Trump's Easy Targets

The new president's first hours in office have come with dire consequences for the most vulnerable.

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About two weeks before Donald Trump was inaugurated, agents with the U.S. Border Patrol staged a series of widespread raids around the city of Bakersfield in Central California. Border Patrol doesn’t often come to Bakersfield, which is only technically in its 100-miles-from-the-border jurisdiction because it’s only 70 miles or so inland from the Pacific Ocean. The agency claimed it was staging a four-day “targeted” operation that was supposed to pick up criminals, but immigration activists and the United Farm Workers think as many as 1,000 people may have been detained and released. Some 78 were detained for criminal records.

Here’s how it actually went down, per the Los Angeles Times:

Rather than “targeted” enforcement, the Border Patrol conducted “random stops of vehicles exclusively founded on racial profiling of individuals,” Ambar Tovar, director of legal services for the UFW Foundation, told me.

The officers raid locations where they knew they would find farmworkers gathering — such as at a Home Depot, where immigrant laborers come to seek day work, and along California Route 99, the highway traveled by immigrant farmworkers heading to their jobs. At some spots, where they were asked to show warrants naming targeted individuals, the officers simply drove away without answering.

[…]

Creamer said there have been no indications that immigrants in Kern County were responsible for a wave of violent crime, the ostensible justification for the raids.

“The people who got targeted get up to go to work at 5 or 6 a.m.,” he said. “They work hard and then go home to their families. That’s incompatible with violent crime. Drug dealers aren’t going out to harvest citrus.”

The effect was noticeable. Community businesses closed, kids stayed home from school, parents skipped work. Nobody wanted to be on the roads. Joe Biden was still President, but something had already changed: Border Patrol was flexing its might, indicating, perhaps, that they were standing by for the orders of the next President.

Now that President is here. The raids he has promised have not officially started yet, as far as we can tell, though there seems to be impending activity in Chicago at some point in the coming days. CBP has already shut down critical services for processing asylum applications. Agents have been instructed to deport migrants without any legal process. We don’t know all the specifics, but this was always going to be how the Trump administration got to work: soft targets and swift “results” first. I put results in quotes because it isn’t likely that a wave of deportations will change the problems that Trump blames on immigration instead, it’s more likely to shovel government cash into the hands of private prison companies but what they will do is sow fear and terror among a demographic of people who have next to no power to push back.

Immigration was always going to be first: Undocumented immigrants are the easiest targets to pick off. They’ll use that momentum, and the precedent that it sets with the public, to take on slightly harder targets: other immigrants, trans people, other marginalized communities. You’ve all heard the “first they came for” poem—that’s what we’re watching in real time. There are precious few voices willing to stick up for the rights of undocumented immigrants in our society. It’s politically unpopular and heavily nuanced. The core principle of this country—that it is a land of free people where anyone is welcome—has been warped so successfully by hundreds of years of abuse and exclusion that it does not apply to the country we live in.

But remember: Soft targets, like undocumented immigrants, are also the groups whom everyday people can most directly help, and the need is so dire that a little effort can go a long way. We will not be able to turn back whatever brutality the Trump administration is planning, but we may be able to slow it and we can absolutely alleviate some of its pain. The clothing drives, legal funds, public organizing—all of those have tremendous value to communities who are already bearing the brunt of state repression. If you are aimless and stressed and helpless in the face of the second coming of the worst president of the modern era, here is where you can step up, now, before the administration’s crosshairs move on to someone else.