America Is Now The World’s Sundown Town
from the we've-come-a-long-way-baby dept
This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren’t white leave the country because they’re not white. And this is according to this administration’s own press release, which celebrates the fact that we’re now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty’s base, which read:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
That was when America was great… or at least periodically tried to be. This is who we are now:
The Trump administration is on pace to shatter historic records and deport nearly 600,000 illegal aliens by the end of President Donald Trump’s first year since returning to office. Two million illegal aliens have left the United States in less than 250 days, including an estimated 1.6 million who have voluntarily self-deported and more than 400,000 deportations.
Are these records we want to be “shattering?” This doesn’t sound like America, the melting pot that once used to be a welcoming refuge for those subjected to violence, poverty, political/religious persecution in their home countries. Now, we’re just the nation of Get The Fuck Out, ejecting hard-working non-criminals who commit fewer crimes and pay more taxes than those blessed to be white enough to avoid this ethnic purge that’s been marketed as making this nation “safer.” Leave before ICE comes for you. The alternatives — foreign gulags, war-torn countries, perennial human rights violators — are worse than leaving for your home country before the government goons make this decision for you.
I mean, listen to this fucking bullshit:
“The numbers don’t lie: 2 million illegal aliens have been removed or self-deported in just 250 days— proving that President Trump’s policies and Secretary Noem’s leadership are working and making American communities safe,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you.”
This is a lie. And it’s not even a particularly crafty one. Anyone with half-assed Googling skills could prove this assertion wrong. Most immigrants don’t commit criminal acts, and those who do commit criminal acts do it at a rate that’s far lower than that of natural-born citizens of this country.
ICE pretends that it’s doing God’s work (literally pretends, lest you think otherwise) but all it’s really doing is targeting people because of their skin color and depriving them of their due process rights.
ICE’s own stats make it clear that every word coming out of the government’s mouth in reference to immigration enforcement is a lie, not that this administration gives a single fuck whether or not anyone thinks it’s lying.
Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.
[…]
According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.
Everyone knows the government doesn’t really care whether you have a criminal record or not. The constant pressure from the administration to increase daily arrests means that being a migrant and/or having brown skin makes you a target. The message has been sent: only whites are welcome here. That’s why people are self-deporting. And that’s why the data shows ICE has long since run out of the “worst of the worst” to target:
If you combine the two non-criminal numbers (those without a criminal charge and those who have not been convicted), it’s a 2:1 ratio to immigrants who are actually convicted criminals. These are the actions of a regime that is no longer content to wrap itself in the flag while shitting on long-held American ideals. Now, it’s trying to pretend that doing the worst it can to the “least of my brethren” is doing the Lord’s work — that somehow the God that defined himself with single word in the Bible (“love”) would condone the relentless cruelty that is Trump’s mass deportation program.
We’re being robbed of a better future — not just because this administration has demonstrated the system of checks and balances is irrevocably flawed, but also because we’re actively hunting and ejecting some the most wonderful, hardest-working people in this nation: people who came to this country because it was still the Land of Opportunity. And the only thing this administration is demonstrating to people all over the world is that the United States can be just as awful as nations we can only now condemn hypocritically.
Filed Under: cruelty, dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, trump administration
Comments on “America Is Now The World’s Sundown Town”
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One little flaw in the argument
If they’re here illegally, they are criminals. They’re deported instead of being convicted.
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To be a criminal you need to be convicted. I know you think all brown people are criminals, but that’s just because you’re an immoral bigot.
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One massive flaw in yours actually.
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The country elected a criminal as President (financial fraud, sexual assault, leaking of top secret material, and twice impeached). It should have no problems with migrants being criminal.
Re: Slight flaw
Being an undocumented migrant is a civil offense.
That’s why ICE don’t have read them their Miranda rights because that’s only for criminal offenses.
Maybe this “worst of the worst” is just immigrants that never committed any crime since they make Trump and Noem look like sad clowns.
It’s the best definition we’ve got so far.
Turns out it was a racist dog-whistle all along, who could have guessed?
ICE, the regime and their supporters have shown without any room for doubt that when they said they wanted to get rid of ‘the worst of the worst’ what they actually meant was ‘anyone with darker skin than me’.
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They all take the Family Guy Skin Color Chart way too fucking seriously.
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For Stephen Miller the skin chart isn’t actually a “yes/no” for arresting, it’s just showing what year they’ll start arresting you because they don’t like you.
Light-skinned? Don’t worry, they’ll get to you in 2028.
Re: Re: 'That. Do that, but for EVERYTHING.'
Because they don’t see it as a joke or even a warning, they see it as a desirable goal.
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That’s not a racist dog whistle. It’s a racist vuvuzela.
We already have reports of American citizens who have been detained multiple times by ICE for existing while brown.
Not to mention the horror of the Chicago raid not only terrorizing all those people, but committing dramatic and unnecessary acts of property damage on top of it.
None of this is needed. This isn’t an 80’s action flick. Even if you decide/agree you want to remove people, there is no need to do it at gunpoint and with terror.
I did not expect the third and fourth Amendments to be so relevant ever again.
I would make the argument that the Statue of Liberty is more representative of NYC than the US at large. We’re a city of immigrants and we celebrate each and every one of them (and one of them will probably become mayor soon!).
But the US? Naahhh.
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I thought the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to the US as a commemoration of the alliance of the two nations. New York happens to be the location in which it resides.
I’m guessing I’m missing something.
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You’re not missing anything. It’s just that I think in terms of the spirit of the statue, NYC represents it more than any other city on planet earth because of how ethnically and racially heterogenous our town is and that is what I meant by that comment. I haven’t been to Paris in over 28 years, but I think not even Paris is as heterogenous as NYC (I bring Paris up because there are rumblings from the French in wanting the Statue to be “returned”). I could be wrong though!
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Time to deport the Statue of Liberty back to France where it came from.
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France will have to pry it from our cold, brown waters.
Can’t find the exact passage at the moment (I miss the good old days when search engines worked), but I remember a bit in one of Robert Anton Wilson’s books about a sundown town called Bad Ass, Texas that the rest of the United States looked down on as a regressive, barbaric embarrassment, not realizing that that’s how the rest of the world looked at the United States.
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I feel that for a while at least, the state of Florida was that “sundown state” (it’s a lot worse now, and so is the US for that matter).
Not just in reference to immigration enforcement — almost every word [period]
Trump version
Take back your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse from our teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to prison
I lift my lamp beside the golden door and light Portland on fire!
Re: Too many words for Trump
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here” seems to be a better fit.
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It’s a common mistranslation, but the ogne (all) modifies speranza (hope), not voi (ye). So it’s properly “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
The only good racist is a dead racist. There will come a time where being racist like MAGA are will become extremely dangerous to their health. They better be grateful that time is not now but it will come. Be it looking for work, or just wearing the red hat, they will come to rue the day they became so blatantly racist. Peaceful protests clearly arent working and people both in the US and across the world are taking notice. There will be a time where people no longer peacefully protest at all and where justice will be taken into the people’s hands, no fanfare or pointless litigation, just the instant punishment.
Racists will deservedly face the very persecution they have been faking since the end of the American civil war and they will know true fear as they fade into the infamous pages of history.
So let’s assume the USA gets rid of all immigrants and minorities. I dont know why the racist, poor, white people that remain think they will be safe and suddenly rich. The authoritarians in power will not share their power and resources. The obscenely rich and powerful that control all the companies and politicians are not going to ever share power and resources.
Instead of harassing minorities based on race, those in power will target whites that are poor, or have some other way to delineate between themselves and the others.
Either we unite to take power back to the people or we will get picked off little by little till we are too weak to do anything but be enslaved and abused.
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As the poem or whatever the term would be, ‘First they came for…’
Those cheering this on are getting their hate fix(the most addictive drug out there), sure that the leopards will never turn on them because are they not strident leopard defenders and supporters, and ignoring that for a group that feeds on persecution complexes and blaming The Other there must always be an out-group, and if the current one is removed or destroyed, why, it’s time to start looking inward.
Re: Vladimir's choice is a choice
Trump’s supporters are cauldrons of resentment and don’t want anything per se other than someone else suffering more than they do.
There’s a Slavic parable called Vladimir’s choice, in which Vladimir the peasant is given any wish he desires granted, but on the condition that his neighbor gets double what he asked for. Vladimir then says “Very well then. Gouge out one of my eyes.”
Unfortunately, psychologists and game theorists found that Vladimir’s choice is the most desired among groups in competition with each other.
Falling for the head fake
Record deportations, while they are real, are nothing more than a means to divert the citizenry’s attention from the raid on the health and wealth of America by trump and the tech oligarchy.
Everyone is getting poorer and sicker while they enrich themselves.
It’s past time to wake up and stop this rape.
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At this point, everything is just a distraction from everything. They’re flooding the zone with every injustice and profiteering and power grab they can. If any fail, they’ll still have some that succeed. If you fight them on one, you won’t see the others.