Image by Victoria Pickering.

President Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for immigrants, particularly the non-white variety from south of our border. His statements that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country,” coupled with Fox News reports on Hispanic-appearing migrants who commit crimes, leave little doubt about what he and his allies think of (non-white) immigrants and their contributions to this country.

So it didn’t surprise me that he recently began to follow through on his own and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leadership’s earlier intentions (as far back as 2018) to detain immigrants — including unaccompanied children — at military posts. Earlier this month, the first deportation flight carried a few men from the American mainland to our naval base and Global War on Terror offshore prison site in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt referred to those migrants as “the worst criminal illegal aliens” and “the worst of the worst.” The flight apparently included members of a gang from Venezuela. Yet troops had already been ordered to ready the base in Cuba to house some 30,000 immigrants — a dramatic increase in its capacity — in military tent encampments meant to supplement existing detention facilities there.

The move is part of President Trump’s signature public policy initiative: to deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. without clear legal status. Some 40% of those Trump deems “illegal” and has targeted for deportation actually have some sort of official permission to be here, whether because they already have temporary protected status, a scheduled date in immigration court, or refugee or asylum status.

Since none of them wear their immigration status on their shirts (thankfully!), it might prove unnerving indeed how officers from DHS will be selecting people for interrogation and detention. (It’s probably not the guy in front of you at Starbucks with a Scandinavian accent who just ordered a fancy drink.)

Everything from Ku Klux Klan flyers left in towns across the Midwest after the election to Trump’s order removing the protected status of schools, healthcare facilities, and places of worship when it comes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids paints a dire picture. We haven’t seen profiling on this scale since the days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when the federal government ordered tens of thousands of men of Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian descent to register and be fingerprinted, subjecting them to increased surveillance and vigilante violence.

Since then, globally, the U.S. has detained hundreds of thousands of men (and, in some cases, boys) domestically and at that infamous prison in Guantánamo Bay, many without........

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