America needs to talk about how Trump's deportation plan is really dictatorship

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/trump-plan-deport-millions-2025-20240523.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/9oPYY

Imagine this: It’s exactly one year from today, Memorial Day weekend, 2025. It’s 94 degrees in the shade, but the fact that the world keeps shattering monthly temperature records isn’t even making the news — and that’s not what has Philadelphians so hot and bothered. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, announced Operation Purify America in an Oval Office address, and about a week since a stunned Philadelphia watched an endless convoy of militarized vehicles and federalized troops from the Texas and South Dakota National Guards roll up I-95.

After a week setting up a base camp at the Air National Guard base in Horsham, the actual operation began at midnight the day before, as a parade of Humvees and armored personal carriers cornered off a wide area in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park section and supported federal immigration agents who went door-to-door in the pre-dawn chaos, bursting into homes and asking Latino residents for their papers. Journalists who’d been kept blocks away by the troops now search for anyone who could confirm the rumors of screaming, scuffling, and dozens of arrests.

As the hot sun rises, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and several hundred angry protesters gather outside the Horsham gate to denounce the raids. A phalanx of helmeted troops push the throng back, firing tear gas to clear the road for the first busload of detained migrants. They are bound for the hastily erected Camp Liberty, an already overcrowded and decrepit holding center on the Texas-Mexico border that Amnesty International calls “a concentration camp.”

This might sound like a page from the script of Alex Garland’s next near-future dystopian movie, but it’s actually a realistic preview of the America that Trump himself, his cartoonishly sinister immigration guru Stephen Miller, and the right-wing functionaries crafting the 900-page blueprint for a Trump 47 presidency called Project 2025 are fervently wishing for.

*snip*

[no_hypocrisy]

1. More to it than that.

I remember Shrub designating AMERICAN CITIZENS AS "ENEMY COMBATANTS," subject to losing their citizenship and being deported from this country.

Any of us with the right court, the right prosecutor, the right jury can be subject to TSF persecuting his enemies.

[BlueTsunami2018]

2. The thing is, the mass deportation plan is popular.

People really think they want that to happen without understanding the impact it would have.

It’s the whole project 2025 thing, that no one knows about for some reason, that might, might, give some people pause.

A lot of people are on board with the authoritarian ideas he’s espousing, it’s pretty scary.

[awesomerwb1]

4. Might be popular with the MAGAts

not with the general population.

Dems fell behind on the immigration issue years ago, credit due to shameless republicans and the extreme far right "think tanks" and orgs like CIS, NumbersUSA, FAIR. Anchor babies, open borders, etc.

No worries, if it ever happens the MAGAts will blame the $10 lettuce on President Biden. Idiots

[BlueTsunami2018]

5. You might be surprised.

It’s not just the cult who are into the mass deportation. According to several polls, that issue in particular is favored between 48-52% and by nearly 40% of Democrats.

This issue is just about lost to us. We have to pound women’s rights every minute of every day. Unemployment, the stock market, all these things are key and no one knows about them. All they hear is doom and gloom.

Our messaging sucks. It’s always sucked.

[0rganism]

3. thus further popularizing dictatorship

We're coming face-to-face with some deep, primal, long-standing tendencies to take sides, to reject "the other". Representative democracy doesn't do this nearly as well as populist nationalistic dictatorship. That crowd of several hundred protestors won't be back after day 3, but the deportations will proceed apace.

This looks like a systemic problem rooted in our nature -- maybe part of the Western civilization package, or maybe a trait inherited from thousands of generations of human evolution, but we do seem predisposed to exclusionary tribalism.