Let's ease in by
noting an e-mail to the public account this morning bemoaning that Ava
and I covered the hysteria (from the press and politicians) around the
death of the demagogue last week instead of NETFLIX's two-part
documentary of Charlie Sheen. I like Charlie Sheen and know him;
however, shortly after the second installment beganI turned it off
because I can only take so many lies. There's also this:
With
the fact that his most recent press cycle a little while ago was his
staff and former staff telling the press that Fettycrap was more manic
because he refused to take his prescribed medicine?
Or
do we drop back to how he was sworn into the Senate in January 2023 and
immediately trotted off to a facility for mental care -- a facility he
remined in for months?
Or maybe you drop back to how he lied to the American people about his health and fitness?
Or,
since he's calling for a more civil tone, do we drop back to when NBC's
Dasha Burns reported accurately on him and Bernie Bros online and on
podcasts ripped her apart and called her a liar. Not one of those
Bernie Bros has ever gone back and said, "Oops!" And, more to the
point, when this was going on, Fettycrap and his wife fully supported
the attacks on Dasha Burns.
Fettycrap
is unstable but even he should grasp that if you don't want to be
called Hitler, it's not that hard not to act like Hitler.
Now
Chump's long been a Hitler devotee. But as president this go round,
he's sporting his Hitler like tendencies even more. And one historian
after another has explained that.
This is a danger to the country and he needs to be called out.
It's
amazing that last week he called the left "terrorists" and even worse
and has given threats to punish people for exercising their First
Amendment rights and Fettycrap doesn't call that out. No, he just
stumbles around in those dirty, smelly clothes (speak to his staff) and
goes deeper and deeper into his mental problems.
Chump
has preached violence repeatedly and his remarks have led to violence
-- most obviously with the attack on our government on January 6,
2021.
TD (The Demagogue) was
not a nice person. He embraced racism, for example. He attacked Black
people, he attacked Jews, he attacked Muslims, he attacked women, he
attacked the LGBTQ+ community.
And it's
really amazing how that gets swept away by the likes of Fettycrap and
Chump. But remember, Ezra Klein and others spent last week White
washing TD, Ezzie Klein made clear that White people will band
together over skin -- even if they disagree on politics.
They will rush to the front of the room to excuse away a hate monger because, 'hey, Whitey's got my skin color.'
And when those of us who are Black call it out, they'll pretend it was about something else.
They can pretend because they really weren't targeted by TD. Their children weren't at risk because of TD.
This morning, Ben on MEIDAS TOUCH started in with nonsense. Love, you, Ben, but it's nonsense: 'We have to condemn this.'
Uh, Ben the country condemned violence years ago.
So
this pretense that we all have to weigh in on the violence that took
TD's life is nothing but a pretense. I'm not hearing lefties
justifying or minimizing the violence. It's US House Rep Nancy Mace, a
Republican, who last Wednesday was calling for the death penalty for the
shooter until she found out he came from a MAGA family and then
insisted that we needed understanding.
I'm not posting Ben's video.
I liked most of it.
But
I'm Black and I'm not using my space to promote a racist. I'm appalled
by the coverage and it's really something to see online that those of
who are truly appalled and have been calling it out are basically just
Black America.
We get a candy covered
portrayal of TD and we get told we're supposed to feel this way and
speak that way. I'm sorry, White America -- and that includes the left
-- do you think we're still working on your plantation?
Stop giving us orders. Stop telling us what to do.
You've done far too little in the last few years to address the increase of racism in this country.
It's really past time for you to get the broom and start cleaning up this country.
But
if you're too damn lazy to do that, at least don't try to lecture those
of us who are Black about what you -- in all your Whiteness -- think we
need to do to 'mourn' the death of a racist.
I'm not in mourning.
Nothing TD ever said or did spoke to me, uplifted me or made this country better.
No.
Again, murder is a crime.
Unlike Convicted Felon Chump, I believe in the law.
I
also believe in truth. And here's some truth MSNBC and others better
start hearing, you can't just wait for the weekend to roll around and
then use your predominately Black staff to clean up your mess after days
of glorifying a racist.
Something from
MEIDASTOUCH NEWS might go up tonight. I don't have time to stream at
lunch. I'll be having lunch in public and that means people will be
stopping at the table to say hi and do selfies. So I don't have the
time to go through each video before posting. So no MEDIAS this
afternoon.
I have yet to see any White person deliver the kind of commentary Lurie Daniel Favors did last week.
You
want to be in this with us? Then stop looking the other way when White
people attack us. And stop minimizing their attacks on us. There was
no reason to DISENY-FY TD last week.
B-b-but
he was killed! Didn't make him a better person, did make him a victim
of crime and we have laws to address murderers for a reason.
He's
destroyed the economy. Give him credit for that. He's been busy with
so many things, like attacking immigrants, but he still managed to
destroy the economy. On immigration . . .
Ian Gordon (MOTHER JONES) noted over the weekend:
When it passed the One Big
Beautiful Bill Act in June, Congress handed nearly $75 billion to
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some $30 billion of that money will
be spent on enforcement and deportation—hiring spree incoming—and another $45 billion will go toward new detention centers, including 50 by the end of the year.
The OBBB immediately supercharged President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which already had been terrorizing immigrant communities and sending asylum seekers to a hellish prison in El Salvador.
But an important part of the detention state ramp-up has flown under
the radar: ICE’s increased cooperation with local law enforcement
agencies.
On Friday, ICE hit a new milestone: The agency has now signed more than 1,000 so-called 287(g) agreements nationwide.
These agreements, which deputize local police and jails to perform
certain immigration enforcement functions, have exploded under Trump. At
the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in
place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.
About half of these agreements are what ICE calls task force
agreements, which allow state and local cops to essentially act as
immigration agents while fulfilling their regular police duties. If
these sound familiar—and familiarly problematic—it’s because they were
discontinued in 2012, following a Department of Justice investigation the year before that found widespread racial profiling by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, then led by the notorious Joe Arpaio.
The Trump administration brought task forces back this year, and ICE
has signed more than 500 of these particular agreements across 33
states.
It takes millions to ramp up mass abuse.
Shame on the Congress. Shame on them for failing to protect us --
that's Democrats and Republicans and independents and Socialists in
Congress. Dems should have been holding hearings right now -- yes, they
can do that without the GOP. You do that by holding what's known as a
shadow hearing.
B-b-b-but what's the point. It probably won't get media attention!!!!
What's
the point? The point is getting it on the record. The point is
showing the people that you're willing to fight. You hold the
hearing and you get it on the record. Media? Invited podcasters to the
hearing if you're that worried. Invite names to speak, celebrities.
Or did we all miss this:
America Ferrera got emotional while reacting to the recent Supreme Court decision on immigration stops while appearing on Thursday’s episode of The View.
On Monday, the Supreme Court lifted a restraining order
from a judge that had restricted immigration agents from stopping
people around L.A. solely based on their race, language, job or
location. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was quick to criticize the decision
and argued it could lead to officials targeting “anyone who looks
Latino.”
When The View panelist Sara Haines asked Ferrera her reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision, the Barbie actress responded, “First of all, thank God for Justice Sotomayor.”
Ferrera, who is an activist for immigration rights, went on to say she
was grateful for “people who still speak with a voice of reason and the
values we recognize as American values” amid the decision.
“As an American, I’m angered and terrified to watch our constitutional
rights be eroded by the Supreme Court. Everyone should be angered and
terrified by it,” she said. “If any American can get pulled over because
of the language they speak or the color of their skin or because they
work in a low-wage job, who’s safe? So, as an American, I’m pissed off.”
Good for America, but she's hardly the only one speaking out.
When
Jessica Lange, for example, spoke at hearings on the farming crisis,
she didn't go into those hearings thinking, "I'm the biggest expert in
the country on this whole issue." She went to speak in defense of
American farmers because she knew her doing so would attract some
cameras and some coverage.
So this has just been a very upsetting week and it's been a very disappointing week.
A
gestapo force goes around kidnapping people and disappearing them into
gulags and Democrats and Socialists and other lefties spend too much
time glorifying a racist. Fortunately, those not in Congress or writing
nonsense are much smarter.
Chase Woodruff (COLORADO NEWSLINE) reported:
A crowd of more than 100 people
stood outside the gates of an empty prison in Hudson on Saturday,
protesting reported plans by the Trump administration to turn it into
Colorado’s newest immigrant detention facility.
“I see people from all walks of life here today, and that’s truly,
truly beautiful,” said Julian Camera, an organizer with the American
Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “We’re going to overcome this. We’re
going to keep fighting.”
The dormant Hudson Correctional Facility is owned by a real estate
investment trust and was formerly leased to private-prison company The
GEO Group, which operated the prison for a span of just five years after
its 2009 opening, during which the facility housed inmates from Alaska.
The prison has a capacity of about 1,200 beds — only slightly less than
the population of the town of Hudson, about 30 miles northeast of
Denver on Interstate 76.
[. . .]
Protesters at Saturday’s demonstration carried signs that likened ICE
detention centers to concentration camps. Speakers especially objected
to the opening of a new facility in a remote rural area, where
detainees’ families and legal aid groups would find it more difficult to
visit.
There are people doing actual
work. As the protesters above demonstrate. And there's history -- that
we all should have learned -- that tells us how shameful what's taking
place was before and indicates how shameful it will be in the near
future.
Victoria Namkung (GUARDIAN) notes:
Mass expulsion, babies born behind barbed wire,
intrusive medical exams for newcomers, families torn apart: these aren’t
scenes from Donald Trump’s promised second-term immigration crackdown, but from the US’s extensive history of xenophobic immigration policy.
While
so many Americans watched in horror at Immigration and Customs
Enforcement’s military-like raids across Los Angeles this summer, US
cruelty and violence towards immigrants is nothing new, from the Chinese
Exclusion Act to the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the
Great Depression. As the Trump administration
escalates its attacks on immigrants – or those perceived to be
immigrants – survivors of previous eras of xenophobia say it’s more
important than ever to remember the past. The harms done to them and
their families have lasted generations, and what’s happening now
threatens to do the same.
The
Guardian spoke with four Californians who have lived through, or whose
parents lived through, some of these dark moments in US history. They
shared how these episodes shaped their lives, what it’s like to see
these chapters of history repeat themselves today – and what gives them
hope.
When Christine Valenciana, 75, watched footage of armed, masked Ice
agents in unmarked vehicles snatching people off the streets across
southern California this summer, rounding up gardeners, car wash
workers, veterans and US citizens, it recalled a familiar time in her
own family’s history.
In the 1930s, under the economic pressures of the Great Depression, nearly 2 million
Mexican Americans – more than half US citizens – were forced out of
their homes and unconstitutionally deported to free up jobs for “real
Americans”. Valenciana’s mother’s family was among them.
“The raids that took place at the time were not unlike now,” said Valenciana, 75.
Mexican
“repatriation”, which Valenciana prefers to call “expulsion”, consisted
of military-style raids, mass deportations, scare tactics and public
pressure that terrorized Mexican communities and broke up countless
families. For American children like Valenciana’s mother, who was born
in 1926 in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, the trauma was
layered: leaving their home and country, adjusting to a new culture in
Mexico and eventually returning to the US years later.
Emilia Castañeda, Valenciana’s mother, was seven
when her own mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died less than a
year later on the day of Emilia’s first communion. “She told me what
bothered her the most about having to leave was that she wouldn’t be
able to visit her mother’s grave,” remembered Valenciana, now an
associate professor emeritus at the department of elementary and
bilingual education at California State University, Fullerton. “They
went to the train station and she and other people were crying.”
She
told Valenciana that the girls in her school in Mexico referred to her
as “repatriada”, which was meant as a put-down. “My mom was pretty
miserable,” said Valenciana. By age 12, Emilia worked as a live-in
babysitter, but at times she was not paid or given a decent bed or
blanket, according to her daughter. Emilia was desperate to come back to
Los Angeles once the repatriation period ended. During the second world
war, she made the journey alone by train right before her 18th birthday
with the help of her godmother, who gave her a place to live.
Along with Valenciana’s husband, Francisco Balderrama, who co-authored a seminal book
on Mexican repatriation, Emilia eventually went on to become an
advocate for others to learn about this previously hidden chapter in US
history. In her 70s, she helped pass legislation that led to a formal
apology from the state of California in 2005 and a monument in downtown Los Angeles in 2012. Emilia passed away in 2020 at age 94.
While
Valenciana sees parallels between the 1930s and today, there’s one big
difference, she says: “There’s much more support for people who are
being kidnapped and tortured today as opposed to the 1930s where people
either didn’t know or care.” She says she better understands what her
mother and others like her experienced when she sees members of her
community leaving the US voluntarily or living in hiding, fearful of
going to church or the market because of Ice.
“I’m not just heartbroken,” she said. “I’m sad and angry. Racism is deeply rooted in this country.”
People
are allowing Chump to trash our country, to trash our image, to trash
our reputation. But, don't worry, last week was all about those
who should be standing up for this country instead attempting to
Whitewash a racist. Kevin Reed (WSWS) reports:
Silverio Villegas González, a 42-year-old Mexican immigrant and
father of three, was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Franklin Park,
Illinois, late on Wednesday afternoon.
According to authorities,
González was initially stopped by ICE agents who claimed that his
vehicle matched the description of one purportedly involved in a prior
immigration-related investigation.
Friends and family contested
this account, emphasizing that González’s only offense was a minor
traffic infraction—an expired license plate sticker—in the quiet suburb
just west of Chicago.
The shooting of González took place within days of President Trump’s
immigration crackdown campaign launched in the Chicago area. Although
Cook County officials did not identify him, the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) and Mexican consulate in Chicago identified the ICE
victim as Silverio Villegas González.
Eyewitness accounts taken
down and reported by WBEZ Chicago said events escalated rapidly after
ICE agents approached González, whose fear and panic were clearly
visible to everyone nearby.
The WBEZ quoted several people who
were on the scene. Maria Martinez, a neighbor, told reporters, “He was
just sitting in his car when two men came up out of nowhere, shouting at
him in English. Silverio looked scared—he didn’t understand everything
they were saying. We heard them yelling, then, all of a sudden, I heard
gunshots.”
Another onlooker, Samuel Ramos, recalled: “After the
first shot, Silverio tried to get out of the car, but he stumbled into
the street. The officers kept shouting at him—telling him to ‘stay
put’—but he was holding his hands up, trying to talk. People started
gathering, screaming for help, but we were pushed back by the officers.”
The
WBEZ account describes confusion and fear among local residents, many
of whom did not realize the men in plain clothes were federal agents
until after the incident. María Santiago, who resides across the street,
said: “Nobody knew they were ICE. They didn’t identify themselves
clearly. It looked like a robbery at first, but then they started
dragging Silverio away and blocking anyone from getting close.”
As
in every act of police brutality that workers are all too familiar with
in American cities, ICE released a statement Thursday morning, claiming
González “failed to comply with lawful orders” and “acted in a manner
that posed a threat to officers.”
And they
claim threats by shoving people around -- shoving them into ICE agents
so they can then claim the person assaulted an ICE agent. It's been
captured on camera.
Let's drop back to Thursday's snapshot:
Let's move over to immigration. Yesterday on MEIDASTOUCH NEWS, Ben addressed Chump's gestapo police.
They
shove, they attack citizens. I have noted for months now that these
people will destroy their own lives in the coming years, they'll turn to
booze and drugs to self-medicate or they'll take their own lives out of
guilt over the families they've broken up and the lives they've
destroyed. That
said, I didn't include the asshole factor. Not only will the coming
years find them ashamed of their actions, it's also going to find them
disgraced and others attacking them. If they're lucky, a decade from
now they'll just get their house tee-peed. But it could be much worse
because they are breaking the law and they are being violent. That has a
way of coming back on you.
Will
the big money they make right now at this moment still seem worth it
five or so years from now when the country and the government turn
against them?
Now let's be
honest about what we saw in the video Ben played. With regards to the
US citizen who is a Latino-American? He was shoved. And ICE can -- and
did -- lie but we saw what happened. And it was not because he wasn't
cooperating. He was being questioned by a man in front of him and he
was answering the question.
The ICE thug shoved the man to try to get him on an assault charge.
That's
what these pathetic cowards do. Over and over. They shove people. And
then they whine assault. It's a gestapo tactic and that they use it --
and do so while people are recording -- demonstrates that they are human
garbage.
They've not been properly trained and there is no real oversight.
Especially
when it comes to our former Supreme Court which has now become The
Crooked Court as Betty regularly notes. The lack of oversight and the
inability to follow existing laws that we see in the videos Ben reported
on above? Time to bring in The Crooked Court. John Fritze (CNN) reports:
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s breezy suggestion this week that Americans who are roughed up by ICE
can sue agents in federal court is drawing pushback from civil rights
attorneys who note the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has in
recent years made those cases nearly impossible to win.
Writing to explain the court’s emergency ruling
Monday that allowed the Trump administration to continue “roving”
immigration patrols in Southern California, Kavanaugh brushed aside
concerns that masked ICE agents had pushed, shoved and detained
Hispanics – in one instance throwing a US citizen against a fence and
confiscating his phone.
“To the extent that
excessive force has been used,” Kavanaugh wrote in a 10-page
concurrence, “the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies
should be available in federal court.”
But in a
series of recent decisions – including two that involved incidents at
the border – the Supreme Court has severely limited the ability of
people to sue federal law enforcement officers for excessive force
claims. Kavanaugh, who was nominated to the court by Trump during his
first term, was in the majority in those decisions.
“It’s
bordering on impossible to get any sort of remedy in a federal court
when a federal officer violates federal rights,” said Patrick Jaicomo, a
senior attorney at the libertarian Institute for Justice who has
regularly represented clients suing federal agents.
Lauren
Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability
Project, said that it can be incredibly difficult for a person subjected
to excessive force to find an attorney and take on the federal
government in court.
“What we’ve seen is, term
after term, the court limiting the avenues that people have available to
sue the federal government,” Bonds told CNN.
Democrats
need to call for hearings -- and make them shadow hearings if they have
to -- in order to determine the training the ICE gestapo is receiving
and the accountability and oversight that's being carried out. Maybe
we'll get it? If so, it'll be because politicians from Illinois aren't 'performative,' they really pursue justice, not just make videos on YOUTUBE:
Gov. JB Pritzker issued a statement on the incident as well, shared below:
"I
am aware of the troubling incident that has unfolded in Franklin Park.
This is a developing situation and the people of Illinois deserve a
full, factual accounting of what’s happened today to ensure transparency
and accountability," Gov. Pritzker said.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth said she is "deeply disturbed" by what unfolded in Franklin Park:
"I
am deeply disturbed by and closely monitoring the truly awful incident
that occurred in Franklin Park today. As the situation develops, our
community deserves the full, unvarnished details of what happened," Sen.
Duckworth said.
"I am calling for a full
investigation of what led to this fatal shooting. I want, I want I'm
calling for all of the videotapes and all of the evidence that exists to
be released and for all the facts to be made public," Representative Jesús "Chuy" García said.
"The
blood that was spilled today will be a stain on the history of our
nation, a stain on our Constitution, which protects us and says that we
have rights, that we have the right to be in front of a judge, and that
we are innocent until proven guilty," State Sen. Karina Villa said.
Chump's gestapo thinks there are no checks on them. Sarah Lazare and Ari Bloomekatz (IN THESE TIMES) note:
Willian Gimenez, a day laborer, was reportedly abducted outside of
a barbershop in Little Village, a neighborhood in southwest Chicago, by
ICE agents on Friday. The Latino Union of Chicago and Raise the Floor
Alliance organized a news conference with immigration rights advocates,
public officials and labor groups there in solidarity like Arise
Chicago, the Chicago Workers Collaborative and Workers Center for Racial
Justice, who all gathered with Gimenez’s friends and family outside of
an ICE facility in Broadview to demand his release.
Gimenez, who is in his late 30s
and is from Venezuela, is one of five migrant day laborers involved in
a federal lawsuit claiming that, among many other things, they “endured
physical violence at the hands of off-duty Chicago Police Department
officers” who were working as security officers for Home Depot,
according to the complaint. The lawsuit also alleges “a conspiracy to criminalize day laborers’ attempts to find work in Chicago.”
Speakers at a Saturday morning news conference organized by
workers’ advocates said they believe he was intentionally targeted
because he is a plaintiff in that suit. (An ICE spokesperson, after In These Times
and Workday requested comments about the abduction, defended the arrest
but would not say where Gimenez was taken or being held.)
It was unclear if Gimenez was being held at the Broadview
facility or elsewhere. No one at the news conference, where the mood was
somber, appeared to know where he is. His disappearance also came on
the same day an ICE officer shot and killed an undocumented man in the
Chicagoland suburb of Franklin Park.
AP quotes US House Rep Chuy Garcia stating at the news conference, "These
incidents make us all ask, if ICE can kill one of our neighbors in
broad daylight … if they can arrest someone for joining a lawsuit or
simply for being Latino, what's to stop them from getting any one of
us?"
What to stop them period? What is protecting anyone?
Nicole Chang (AMERICAN COMMUNITY MEDIA via ASAMNEWS) reports:
A joint report released
by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center and the Center for Neighborhood
Knowledge found that in the first week of June 2025 alone, arrests of
Asians were nearly nine times higher than during the same period a year
earlier — a clear sign that ICE enforcement has intensified to
unprecedented levels.
The report comes on the heels of the largest
ever raid conducted by ICE on a Hyundai plant in Georgia, where agents
arrested more than 300 Korean nationals on September 4. The operation
has stoked anger in South Korea and has strained relations between the
two countries.
Signs of increased enforcement are also evident in the Korean American
community in Los Angeles. On the morning of June 3, ICE agents raided a
Korean-owned car wash on Olympic Boulevard in Koreatown. Without a
warrant, they searched the premises, checked workers’ immigration
status, and reportedly detained about five employees.
[. . .]
According to the report, Asian arrests, which numbered about 700 in
2024, jumped to more than 2,000 in just one year. By state, California
accounted for 19% of arrests, followed by New York and Texas with 11%
each, then Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma. Together, the top five
states represented half of all arrests.
Again, this extra-legal gestapo force is conducting attacks with no oversight. Matthew Cunningham -Cook and Arn Pearson (THE AMERICAN PROSPECT) attempt to reassure us:
On Wednesday, a federal district court judge in Los Angeles issued
a sweeping preliminary injunction barring Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) officers from “dispersing, threatening, or assaulting”
journalists or legal observers, or using crowd control weapons on or
shooting projectiles at anyone who doesn’t “pose a threat of imminent
harm.”
The Los Angeles area has been rocked by protests against Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids since June 6, when the Trump
administration first targeted it for a crackdown on undocumented
immigrants.
DHS officers have “unleashed crowd control weapons indiscriminately
and with surprising savagery” in “retaliation” for those
“constitutionally protected” protests and the related activities of
journalists and observers, Judge Hernán Vera, a Biden appointee, stated
in his ruling.
DHS does not have “carte blanche to unleash near-lethal force
on crowds of third parties in the vicinity. Indeed, under the guise of
protecting the public, federal agents have endangered large numbers of
peaceful protestors, legal observers, and journalists—as well as the
public that relies on them to hold their government accountable,” Judge
Vera wrote. “The First Amendment demands better.”
The judge concluded that “federal agents’ indiscriminate use of force
… will undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts to cover these public
events and protestors seeking to express peacefully their views on
national policies.”
Applause for the federal court
and its decision but let's cut the b.s. It doesn't mean a damn thing.
Not when the Supreme Court continues to overturn legal and accurate
rulings by the federal courts in order to cover for convicted felon
Donald Chump.
It you're just not getting it, refer to Gabriel Buelna and Enrique M. Buelna's "Supreme Court Gives ICE License To Hunt Mexicans" (LA TACO) in which they note:
On Monday, Sept. 8, the U.S. Supreme Court did the unthinkable: it gave the Trump administration the power to use race as a “relevant factor” in stopping and detaining people in Los Angeles. To be clear, as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh
likes to say, ethnicity—especially of the “Mexico and Central America”
variety—is fair game for roundups, detentions, brutal takedowns, and
arrests. But no need to worry, the good justice assures us: ICE is
legally bound to target only the “bad guys.” If you are legal,
everything is fine. But this pie-in-the-sky assurance couldn’t be
farther from the truth.
For years, conservatives on the court have claimed to be “colorblind.”
They struck down affirmative action, insisting that race has no place
in education or public policy. Yet when it comes to criminalizing our
communities, suddenly race matters. This is the contradiction at the
heart of the Roberts Court: no race in college admissions, but race is
admissible in immigration stops.
The real problem in this Sept. 8
decision is that the Supreme Court justices are now saying the quiet
part aloud: Brown skin is a problem to be policed. And that leaves us
with a dangerous question—can a country built on such contradictions
hold together when its highest court openly sanctions racism against
millions of its own people?
We write this from Los Angeles, a city
where nearly half the population is Mexican, Chicano or Central
American. That means almost every family here has someone—citizen or
not—who could now be targeted under this ruling. Families who could be
harmed physically, emotionally, and financially. We know what it means
to be pulled over because you “look like” someone who does not belong.
And now the Roberts Court has made that legal again.
As Chicanos
working in law and academia, we know the score. This decision ignores
both history and plain facts on the ground. Selective amnesia seems to
be the illness of choice. Native-Americans, African-Americans,
Asian-Americans, and Mexicans have all felt the sting of second-class
status. And our memories are quite intact. Think of Plessy v. Ferguson, every broken treaty and legislative act denying Native Americans citizenship, Japanese internment, Chinese exclusion, and the failed promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
And this is just the tip of the historic iceberg. The story is always
the same: the law used as a weapon to keep communities in their place.
And now again, the Supreme Court has done it again.
This decision is galling in its scope and dangerously disconnected from the sheer terror that such a scheme will unleash. Kavanaugh’s concurrence
stands as the centerpiece of the ruling. He writes that ICE officers
may take into account the fact that many immigrants in Los Angeles
gather at bus stops, day-labor corners, and car washes; that they work
in landscaping, agriculture, or construction; that they speak Spanish or
accented English; and that they come from Mexico or Central America.
But, careful to burnish his civil-rights credentials, he adds: “To be
clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion…” At
first glance, he sounds like a reasonable man. Yet just eight words
later, he reveals his true colors: “however, it can be a
‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.” The doublespeak is thick; his arrogance unmistakable.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court’s only Latina ever, issued a fiery dissent:
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize
anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage
job.” She warned that this ruling makes all Latinos “fair game” for
detention. But even her powerful words did not go far enough. What the
majority embraced was not only a deep-seated anti-immigrant sentiment—it
was a reaffirmation of this nation’s long history of anti-Mexicanism.
In practical terms, it means anyone who is Brown carries a target on
their back, just as it was in the so-called good old days.
It's
an important article and it's a shame the media -- including MSNBC --
made last week wall-to-wall canonization of a dead racist instead
of standing up for real issues. No wonder Chump thinks he can get away
with anything -- he watches so many on the left and 'left' act like
idiots and wimps.
