I have faced fascism before, in this very country. I was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans summarily rounded up and expelled from our homes at gunpoint, all for the crime of looking like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.
I spent my childhood behind barbed wire. My parents lost everything. 1/
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) November 15, 2024 at 7:43 PM
But we did not give up on this country. We rebuilt our lives, and we worked to ensure that something like this never happened again in America.
Now, I fear there are echoes from that dark chapter of our history. They are speaking once again of camps to hold people, this time for the crime of /2
…being undocumented. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn from them. I know it feels bleak out there. I know it feels hopeless. But I am living proof that out of that darkness can rise great hope and optimism.
I will fight for the principles of this country until my /3
… very last breath. I ask you to join me in that fight. It is a noble one. It is a worthy one. And it is one we fight on behalf not just of ourselves, but of generations to come.
When you are my age, you will be able to look back upon this time and be proud of what you did, what you stood for. /4
So don’t give up hope. Do not despair. That is what they want, and we shall not give them that satisfaction. In Japanese, there is a word my mother used to say to me.
“Gaman, Georgie,” she’d say. It means to endure with fortitude and dignity. We all could benefit the spirit of Gaman. /5
Look to community. Look to friends and family who stood with us and who suffer the grief of this loss with us. In their company find comfort. And when you are ready to stand up and fight, I will be with you, too.
We will prevail. For the light always defeats the darkness. /end
Go read this. ??
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 7:52 AM
Dara Lind, “What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means “ [gift link]:
… Donald Trump’s team has construed his victory as a mandate for carrying out what it has described as mass deportations. Even before Mr. Trump announced a nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, he named Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, and Tom Homan (who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during part of Mr. Trump’s first term) as a White House-based czar to oversee “all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.”
It is tempting to assume that after his first term and four more years of planning, Mr. Trump and his administration will find no obstacles to impose their will swiftly and completely.
But that’s not true. No executive order can override the laws of physics and create, in the blink of an eye, staff and facilities where none existed. The constraints on a mass deportation operation are logistical more than legal. Deporting one million people a year would cost an annual average of $88 billion, and a one-time effort to deport the full unauthorized population of 11 million would cost many times that — and it’s difficult to imagine how long it would take.
So the question is not whether mass deportation will happen. It’s how big Mr. Trump and his administration will go, and how quickly. How many resources — exactly how much, for example, in the way of emergency military funding — are they willing and able to marshal toward the effort? How far are they willing to bend or break the rules to make their numbers?
The details matter not only because every deportation represents a life disrupted (and usually more than one, since no immigrant is an island). They matter precisely because the Trump administration will not round up millions of immigrants on Jan. 20. Millions of people will wake up on Jan. 21 not knowing exactly what comes next for them — and the more accurate the press and the public can be about the scope and scale of deportation efforts, the better able immigrants and their communities will be to prepare for what might be coming and try to find ways to throw sand in the gears…
That this mass deportation will happen with no legal restraints, accountability or oversight is by no means a premise to be granted without contest. Because resigning oneself in advance to a maximalist vision of mass deportation helps accomplish the same goal: making immigrants feel they have no choice but to leave the United States…
For those who believe the United States will be better off if every unauthorized immigrant leaves the country — no matter how many native-born U.S. citizen children they have to take with them to keep families together or how many American communities are surveilled and disrupted for years — making people afraid enough to deport themselves is a convenient and low-cost way to do it.
Conversely, those who do not wish to see millions of people leave the United States under coercion during a second Trump administration should do what they can to prevent that reality. That starts with a committed and cleareyed understanding of what is actually happening, and a willingness to treat abuses of power as a rupture and an aberration — something that can, and should, be fought.
They can document and communicate when the government is breaking the law; pressure state and local officials to refuse to collaborate with federal removal efforts by refusing to share information, and especially by objecting to deployment of the military or National Guard in their states’ territory; and support efforts to provide legal representation to immigrants.
This work will require, particularly for those who are not themselves immigrants, a promise not to let pessimism do the Trump administration’s job for it. The government will do things that hurt people. It will do things that look scary.
But how many people will be caught up in a deportation machine, and how quickly, is by no means a settled question — and it’s one that a public sympathetic to immigrants should continue to care about the answer to.
different-church-lady
THAT’S NOT HOW YOU SPELL NAZI!
Jeffro
Has anyone else thought “checkpoints” when they think about deportations? “PAPERS PLEASE!!1!” backing up traffic when suburban commuters least expect it?
Of course it’s abhorrent in its own right, but then I realize how self-centered most Americans are and how checkpoints here, there, and everywhere will snarl traffic (in addition to causing a significant percentage of America’s restaurant workers, field hands, and housekeepers to flee the country) and I think to myself…
…”If a mass uprising against trumpov happens for a number of selfish and shallow reasons, it’s still a good thing, right?”
I think it is. And I do think we’re going to find out.
Nukular Biskits
Something I need to ask my local PD and sheriff’s department:
Will you be assisting the Trump Administration with rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants and their families.
Actually, the local mullet wrapper should be asking that.
mrmoshpotato
@Nukular Biskits: mullet wrapper?
Jackie
The town that my dad finished school and settled down in had a large Japanese/Japanese-American population. Dad remembered and NEVER FORGOT seeing friends, neighbors, former classmates and their parents/grandparents gathered up and taken away. He always had such profound sadness when he spoke of it.
Every time I see or read of Takei, I’m reminded of that horrible blight of our history.
CaseyL
>@mrmoshpotato:
Newspaper, so called because they’re often referred to as “fish wrap.”
bbleh
Ok Miller is by all appearances a psychopath, his presence high in the next WH scares the sh!t out of me, and I have no doubt that he is a committed racist who is genuinely determined to pursue a policy of “ethnic cleansing” in every way short of mass murder, and it may yet come even to that.
But I think the Orange Idiot thinks of “deportation” primarily as SPECTACLE, as entertainment for his fans. “Yeah we hate the immigrants, don’t we folks? Whoooo!!” [jumps up and down, waves arms, grabs folding chair that somehow has appeared in ring and smashes it on post] And given that, it doesn’t matter much how effective it is; it matters only that it gets on TV and keeps people screaming. He could deport fewer people than the Biden administration has done, but he’d do it in the most humiliating way and have it covered 24/7 by Fox. THAT’s what he’s after. He has NO interest in some big, expensive logistical effort, especially one that might get the Money Boyz in agriculture, construction, meatpacking, hospitality and other industries MAD at him.
This is not to say that the whole thing is not abhorrently racist, horrifyingly cruel, and galactically stupid, nor that Miller et al. aren’t capable of what amounts to state-sponsored terror. It’s only to say that we should also keep our eye on what is portrayed to his WWE fans on TV, because THAT (in addition to grifting and revenge) is what he cares about and where efforts will be focused (insofar as he has control of them).
Also George Takei is about as close as I have to a personal hero. What a mensch!
scav
@Jeffro: Driving while hispanic is going to become an ongoing nightmare. As will — in theory! — driving while white if they actually go after all the undocumented Poles, Irish, etc who actually exist but tend to be omitted during the fear-mongering.
Of course, in some states, the police are going to be ever so busy simultaneously checking the pregnancy status of any women nearing a state border and also possibly checking everyone for birth-certificate-appropriate clothes. Those checkpoints could get, shall we say, ever-present and complicated?
Nukular Biskits
@mrmoshpotato:
Flathead grey mullet
Gretchen
@scav: I always wonder how the zealots in Missouri would do that since the Planned Parenthoods for Kansas City and St. Louis are just over the state lines in Kansas and Illinois. Thousands of Missourians cross those state lines every day to go to work in the suburbs. Are they going to do daily pregnancy tests as part of the commute?
Gvg
Some good camera and sound editing could help. Show people being rounded up, sadness, families faces. Don’t drone on repeating the same blather by news reporters preventing viewers from hearing the actual people, including the stormtroopers. Have Trump speaking the orders but mute it a bit not blaring like they have been, so you know and hear him give the orders but make him sound distant and the families real and personal. Real. Do not treat them like the same style of news we have heard all our lives. Come across as sober and serious. Not entertaining at all. Some how change the serious stuff and get through.
often it seemed to me last time that Trump really didn’t understand that TV was not real. I also got that impression from some of Bush’s crew including Dick Cheney and that popular Tv show about fighting terrorism that justified torture.
YY_Sima Qian
As I had posted before, the Trump Administration will probably start w/ deporting the thousands of Chinese migrants of “military age” that have crossed the southern US border in the past couple of years, & slowly normalize larger & larger deportations from there. They are not going to deport all of the undocumented migrants in the US, too many sectors of the US economy is reliant upon exploiting this marginalized underclass of manual labor, & there is no logistical capability/capacity to deport tens of millions of people in any period of time. However, Trump & his coterie can leverage selective enforcement to keep businesses in line & keep the bribes flowing, & to keep the undocumented vulnerable & marginalized & thus open to exploitation.
Starfish (she/her)
Schools are having to think about this already. “What will they do if a kid is stuck at school because their parents have been detained by ICE?”
Nukular Biskits
@Starfish (she/her):
It’s already happened once:
Traumatized children and broken families: The invisible scars of the Mississippi ICE raids
mrmoshpotato
@CaseyL: Ah. I’ve heard fish wrap, not mullet wrap.
princess leia
@Starfish (she/her): In the last T admin, many lawyers locally were providing workshops for parents to have legal docs in place for their children’s guardianship. Really sobering.
Suzanne
I have no words of wisdom. This entire topic just makes me incredibly sad. The deeply fatiguing kind of sad.
I have been doing some genealogical research in recent weeks. I don’t know much about my dad’s side of the family tree, since my parents split up and he took off. I learned that his grandmother, my great-grandmother, boarded a boat in Napoli as a teenager with $10 in her pocket to come to this country. No other family was here. Just…. $10, and probably big dreams and big fears. She came through Ellis Island, and lived the rest of her life and raised her children in this country, and her great-granddaughters got to go to law school and graduate school.
And I want that to be possible for anyone.
lowtechcyclist
@bbleh:
Stephen Miller organized the child separations and kids in cages last time. I have no doubt he will try to inflict much greater horrors this time. I doubt that Trump will restrain him very much.
Omnes Omnibus
Remember, if you know a person whose immigration status is in question. No, you fucking don’t. If you know someone who had or is thinking about having an abortion. No, you fucking don’t. And everyday is STFU Friday, if the police have questions.
TBone
I promise.
Jackie
@lowtechcyclist: Homan (sp?) promised no family separations: American born children will be deported with their undocumented parents.😡
Gretchen
@Nukular Biskits: The part about the mother being ripped apart from her breastfeeding 4 month old is heartbreaking. Mom in jail leaking milk while dad has to buy bottles and formula. The 4 month old is a US citizen.
TBone
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-s-deportations-will-fail
Jay
If some Blue State wanted to, they could invoke Malicious Compliance.
Roadblocks, ID checks, especially at State Borders, demanding proof of Citizenship.
Immigrants get a pass, all others get sent home to get their passports and citizenship docs.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Gretchen: We passed Amendment 3. Abortion is now protected though our scumbag legislature is trying to figure out how to work around the constitutional amendment.
LAO
@Gretchen: Phone data location. That’s how there going to track pregnant people.
ColoradoGuy
The media is forgetting many of the undocumented workers are what we used to call a mere four years ago “essential workers”. They grow food, pack it, ship it on trucks, do the worst and hardest work in meat-packing plants, etc. etc.
Cut out hundreds of thousands of people in these sectors and crops spoil, animals don’t get slaughtered, crops don’t get planted, shelves in supermarkets go empty, and prices go up … fast. Think eggs are expensive now? Try subtracting 200,000 to 500,000 agricultural workers and then see what happens. Oh, and also clogging up airlines at the same time.
p.a.
@LAO: In the old days, pull the battery & the phone was dead. Now with no battery access…
rikyrah
I just know it will be horrible. The images will be haunting.
Rotten, evil people😠
Omnes Omnibus
@rikyrah: As you would say, no lie told.
LAO
@p.a.: The American people are going to find out what a bad bet trading convenience over privacy was. The amount of data the government has/ will be able to obtain on us is frightening.
ColoradoGuy
@Gretchen: Put the phone in a closed metal can and it loses contact with the Internet. A food can is good enough, if the lid is tight. RF shielding is pretty easy. Metal does the job.
Microphones can be silenced by putting the phone in a drawer with a hand towel wrapped around it. It might contact the Internet, but whatever the microphone picks up will be so muffled the audio will be unusable.
Devices with single microphones, like remote controls, can have the mic opening covered with a dab of Blu-Tak or modeling clay.
Smart speakers probably need to be unplugged and set aside.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yet another good reason for everyone to MYOB.
Aziz, light!
Trump wants TV ratings. He doesn’t care about results. Not that this effort won’t be cruel, divisive, and wasteful, but it’s mainly for show, a daily Two Minutes Hate.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@ColoradoGuy:
Fixed.
Spanky
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t know nothin.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@different-church-lady:
Ah, Our Media Betters are doing the ole “enhanced interrogation techniques” labeling again.
Because “nazi” is just so unpleasant a word. /s
Spanky
@p.a.: Put your phone in one of these to prevent leakage.
(Turn it off first. )
NutmegAgain
@Gretchen: Well, if they’re already looking up all the women’s and girl’s skirts, what’s a little pee test? /s
different-church-lady
@ColoradoGuy: They’ll be essential again as soon as RFK jr gets going.
KatKapCC
@ColoradoGuy: I keep telling folks, if you kick out every undocumented person, the produce sections in the grocery stores are gonna be barren as hell.
Jackie
@Gretchen:
Both directions. You can cross the state border pregnant. When you come back and fail the pregnancy test…
LAO
@Spanky: In all seriousness, there’s a concept in criminal law called “consciousness of guilt.” A common example is a defendant who runs away when the police are looking for him/her. Technically, it’s pretty weak evidence but jurors love it. I’ve interviewed a lot of jurors who put a great deal of stock into this type of evidence even though judges typically instruct juries it’s weak evidence.
Disabling your phone would definitely be introduced against a person as consciousness of guilt. And would probably be very convincing to a jury.
Martin
So, I’ve been through this twice – once during previous immigration crackdowns and once right after 9/11.
In our case the approach was the same – federal law protects disclosing student information to anyone without a need to know, and I’m not qualified to evaluate if you have a need to know, so we’re going to wait for legal council to show up and guide me through this.
Appreciate that after 9/11 I was the contact point for inquiries for engineering, and we had one of the largest muslim student population in the US, and the FBI was investigating every muslim engineering student (some of the hijackers were here on student visas and trained not far away). My local FBI agents who I knew pretty well doing background checks were in my office nearly every day for months. Not just students but faculty as well (a good friend of mine was the graduate advisor for current president of Egypt and they climbed real far up his skirt) and I told the agents I wouldn’t discuss a thing without legal council telling me what was okay to discuss. It took forever. Needless to say it strained the relationship I had with those agents who were VERY rattled and VERY eager to get on with things. And I never faulted them for that – I’d have been the same way.
We had similar policies if police, ICE, etc. came knocking looking for undocumented students. Say nothing – not even to acknowledge if we had any such students – until legal council arrives and let the lawyer run the show. If they hand you a subpoena or a warrant – you are not qualified to evaluate that – only legal council is – don’t even receive the document.
These were things we practiced with staff. We shared this advice with student groups as well so they didn’t out their classmates. But probably ⅓ of our students were on visa of some sort/PR/etc., and we always had a tidy pile of undocumented students that I handled personally because the issues around them were so fraught. I know some community colleges in the Central Valley are over 50% undocumented.
If there are raids, expect CA agriculture to grind to a crawl. You don’t round up undocumented at home because they generally don’t know where you live, you do it at their work, so they stop working. Same with meat packing and some other industries. I’m expecting some calls for financial support around these communities. Haven’t seen anything yet.
p.a.
@ColoradoGuy:
@Spanky:
Lead bags for film going through airport xray machines? I have those. Also do have a WW2 ammo box.
Bill Arnold
@p.a.:
A few years ago I bought a couple of Faraday bags, 2 for about $10 (brand “Tuulin” ), and verified that they block incoming phone calls at least. (A microwave oven (not turned on), surprisingly, did not.)
Worth it, if one expects the possibility of wanting to travel without being tracked, or wanting to confuse trackers.
Omnes Omnibus
@LAO: “Consciousness of guilt? I’m lucky to be conscious at all, officer.”
Slight edit.
Birdie
Is this true?
I am an immigrant and don’t know that this was my experience. And the last 8 years has made me question it even more.
I’ll certainly shut up and not actively comply, especially for people I know personally. But I’m finding it hard to find the permanent, generalized outrage / fear that I had a few short months ago. These policies are what more people voted for, including many more immigrants than 4 years ago. It’s not like any of this was a secret. My sense of solidarity with immigrant communities broadly is permanently diminished.
Albatrossity
@different-church-lady:
Rotating tag nominee, for sure!
Jackie
@Martin: Do we have
stickers ready to go?
Salty Sam
In 2017, I was living on my boat in Fulton Harbor, just north of Corpus Christi, TX. Fulton Harbor was a working harbor- in oyster season, all the oyster fishermen from three surrounding bays came in to Fulton to sell their daily haul. By law, they had to be in by 4:00 pm.
I came home from work one afternoon, in the first months of the first Trump administration. There were ICE and BCP vehicles and paddy wagons, Texas DPS vehicles, and assorted local cops all gathered onsite. It’s not a big harbor, the place was crowded.
It probably should be said up front, the vast majority of the oyster fishermen are undocumented Mexican men. As the boats came into the harbor to sell their catch, they were redirected to a landing spot where ICE and BCP officials were checking their documentation, and loading them into the paddy wagons.
I was horrified and angry- these guys were my neighbors, and they were being rounded up like cattle. I went up to a young ICE agent and asked WTF is going on here!?!
He answered, “Just a routine immigration check. We do this quite regularly…”
Bullshit. I’d lived there for over five years and had never seen anything other than the occasional Parks and Wildlife official checking for undersized oysters. This was nothing but SPECTACLE, a show of force for the new boss, DJ Trump.
My fear is that it will go far beyond spectacle this time.
Martin
@Jackie: I actually am thinking along those lines for groceries. I would still like to work it around more of a profit-taking-from-hardworking-people message but that’s hard to make simple enough.
I live in the wrong place for those to be effective though. I’ve been in a Walmart exactly once in my life, and it was impressive – my dad asked if they took Apple Pay and the clerk replied, and this is an exact quote: “You think fucking Walmart takes Apple Pay?” I’ve interacted with a single employee in Walmart and he dissed his employer harder than any employee I’ve ever encountered in retail in my life.
On one hand, that’s the kind of autonomy I want workers to have, on the other hand, wtf Walmart?
Splitting Image
@Birdie:
Most people are sympathetic to specific kinds of immigrants.
My mother’s family, for example, emigrated from Ireland in the early 1960s. They were all sympathetic to Irish immigration (and could sing any of the ten million songs written about the Irish diaspora), but most of them believed that the dirty, smelly immigrants who came in after them could all go back where they came from.
Those are different, don’tcha know?
Dan B
@Jackie: We have a friend who was in the camps as an infant. She talks about how angry she still is. And my brother’s ex married a man whose parents, aunts, and uncles went to visit the camp they were in. On the way home their van had a massive tire blowout on the freeway and they all died. It felt crushing to me that amount of emotional pain for those families.
Jackie
@Dan B: Sadly, we’re going to go through it again. Hopefully this generation and the next generations will remember and fight like hell like the WWII generations did. And it will NEVER be repeated again.
Barry
@Aziz, light!: “Trump wants TV ratings. He doesn’t care about results. Not that this effort won’t be cruel, divisive, and wasteful, but it’s mainly for show, a daily Two Minutes Hate.”
He might be, but the people under him seem to be serious.
Also, the King’s whim is deadlier than most people’s anger,
mayim
@Martin:
privacy for library patrons is mostly governed at the state level and is generally fairly strict. However, there’s also a firm professional belief in the right to read ~ even things the reader disagree with but is curious about.
After the Patriot Act passed, most libraries stopped keeping records of loans after the item was returned. After all, records can’t be handed over to law enforcement if they don’t exist.