Trump's Cruelty Promises to Create an Ungovernable Nation
Trump's plan to deport millions of people, many with legitimate protections under US law, will face the same legal delays that he himself took advantage of as an indicted and now-convicted felon.
The first court of appeal for challenges to DHS/ICE deportation efforts is controlled ultimately by DOJ and the US attorney general. But from there, immigrants have direct appeal to the US appellate courts in many cases.
That process can take years, and meanwhile, the immigrants caught up in Trump's planned dragnet will be housed in purposely cruel ICE prison camps, run by Wall Street-fed private prison companies.
So think about how hard it will be to push hundreds of thousands of immigrants through that time-consuming legal process.
Now that's only the case if immigrants, including DACA-protected immigrants, can afford lawyers. And it seems clear to me the nonprofit immigration groups arrayed against Trump's cruel plan are geared up for the fight. And judging by how much money Harris raised for her 3-month presidential run, $1 billion, that money is there on the left for the fight.
So, think about how that will play out in the media (24-7 coverage of concentration camps where no doubt some adults and kids will die) and huge costs and disruptions to border-state economies (red states mainly, his base)and migrant-dependent businesses.
It will anger Trump, and he'll find ways to be vicious and cruel about it, but he can't change the facts on the ground, absent illegal use of power. He can choose to do that, but there is always blowback (hundreds of thousands in the streets), and then he'll escalate further by deploying federal troops to bust heads.
That, in turn, will fuel international outrage and media coverage that will expose his corruption further and help build even more civil-society resistance against him.
Now, none of that alone will stop him from unleashing oppression on the people challenging his rule, but it's clear the price to his administration will be high. And for the American people and immigrant families.
Achieving mass deportations is not a cake walk here, even for fascists. It's one thing to attain power by lies. It's a whole other matter to govern 350 million people with lies. There are not enough federal troops in the nation to dispurse Trump's ordered cruelty on the potential groundswell of repulsion and protest against Trump and his extremist cronies. Remember half the nation voted against these policies and many more were grifted and fooled by his bombastic rhetoric.
All he will create is an ungovernable nation.
Stay tuned, the show is coming.
And if you want a better understanding of the US immigration system and how it works, read my book, "Dispatches from the House of Death." The nonfiction book is more relevant now than when it was published last year because Trump' election made it so.
