s Voice. Mueller for many years has been paying close attention and tracking the rise of the GOP’s embrace of white supremacist messaging, especially in relation to the border and immigration. He reflected on the election and on how immigrant rights organizing will need to step up its game.
In several interviews and speeches Trump has talked about using mass deportations to target the “bad guys.” But in the same breath he’s also talking about the “enemy within,” and I worry the targets will soon include, for instance, journalists, political opponents, and people doing border humanitarian work.
I think the definition of a “bad guy” will be quite expansive. But I also think Trump and his team learned their lesson from family separation and the backlash they received in 2018. Which is that if there is visceral imagery of what’s happening, it’s harder for them to say it’s really not as bad as you think.
So when they talk about these mass deportations now, they always say “we’re just getting the bad guys.” So we might see things like a joint operation between the National Guard and ICE. They’ll say [about the people they’re rounding up] they’re bad because they entered without documentation, then it’s “they’re here with temporary status,” or “they’re a family member of someone with temporary status.” And you will see this slow escalation of what is acceptable.
And I imagine they’re going to control the message through their own MAGA-aligned media?
Yes, it will be like “the leftist media is just hyping this up again. But don’t worry, these people were bad.” The message provides a dual focus. It creates a level of plausible deniability for the Trump supporters and the American people to say, “Well, these deportations are regrettable but necessary. And don’t worry because they’re just getting the bad ones.” It is a model that both activates the fear and the plausible deniability that I think we’re going to see a lot of.
The National Guard has slowly become politicized. Do you think the Trump administration will send the National Guard to states that resist rounding up people?
I think they’ll eventually deploy the National Guard, because all the incentives right now inside the Republican Party are about being more and more radical. When they have the Senate, the House, and Donald Trump in the White House, and they’re feeling like their nationalism is a winning strategy for the American people, there’s going to be a competition to show “I’m the real vehicle of the fascist national agenda.” So the idea that we wouldn’t get to the point of deploying military into the streets is wishful thinking.
What do you see on the organizing front?
The immigrant rights movement, and the larger progressive kind of movement infrastructure, does not have a handle on who these forces are, what their ideas are, what their strategies are. So much of why we’re facing such a difficult moment is that the team I played for decided we don’t need to worry about what the other team is doing. Like, we know they’re going to play football, they’re going to do some passing plays and some run plays, but no sophistication beyond that, about like, in what order and how, and how do we combat that?
I know the work that you cover. There are not nearly enough people covering that stuff. In the progressive world, somebody like [Trump’s new “border czar”] Tom Homan is treated like this bespoke entity, when he’s really not.
So much of the MAGA-sphere sells a sense of belonging or lifestyle to alienated and angry people. It provides a community.
It’s like a negative solidarity.
So how do you respond to this?
Everybody is sick of the status quo, and they want change, but the only change we have is either destruction or a reaffirmation of a neoliberal agenda which sucks.
We haven’t built widespread antiauthoritarian coalitions, which are different from the coalitions that U.S. progressives have been building for the last several decades. We have coalitions built on a shared, loose agenda in particular issue areas, but we lack an understanding of the threat we collectively face, which requires a different sort of coalition, one that the progressive movement has no muscle memory of building.
So the positive bit is we have an opportunity. There’s power in people organizing together to provide a different vision. My view is that that’s got to come from people who are organizing working people, and that might mean organizing immigrants as workers, not based on immigration policy. If it’s just around deportation defense, that is going to be really important, but that is not going to be sufficient for building an opposition. It won’t come from people who are doing it because they’re trying to push for immigration reform. It will come from people fighting because “we need to protect the community, and also half of our members work at the meatpacking plant.”
Border humanitarian work, which is mutual-aid work, is inherently anti-fascist and helpful in building that better vision of the world. But they need help. Border residents have been shouldering a lot of this work on their own for years.
The humanitarian border groups are already doing the hard work and doing the mutual aid. There needs to be a group of organizations outside the border that are building power, shaping the conversation, and building organizing prowess, to be able to create the pressure on the Democratic Party to have real champions who do real stuff and push back against the nativist forces. This network could provide those folks with a level of space to breathe by creating the other organizations that create the space in the political sphere. I really believe that needs to happen.
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