Trump’s Reelection Strategy: Ethnic Cleansing
Trump is starting to ramp up the reelection team and there’s only one issue that he can use to really make his supporters excited.
President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting “next week,” an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump wrote, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.”
Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.
Trump and his senior immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, have been prodding Homeland Security officials to arrest and remove thousands of family members whose deportation orders were expedited by the Justice Department this year as part of a plan known as the “rocket docket.”
In April, acting ICE director Ronald Vitiello and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were ousted after they hesitated to go forward with the plan, expressing concerns about its preparation, effectiveness and the risk of public outrage from images of migrant children being taken into custody or separated from their families.
The cruelty is, of course, the point. The fact that this is entirely likely to work in terms of ginning up support for Trump next year says a whole lot about the humanity of many millions of Americans. A lot of people on Twitter are comparing this to Hitler’s rhetoric before Krysatllnacht. It’d be nice to say that this is an unfair exaggeration. But it is entirely appropriate. We’ve already set up the concentration camps.