Politics

Where Trump Succeeds

The administration continues to accomplish its central goal of maintaining white racial hierarchy.

Members of a caravan of Central Americans who spent weeks traveling across Mexico walk from Mexico to the U.S. side of the border to ask authorities for asylum on April 29, 2018 in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico.
Members of a caravan of Central Americans who spent weeks traveling from Mexico to the U.S. side of the border to ask authorities for asylum on April 29 in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico. David McNew/Getty Images

It’s been lost in the frenzy over the Stormy Daniels affair, but in the past week, the Trump administration has sped its pursuit of a central goal: removing as many nonwhite immigrants as possible from the United States.

On Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced an end to temporary protected status for tens of thousands of Hondurans who arrived in the United States to live and work after a 1998 hurricane devastated their country. Now, these Hondurans—who’ve spent decades integrating into American society with homes, jobs, businesses, and native-born children—will be given just two years before they have to leave the United States.

This marks the latest round of expulsions. Last year, the Trump administration removed similar protections for 45,000 Haitians and 2,500 Nicaraguans. At the start of the year, Trump officials did the same for 200,000 Salvadorans. (Senior U.S diplomats objected at the time to Trump’s decisions to expel these immigrants, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, and warned his administration that the deportations could lead to instability in Central America and a surge in illegal immigration. They were ignored.) And just two weeks ago, the administration revoked status from 9,000 Nepalese immigrants. “By January 2020,” notes Dara Lind for Vox, “the Trump administration will have turned 400,000 people who are currently in the US legally into unauthorized immigrants.” At that point, those immigrants will be vulnerable to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency that, under Trump, has become a bona fide deportation force, utilizing draconian tactics to harass and detain people—including American citizens—who pose little threat to the United States.

This decision to end temporary protected status represents a major break with previous administrations that extended the program, recognizing the deep roots these immigrants had established in the United States. In rejecting this precedent, the administration is advancing the ideas and prejudices of Trump himself, who infamously referred to predominantly black and brown countries as “shitholes,” and who made his presidential campaign a prolonged attack on Hispanic immigrants and Muslim refugees. Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was an open call to return the United States to a time of complete white racial dominance, where nonwhites were largely marginal to American politics and culture.

It may seem banal to focus on the president’s racism—since at this point in the Trump era, it’s a known quantity—but the racist nature of his policies and program are still, somehow, underplayed amid all the churning controversies. The move against immigrants with temporary protected status was joined, on Monday, with a speech by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who pledged to criminally prosecute every migrant who illegally crosses the southern border and split parents from children to do it. It’s a deliberately cruel change from the present procedure, where apprehended families are released to await civil deportation procedures.

Beyond immigration, there’s the anti­–anti-segregation action undertaken at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where Ben Carson has suspended an Obama-era rule to “affirmatively further fair housing” by pushing localities to address segregation in their communities. Under the 2015 rule, HUD would provide local governments with information on segregation and racially concentrated poverty, tying federal funding to efforts to alleviate both, with periodic check-ins from the department. Communities without HUD-approved plans would lose federal dollars. Carson, who has criticized federal segregation efforts as “failed socialist experiments,” halted the program in January. At the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos has pushed cuts to the agency’s Office for Civil Rights as well as questioned efforts to curb racial disparities in school discipline.

Donald Trump broke his promise to build a more worker-friendly America, working instead on a program of upward redistribution financed by deep cuts to the social safety net. He broke his promise to “drain the swamp” by presiding over, and participating in, unprecedented corruption of the public interest. But thus far, he has kept his promise to act in defense of white racial hierarchy and weaken—as much as possible—this country’s stated commitment to fairness and equality.