By Blake Burdge

Mexico is sending murderers and rapists to the United States.

Tren de Aragua has invaded and seized apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado with weapons better than the U.S. military’s.

MS-13, a street gang with U.S. origins, has organized itself transnationally with the discrete intention of sowing unrest throughout the United States.

The embellished outrage surrounding transnational crime and organized gang activity grows quiet once it has served its purpose – to criminalize migrants fleeing violence or the grim landscapes in their home countries created and maintained by an oppressive, dominant economic system. 

The United States is a country built on violence, whose primary foreign policy objectives are pursued through the forced rupture of democratic values in service of U.S. corporate hegemony. It has exported violence to maintain order throughout the world in service of its gluttonous goals. To argue anything otherwise is to be willfully ignorant. The United States has sponsored military coups of democratically-elected leaders who have challenged U.S. corporate hegemony in favor of greater rights for workers, the indigenous, and the poor in Chile, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Nicaragua. We killed 504 unarmed civilians in a single day in My Lai, Vietnam; 1,000 unarmed civilians in two days in El Mozote, El Salvador; and caused 408,749 direct civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen between 2001 and 2023, with the total death count approaching five million. We dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs over Cambodia and 32,000 tons of napalm over North Korea. 

The poor, huddled masses who have survived the U.S. war and regime change machine are not just personae non gratae – they are firmly centered in the crosshairs as public enemy number one of the United States. Where are the people of the developing world safe from U.S.-sanctioned violence and economic domination if not within its own borders?

…it is up to people as ordinary as you and I to reject the idea that it is the immigrant who inflicts suffering on working class Americans.

And now, here we are. We have a sitting U.S. president inflicting the same violence and disdain for democratic, constitutional order that this country has sponsored for decades throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. I shudder when I hear “Trump is turning us into a banana republic!” We created the banana republic and were always the banana republic ourselves. This president is cheered on by a political party that cosplays as the resistance to tyranny, whose tongues are more firmly stuck to the sole of the tyrant’s boot than Flick’s to an icy sign pole in A Christmas Story. 

There is no regard for lawfulness in this authoritarian’s pursuit of his political goals. The Fourth Amendment protects anyone on U.S. soil from unreasonable search and seizure; the Fifth Amendment ensures due process for any individual on U.S. soil; and the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right of a fair trial to any individual who is physically within our borders. Such crucial rights have all been torn to shreds by one man’s wishes to fulfill gaudy campaign promises. Meanwhile, the Second Amendment is interpreted to benefit the powerful. It applies to vigilante neighborhood watch leaders who shoot unarmed 17-year-old African American boys in the dark of night, but not to Angelenos wielding nothing more than protest signs and roadside rubble as they confront military assaults on their neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and courthouses. The heightened state violence against immigrants and unconstitutional removal processes are justified by the lies that the President has told, allowing him to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to treat them as an invading enemy army. 

It is impossible to challenge an authoritarian regime which continuously moves the goalposts and rewrites the rules of legal existence in society according to its leader’s own political whims. I continue hearing from Trump’s defenders arguments along the lines of “I support immigration, so long as it is done the right way.” What is the right way at this point? We see endless instances of immigrants attending their government-mandated court dates, only to be brutally detained by plainclothes ICE officers at the courtroom exit who act with total impunity. The government cancelled legal protections for more than half a million people who arrived legally in the United States under the CHNV parole programs, stranded thousands of immigrants following the legal process outlined by the CBP One app as they awaited their immigration appointments on the Mexican side of our southern border, and cancelled temporary protected status for more than one million people. Again, all of these people arrived in this country under the presumption that they were doing everything the right way. 

Further, I reject the argument that I hear from many otherwise well-meaning supporters of immigration to the United States: that immigrants belong in this country because they grow our food, clean our houses, and do otherwise undesirable manual labor. The value that a person provides to the economy should never dictate the dignity we afford them as individuals, nor dictate the legal rights that they receive. These rights are “God-given” after all— are they not? At the very least, this country owes refuge and a fair shake at success to the world’s poor and destitute as reparations for the havoc that our own nation has wrought throughout the world. In a perfect world, we offer these same people a home because we are good people and caring neighbors. 

As easily as Donald Trump and his loyal followers have embraced a nearly decade-long campaign of vitriol and violence against immigrants in this country, imagine how much easier it would be to offer them a legal pathway to citizenship than to deport them. Trump’s mass deportation efforts, should he achieve his stated goal of deporting one million immigrants per year, are estimated to cost $88 billion annually. Under the assumption that 20 percent of the estimated 13.3 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States “self-deport,” the total operating costs over ten years is estimated to reach $967.9 billion. The party that wants its followers to believe it promotes principles of small government and fiscal responsibility wants to hire an additional 30,000 ICE agents at a cost of $6.2 billion. These unfathomable sums of money still don’t account for the cost of processing, detention, or logistics, nor do they account for the lost tax revenues from 13 million people who pay into the system and receive no benefit from it in return. 

It is perfectly within the power of this country to be responsible and compassionate simultaneously. There are undoubtedly ways to reform our immigration system to safely track new arrivals to this country and provide people with a toolkit to succeed. It is not only up to the leaders of this country to embrace this kind of “radical” change in the way we think about immigration, but it is also up to people as ordinary as you and I to reject the idea that it is the immigrant who inflicts suffering on working class Americans. This country’s billionaire oligarchs  monopolize key sectors of our economy, corrupt our political system, contract the state as the violent enforcement mechanism of their own interest, and extract the wealth from our working class making the lives of Americans more difficult by the day. Poor treatment of immigrants to the United States is a systemic problem forged by a political duopoly that works solely to serve the billionaire class. 

History has rarely, if ever, sided with governments who have turned the armed forces on their own people. Unfortunately, roughly half of this country is duped by hyper-nationalist propaganda and places its loyalty for a country with practically mythical ideals over our shared humanity. Violence has been brought to the streets of Los Angeles by the military at Trump’s command, not by protestors standing up for members of their own community. Labeling these protests as “riots” reduces them to acts of criminality or disorder, effectively undermining the legitimacy and agency of those involved – a tactic used repeatedly by segregationists against the civil rights protestors of the 1960s. 

To love this country is to love its people. Be compassionate. Understand others and their struggles as you would if they were your own. Love your neighbors as if they are your family. Learn the people’s history, not the powerful’s. Reject the propaganda which demands that you idolize a single man and swear loyalty to a flag.