Overview: The article discusses the recent actions of ICE agents, who blew open the front door of a Huntington Park home while searching for a suspect involved in a traffic incident during a protest against ICE activities in Bell. The incident has caused fear in the immigrant community, with many avoiding leaving their homes or engaging in daily activities. The article also highlights Trump’s immigration policies and his alignment with Eugenics philosophy, which aimed to create an “America of the well-born” and control and contain immigrants and others considered undesirable. The author calls for the broader community to speak out against these policies and for Congress and the courts to take action.
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The incident didn’t happen here in the inland region but it could have. No one was seriously injured, but they could have been. ICE tactics have grown increasingly dangerous for those being hunted like animals for deportation and American citizens caught in the cross-fire.
A mother and her two young children are now traumatized after ICE officers blew open the front door of their home in Huntington Park around 6:00 a.m., Friday morning, June 27.
The mother, a U.S. citizen, said she was still in bed when a neighbor called advising her that ICE agents were amassed outside her home. The young mother jumped up with her youngest child in her arms and rushed to gather her other child from their bedroom. Before she could gather herself and her family, ICE agents, using an explosive device, blew her front door wide open.
Agents claim they were searching for the woman’s boyfriend, also a U.S. citizen, as the result of an incident that occurred during a protest against ICE activities in the community of Bell, the previous week. A government official claimed the suspect had rammed his car into a Border Patrol vehicle and in the process, obstructed the ICE agents ability to do their job. ICE initially detained and then released him the day of the crash but days later arrived at the couple’s home to arrest him.
The family’s attorney declared the suspect did nothing wrong–that it was a minor traffic accident, “and this is the level of violence and the response that we get [from ICE].”
The boyfriend, who subsequently turned himself into police, is now free on bail. But what about the trauma to his children . . . to his girlfriend . . . to his neighborhood. . . to himself?
In another recent incident, my friend’s younger brother was caught up in an immigration sweep while at work here in the Inland Empire. I felt her panic as their parents rushed to present his documents to ICE officials hoping to preempt her brother being “disappeared” into an ICE detention center, or worst yet, deported to a foreign country and held in detention without due process. Fortunately, the parents were able to free him, but what if they hadn’t reached him in time?
Fear in the immigrant community is palpable, debilitating. Immigrants are afraid to leave their homes, go to work, shop for groceries, see a doctor, pick their children up from school. Is this who we are?
For many of us it is difficult to ingest, assess and process what is happening in this country, in this state, in our communities.
I remember years ago reading a poem about poverty written by an unknown poet. It read in part, “No one can communicate to you the substance of poverty until you have lived with it intimately. Until you have run your fingers over its shallow eye sockets, over its hollow cheeks…”
What the poet tried to convey to the reader was that no matter how compassionate you may be, unless this is your reality, it is difficult to truly understand. Today, Trump’s immigration order and the indiscriminate, dispassionate actions of ICE have created a similar reality for immigrants across the country–they are being forced to live with the intimate fear of deportation.
In my early twenties, I watched children shot down in the streets of South Africa and that’s when I came to better understand how white supremacy and deep-seeded hatred of Black people, when combined with unlimited power unlimited funding and total political control, had left Black South Africans with no other option than to fight for their lives, for the lives of their children, for their futures.
I also saw how, when calls for divestment from South Africa, and protests here at home and abroad combined, it changed the mindset of the U.S. government regarding its support of the South African Apartheid regime. At the time, the U.S. was one of only two nations in the world—Israel was the other—continuing to uphold the racist South African government. This opened my eyes even wider to the breadth of American racism and changed my perspective regarding Israel.
Since that time, the atrocities perpetuated by Israel in the West Bank are unconscionable. This is nothing against the Jewish people, no more than America’s illegal attack on Iraq, which resulted in the unwarranted deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, was the fault of the American people. But, we cannot ignore being responsible for who we elected to lead this nation and took us into that war based on a lie.
Today the U.S. and Israel seem to once again be travelling parallel paths–each country working to purge their populations of those they deem undesirable. And once again, we cannot ignore being responsible for who we elected to lead this nation to where we currently sit—on the precipice of authoritarianism.
We are also, in true Eugenics fashion, in the midst of the country’s renewed steps toward creating the white supremacists’ wet dream of an America of the “well born”and white. Eugenicists believed that certain [white] people are born with superior genetic traits or qualities and as a result, should breed selectively so those traits are passed on to the next generation.
Both scientifically unfounded and a purely racist ideology, Eugenics relied on the support of those who embraced it as justification for slavery, were xenophobic, anti semitic, sexist and who also supported the tenets of colonialism and imperialism.
You can get a sense of the “well born” mentality among Trump’s inner circle by following the antics of his once and future bro, Elon Musk, who has allegedly fathered at least 14 children with different women, and counting. Musk has been very open regarding his concerns about the nation’s declining population in relation to the long term viability of civilization. With this in mind, it certainly must gall him and others like him to know that although birth rates are declining in Western-European countries, many of what Trump called shxt hole countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Niger, Angola and Chad, have total fertility rates significantly above the replacement level.
“Congress first criminalized the act of entering or reentering the country without authorization nearly a century ago, in pursuit of xenophobic and eugenicist policy goals. For much of the last century, these laws sat largely unused. However, Congress revitalized these laws as part of the national trend toward mass incarceration of people of color. For nearly 20 years, the U.S. government has prosecuted migration related offenses in greater numbers than any other type of federal offense in the United States.”
The National Immigrant Justice Center
Replacement level is the rate at which a population replaces itself from one generation to the next. For most countries, the current replacement rate is about 2.1 children per woman. The United Nation noted that even though fertility rates are continuing to decline, the population in sub-Saharan Africa is still projected to grow significantly in the coming decades. Is it any wonder that one of Trump’s first major actions was to cancel America’s commitment to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
It is difficult for me to believe that Musk cares about civilization in general. As a South African who was suckled at the breast of Apartheid, what he really cares about is the loss of a white supremacist-led Western-European civilization, starting with the rapidly browning demographic right here in the USA.
But that’s not all. Breeding a society of “well born” individuals was only part of the Eugenic equation. Eugenicists also actively embraced a variety of ways to remove those they considered “undesirable” from American society. This not only included strategies like sterilization, it also focused on deportation and immigration restrictions. More evidence Trump is following an old handbook seeped in racism.
Today we watch as deportation efforts accelerate to the pace envisioned by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons who said, “We need to get better at treating this [mass deportation] like a business. He bragged about how he wanted to see a deportation process work “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
Again, I encourage all of us to show up in support of our immigrant neighbors who are law abiding citizens, contributing to community, and just trying to live their lives in peace. When we stand up and speak out on behalf of immigrants, we are standing up and speaking out for ourselves.
For years, Trump has “trumpeted” who he deems undesirable and aligned himself with like minded individuals, organizations and power brokers to help facilitate his efforts to control and contain them. Today, its immigrants. Tomorrow will it be citizens caught up in the criminal justice system? He’s already intimated his desire to move American citizens convicted of crimes to prisons off shore. Will he stop at those detained or go after those on parole? Will he next look to imprison or deport the homeless or transgender individuals or gays and lesbians or those with disabilities or the sick and the elderly?
Why wouldn’t he? Who is going to stop him? Congress? The courts? For a nation that is supposed to be “Of the people, by the people and for the people,” today the people appear powerless. We must find our voice. We must change course. We the people are our last best hope.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I’m keeping it real.