Back in May, Radley Balko spelled out the details of Stephen Miller et al.’s monstrous plans for a deportation army, (cholera) camps and “efficient” airlifts. (Per Miller: “So you build these facilities where then you’re able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico. Two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right. On Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries, right.”)
A swatch from the opening of Balko’s piece:
Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted.
But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan.
“You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”
The Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post have all looked at what Trump and the MAGA coalition have planned for immigration policy should he be elected again. Those stories all got some attention at the time, but not nearly enough to reflect the insanity of what he’s proposing…
We ought to take it more seriously. Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.
Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. [Done! Editor’s note.] Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life.
Read the rest of Balko’s piece here.
It comes with a nod to Drive-By Truckers’ song, “Ramon Casiano,” tuned to a sidenote on Harlan Carter. As Eisenhower’s head of INS–Carter oversaw “Operation Wetback”–the lawless, militaristic mass deportation of Mexicans in the 50s that scum like Stephen Miller treat as a template. Harlan Carter was convicted when he was seventeen years old of murdering a Mexican boy, Ramon Casiano. Carter pled self-defense, and the verdict was overturned due to faulty jury instructions. The charge was later dropped. Carter would go on to lead the National Rifle Association. As DBT’s Mike Cooley sings: “Someone killed Ramon Casiano/He still ain’t dead enough…”
Ramon Casiano
It all started with the border
And that’s still where it is today
Someone killed Ramon Casiano
And the killer got away
Down by the Sister Cities river
Two boys with way more pride than sense
One would fall and one would prosper
Never forced to make amends
He became a border agent
And supplemented what he made
With creative deportation
And missing ammo by the case
Since Bullet ran the operation
There’s hardly been a minute since
There ain’t a massing at the border
From Chinese troops to terrorists
He had the makings of a leader
Of a certain kind of men
Who need to feel the world’s against him
Out to get ’em if it can
Men whose trigger pull their fingers
Of men who’d rather fight than win
United in a revolution
Like in mind and like in skin
It all started with the border
And that’s still where it is today
Down by the Sister Cities river
But for sure no one can say
The killing’s been the bullet’s business
Since back in 1931
Someone killed Ramon Casiano
And Ramon still ain’t dead enough