A Kakistocracy Takes Over Immigration Policy

Jim Hightower's Lowdown

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15d ago

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Social media has been lighting up like fireworks, with a myriad of Trump voters exclaiming: “I didn’t know he meant me!” For example, many MAGA cheerleaders are now shocked to learn that his rallying cry to eliminate “Obamacare” means killing the popular Affordable Care Act that provides their health coverage!

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Perhaps the most stunned, though, are many Trumpers who had cheered his anti-immigrant, send-em-back-where-they-came-from tirades. They assumed he only meant the murderers, rapists, and cat-eaters he frantically warned about – not their own son’s wonderful Honduran wife; not the beloved family running the popular Mexican café in town; and surely not their hardworking landscaping crew! Just the “bad” migrants, right?

Wrong. Trump says he’ll declare a national emergency, ordering America’s military to conduct a mass round-up and deportation operation, including police agencies making workplace raids and neighborhood sweeps. They even expect they’ll make “collateral arrests” of US citizens. Surely, you might think, such indiscriminate, unAmerican, mass incarceration can’t really happen here! But Trump is already putting thuggish right-wing enforcers in place to make it happen.

Moreover, a network of Trump’s big corporate funders is gleefully rushing to cash-in on this new capture-and-jail industry. Meet GEO Group, for example, a multibillion-dollar private penitentiary conglomerate that has been a profiteering house of horrors for inmates and workers across the country. But its top executives were huge donors to Trump’s ascension, and they now tell Wall Street investors they expect to gain $400 million a year in new business incarcerating Trump’s immigration suspects.

There’s a name for a government based on xenophobia, demagoguery, and greed: “Kakistocracy” – government by the worst persons in society.

Do something!

Looking for organizations who are already working on the coming immigration fights? We love these, for starters:

Also: look for local immigration organizing groups in your area—often these are the groups on the front lines of doing ICE raid defense, legal support and more. (For example, DRUM in NYC or Voces de la Frontera in Wisconsin.)