For immigration opponents, cruelty is still the point
By Mirella Ceja-Orozco and Paul Dimick
When it comes to border policy, for some the cruelty is still the point.
That appears to be the message of last Friday’s letter to the editor, “This can’t go on,” in which the author pines for the supposed halcyon days of the Trump administration, during which, according to the author, “our border was secure.” We can ensure the “sovereignty” of our nation, the author claims, only by “returning our border to what it was previously.”
But what does that really mean?
Conspicuously absent from this perspective, and perhaps intentionally obscured by the author’s vague reference to “what [the border] was previously,” is any real engagement with or acknowledgement of the substance of those previous policies.
Under the Trump administration, for example, thousands of children were violently separated from their asylum-seeking parents and disappeared in a sprawling system of jails and detention camps, despite well-documented harms to children and despite there being no evidence that the policy effectively deterred immigration or cross-border trafficking.
As Caitlin Dickerson recently detailed for The Atlantic, the profound cruelty of family separation was the point, the end in itself of the previous administration’s immigration policy. So much so that officials endeavored to keep families separated even after parents’ cases were complete, often by “losing” children in the government’s byzantine network of detention sites. Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that more than 1,000 families may still be separated with many of those parents having been expelled from the country.
That does not mean, of course, that the government does not have the ability to locate, track, and surveil immigrants when it chooses. Researchers from the Georgetown University Law Center recently reported that ICE operates a vast digital surveillance system with access to data on nearly every person in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. ICE has access to the driver’s license information of 3 out of 4 adults, and it has the capability to locate 3 out of 4 adults using only their utility records. That means if you have applied for a driver’s license or you have heat and running water in your home, ICE likely knows where you are.
As we speak, ICE is using these frightening tools to target, arrest, detain, and deport tens of thousands of immigrants. Far from the southern border being “wide open,” as the author of Friday’s letter suggests, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol apprehends hundreds of thousands of immigrants every month, and officials report that CBP used the Title 42 rule more than one million times last year to turn away immigrants at the southern border.
These troubling facts give lie to the naive, fear-mongering suggestion that the border is “wide open,” as the letter writer claims, or that ICE does not know “where [immigrants] wind up.” Not only are these statements demonstrably false, they trade on anti-immigrant bias to obscure the real threat our so-called “sovereignty” faces: growing incursions by an unregulated federal police force into our private affairs.
One wonders, given all this, what the author of Friday’s letter wants, in wishing to return the border to “what it was previously.” But I think we can make an educated guess.
When the letter writer talks about a supposedly “open border” as a threat to national “sovereignty,” he is nodding unmistakably towards replacement theory – a foundational white supremacist myth that Black and brown immigrants are coming to the U.S. to “replace” white people by claiming an increasing share of political and economic power. In so doing, the theory goes, immigrants directly threaten the ability of the U.S. to govern itself and, presumably, the power and authority of white people to shape our shared government and its policies.
This is nonsense. And yet, it is the ideological bedrock of the policies to which the letter writer and his political compatriots yearn to return: the border as a militarized shield to protect racial purity and a legal sword to punish Black and brown immigrants, most of them asylum-seekers, who pose no threat and want nothing more than safety and opportunity. In other words, the border as an instrument of cruelty, which – after all – does appear to be the point.