Last month, the Trump administration flew 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a brutal jail in El Salvador. Federal officers alleged that the detainees have been members of the Tren de Aragua gang, calling them “heinous monsters” ,“prison aliens”, “the worst of the worst”. The federal authorities has additionally revoked visas for a thousand worldwide college students over their alleged participation in protests in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Some have been kidnapped, like Mahmoud Khalil, who has spent greater than a month incarcerated in one of many worst jails within the US. Officers alleged that Mahmoud “sided with terrorists … who’ve killed harmless males, ladies, and youngsters”.
Media reviews shortly revealed that the Trump administration is mendacity about “harmless” folks to justify abducting them. However this raises a extra necessary query: if Trump’s victims weren’t “harmless”, does that make them disposable? I fear that emphasizing the innocence of victims creates a rhetorical entice. It’s like fastidiously digging a pit that the fascists can shove us into.
As an alternative, we must always interrogate the truth that the Trump administration selected to focus on “gang members” and “terrorist supporters” in step one of its ethnic cleaning mission. Criminals and terrorists are the bogeymen animating bipartisan racism in opposition to Black, Latino and Arab folks, and Trump is weaponizing these myths as a result of many liberals have already written them off as lower than human. The political context that enabled US residents to be shipped to El Salvador’s Cecot facility is a bipartisan mission greater than 50 years within the making, largely unquestioned by people who find themselves rightfully horrified by latest escalations.
Allegations of criminality have lengthy been an efficient pretext for anti-Black violence within the US – that is the “struggle on crime”. As long as there are “criminals” to combat, vicious police brutality turns into politically palatable. That is true in blue and crimson states alike. The gang member is the newest image used to dehumanize Black and Latino folks, changing the “superpredator”. In observe, police and prosecutors invoke the specter of monstrous gangs to proceed focusing on whole neighborhoods whereas evading allegations of specific discrimination.
You might be added to a gang database due to your tattoos, the colour of the clothes you put on and even for utilizing sure emojis on social media. These lists are riddled with errors, generally naming toddlers and elders. Extra generally, gang databases index the hundreds of individuals – usually kids – swept up by police due to the place they stay or whom they socialize with. The results of gang policing are devastating: it might result in federal prosecution or potential deportation, to not point out a lifetime of state harassment.
Gang membership isn’t the one device the Trump administration can use to painting its victims as responsible. When the “struggle on crime” morphed into the “struggle on terror”, Arab and Muslim residents suffered from discriminatory surveillance and repression – the “terrorist” class matches the “gang member” class in that it justifies racist dragnet policing practices. The “counter-terrorism” web has already widened, focusing on Cease Cop Metropolis activists in Atlanta. This drawback will not be restricted to Republicans – liberal politicians and college stakeholders laid the groundwork for Trump’s deportation efforts. Final yr, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, known as pupil Palestine activists proxies for Iran, and New York Metropolis’s mayor, Eric Adams, smeared us as terrorist supporters to justify an extremely violent police raid.
The widening web of who is taken into account a prison not solely chills dissent amongst immigrants and activists. It additional dehumanizes and renders disposable individuals who have genuinely dedicated hurt.
We should defend the rights of people that do have prison data. Nobody deserves to be whisked away to a brutal jail that deprives them of primary human rights – regardless of if it’s in El Salvador, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania or New York. Felony data and bona fide gang membership don’t flip human beings into monsters. If Trump goes by means of together with his plan of sending residents to El Salvador, he may initially goal folks convicted of heinous crimes. This is able to permit federal officers to ask: “Why do liberals care about pedophiles and murderers?”
We needs to be ready to defend the fundamental rights of all of Trump’s targets with our full power. If a single individual turns into disposable, anybody may turn out to be the following goal. Final week, Trump mentioned he “beloved” the concept of sending American “criminals” to El Salvador, and regulation professors are sounding the alarm about citizen pupil activists being subjected to terrorism prosecutions. First it will likely be the “migrant gang member” or “terrorist on a pupil visa” despatched to Cecot. Subsequent it will likely be the home gang member and the terrorist-supporting citizen. Ultimately, maybe any political opponent may very well be construed as a criminal-terrorist.
Trump might not even have to depend on the justice division to criminalize his enemies – dozens of native cops joined the 6 January 2021 putsch on the US Capitol, and native prosecutors have eagerly charged pupil activists with felonies. That is another excuse to keep away from the innocence entice: many police love Trump, and regulation enforcement can very simply make their adversaries look like criminals.
The innocence entice is harmful as a result of allegations of criminality have at all times been deployed to justify state violence. If we solely defend the “harmless”, the fascists will argue that their sufferer “was no angel”. An anti-fascist rhetoric that carves out exceptions for imperfect victims is a present to our opponents.
-
Jonathan Ben-Menachem is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia College, the place he researches the politics of criminalization
Supply hyperlink
