The Trump administration plans to deploy a hundred members of the Border Patrol’s BORTAC tactical teams to assist ICE agents with arrests of undocumented immigrants in the United States, including in sanctuary cities. Officials say these personnel are being deployed to make up for challenges ICE faces due to the lack of cooperation of sanctuary cities, but the New York Times notes that “immigration agents in cities are enforcing civil infractions rather than criminal ones. They are not allowed to forcibly enter properties in order to make arrests, and the presence of BORTAC agents, while helpful in boosting the number of agents on the ground, may prove most useful for the visual message it sends.”
It would be naive at this point to think this “visual message” is not only meant to intimidate immigrants, but the cities and their citizens who oppose the Trump administration’s criminalization and dehumanization of the undocumented. Last week, we learned that the administration is banning New Yorkers from an expedited re-entry program when returning to the country from abroad; officials made clear that this move was in retaliation for New York’s approval of driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, as well as for the state’s refusal to allow Homeland Security access to its DMV database. In the quest to turn immigrants into a hated other, the Trump administrations is now embarked on a strategy to punish our own citizens and states for opposing its crackpot crackdown. First, immigrants were the enemy; now, our fellow Americans apparently are.
This is alarming, authoritarian behavior, but it also reflects the self-defeating agenda of the right-wingers in the White House. The sight of heavily armed law enforcement rolling up on immigrant communities might thrill his die-hard base, but most Americans will see instead the disparity between the body armor and the unarmed civilians in their path. It’s a stupid person’s idea of strength, in the same way that Donald Trump has been described as a stupid person’s ideas of a smart person.
As Donald Trump engages in an escalating pattern of outright criminality in the wake of Republican senators’ abdication of their impeachment duties, it’s important to his survival that he divert attention away from the White House’s crime spree. An escalated campaign against immigrants creates the false impression of crisis and escalation caused by undocumented immigrants, when in fact this newest outrage in the anti-immigrant war is ultimately a sign of the president’s fundamental weakness: that he is a man who must prey on the weak to make himself feel strong, and to distract others from his essential inadequacy to the task of being president. In this, he is both dangerous and deeply pathetic.