Tin soldiers and Trump’s comin’. We’re finally on our own.
If you didn’t take Donald Trump seriously on his abhorrent immigration plans before the election, now you do. Now you must. There’s no choice as he’s going full blast in the opening days of the Trump restoration.
And it won’t be long before an ICE representative may be knocking on your door, or maybe just your neighbors’ doors. Everyone knows it’s coming. We’re just waiting to see how bad the mass deportation gets. The Trump team is promising to deport millions, including those who actually have papers. The New York Times has a great take, with many handy charts, on just who the immigrants are that Trump says will be deported.
What I’m saying is, it’s going to be worse than you think.
Trump has already declared a national emergency at the southern border — the emergency apparently being that border crossings have gone way down — meaning that he can send the military to the border. He already has sent troops and promises to send many more. What they’ll do once they get there, we don’t know.
Trump declared a national emergency in his first term. But now, in his second term, he has officially called the immigration at the border an “invasion” and says he could use the troops to “seal” the border to help — in Trump’s words — to “liberate Colorado.”
Of course, if you trust the election results, Coloradans didn’t think they needed liberating, even though 40,000 migrants — many of them bused here from Texas — had come to Denver. But Denver Mayor Mike Johnston says the numbers of migrants are much reduced, shelters are no longer needed, many of the migrants have jobs, and there is no longer a “crisis.”
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Whether Trump can get away with his mass deportation depends in large part, I’d guess, on how we react to it all. And sadly many Democrats aren’t reacting much, or in the case of some, reacting badly.
The House and Senate have both passed what they’re calling the Laken Riley Act, which allows for deportation of any undocumented immigrant who is suspected — not charged, much less convicted — of certain crimes, ranging from assault on a police officer to shoplifting. In the House, 46 Democrats joined Republicans in passing the bill. In the Senate, 12 Democrats joined in. Fortunately, none of those Democrats represents Colorado.
I assume, though, that Rep. Lauren Boebert, the canoodling carpetbagger, voted for it, along with the rest of the Colorado Republican delegation. But she might have been too busy acting as House bathroom monitor. If you didn’t hear, Boebert thought a “trans” congressperson was using the women’s bathroom and warned people that a “guy” was in there. Except there wasn’t.
Boebert, who apparently can’t identify what a woman is, apologized for her actions. Again. That’s the kind of serious stuff Boebert is working on as a member of the House majority.
And I’m sure she’s fine with the fact that now her neighbors and yours — some of them unauthorized immigrants who have been in the country for decades; some actually legally authorized here on temporary permits instituted by Joe Biden that Trump has declared invalid, affecting more than a million people — are in serious jeopardy.
The deportations, unless court challenges prove successful, will be massive, on a scale, as Trump likes to say, never seen before. This once, he’ll probably be right.
I’d like to think these raids could change minds. Just wait for the major raids to come to Colorado. They’re coming — and soon. I mean, Trump has called the raids “Operation Aurora.” The Wall Street Journal has listed Denver as one of the primary targets.
We just don’t know when they’re coming (as I write this on Friday afternoon, they haven’t arrived yet). And, worse yet, we don’t know how. And we’re not alone.
Johnston, like many unnerved Democratic politicians, has calmed down his rhetoric — it looks like he’s no longer talking about active resistance on Denver’s borders — but says he has not been contacted by ICE. He doesn’t know for sure, but he fully expects raids to come soon.
He says he has no idea what form the raids would take, having received no guidance on the matter. My guess is that Trump and Company haven’t started big-city busts because Trump’s team — meaning Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, Tom Homan and whoever is running the DOJ these days — haven’t yet decided how far they can go. And, of course, they need to ramp up the building of, uh, detention camps — “detention” being the nice word for it. Let’s see if Elon Musk — with arms down, I’d like to think — puts in a bid.
Would ICE agents raid, as Trump now says they can, schools, churches and hospitals?
Would they — and this is more likely — raid places they know migrants, unauthorized or not, are working, and in the process of gathering up criminals, they actually round up anyone without papers, or even some with temporary papers?
It’s dystopian. But it’s not science fiction. This will happen. Meaning, among other possibilities, that there will be kids — there could be many thousands of such kids in Colorado alone — who might have no one to pick them up after school.
In a wide-ranging interview with 9News’ Kyle Clark, Johnston laid out his plans. He would cooperate with ICE when it comes to violent criminals, just as he says Denver has always done. But when it comes to everyone else, he says Denver won’t do the federal government’s work for them.
And if ICE follows through with raids at schools — many Denver-area schools have already been told not to allow ICE officials inside unless they have a criminal warrant, which they probably won’t — Johnston said he will take the federal government to court, just as 22 states have done, some already successfully, with Trump’s clearly unconstitutional order to end birthright citizenship.
Johnston says, with guidance from state and local laws, Denver won’t assist on raids. And if the raids sweep up people who have done nothing wrong other than crossing the border illegally — which is basically a civil violation — or those who actually have temporary papers, he will take Trump and team to court.
Meanwhile, the DOJ is threatening to investigate and possibly prosecute Johnston and officials elsewhere who may not roll over for what Johnston calls Trump’s ”terror” campaign.
Johnston says he has done nothing illegal and that he won’t. But who knows what’s illegal these days? Assaulting the Capitol is apparently OK. As far I can tell, Trump is the final word on legality and illegality.
What we do know of the Trump immigration scheme is that it’s on. It’s more than on. It’s on — this winter we hear the drumming — and it’s coming quite soon to a neighborhood near you.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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