Coming soon: massive US deportations or internment camps unless we get more politically active
20 February 2024
Today, historian Heather Cox Richardson discusses the history of the Japanese-American internment camps, initiated by liberal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 82 years ago:
Today is the anniversary of the day in 1942, during World War II, that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 enabling military authorities to designate military areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” That order also permitted the secretary of war to provide transportation, food, and shelter “to accomplish the purpose of this order.” Source
This is an issue today because Donald J. Trump has promised to do much more: instead of the US government forcibly removing 125,000 Japanese-Americans into these camps, Trump has proposed deporting millions of immigrants each year:
Trump has promised his supporters that in a second term he would launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” To deport as many as ten million of what he called “foreign national invaders,” Trump advisor Stephen Miller explained on a November podcast, the administration would federalize National Guard troops from Republican-dominated states and send them around the country to round people up, moving them to “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” that would serve as internment camps. Source
In a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”
The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here. New York Times
Would the courts prevent this? It seems unlikely. In 1944, the US Supreme Court upheld President Roosevelt’s Executive Order in its Korematsu opinion. Although considered one of the worst US Supreme Court decisions ever, it was not repudiated until 74 years later in Trump vs. Hawaii. The current ultra-conservative Roberts Court has already issued some of the worst decisions of all time, including Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (abortion rights, my vote for the worst decision due to its profound impact), Citizens United v. FEC (campaign financing) and Shelby County versus Holder (civil rights). Thus, all immigrants, undocumented and perhaps even documented, should anticipate deportation proceedings under the Trump administration.
There is a clear mechanism to help avoid this possible deportation: vote to elect President Joe Biden and Democrats at the Federal and State levels and encourage others to do so. I believe in the value of immigrants and am highlighting this issue so all my friends, family and contacts know the importance of this issue. What are you doing?
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The Huntington Woods Peace Group has a Reading Group each summer/fall. Last year we read fiction and non-fiction on the theme of fascism coming to the United States*. Certainly fear and hatred of “the Other” whether Jews, Muslims, Asians, Mexicans, gay people, trans people, female people, or Democrats, is rampant in the U.S., and is being relentlessly weaponized by the ultra-extremist far right; or, as they were formerly known, the Republican Party. All that is necessary for the strong currents of fascism in many states to become our national reality is that people of good will do nothing. Or not enough. Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written extensively about how fascism arose in European nations (“On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”), and has remarked that a significant difference between the United States and those nations is that we have their example before us; and if forewarned, we can be forearmed. Nat Pernick’s short pieces on this theme are to the point, and should be more widely read. You can help by sharing Nat’s writings on the very real peril to democracy posed by the MAGA Party with your friends and colleagues. Every right we have, including all those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, can be abridged or lost as easily as women’s rights to reproductive freedom have been lost. Speech such as Nat’s blog and my and comments can and will be banned and punished if the MAGA Party takes the helm. It can happen here, and it is happening here. Do more than you are doing now to beat back the tide of fascism! MAGA fascism threatens to overwhelm freedom here as soon as the upcoming elections. To wait and see if our freedoms will survive is to assure that they will not.
* The Plot Against America, It Can’t Happen Here, Listen Liberal, and American Psychosis