Trump's Mass Deportation Plan Is A Racist Racket

Now, less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the threats against municipal or state officials willing to extend ​“sanctuary” have only grown more explicit, as when Homan recently vowed to prosecute Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson if he continues to ​“harbor and conceal” asylum seekers.

Trump’s mass deportation plans are alarming but they are also a conscious (if turbocharged) recap of the United States’ long history of anti-migrant state racism, as well as the product of a very profitable system of detention and surveillance supported by successive administrations of both major parties.

Whether they take the ​“spectacular” form Miller seeks, they will pay dividends in multiple ways: enabling further profiteering by private prison and other carceral corporations tapped to manage the coming crackdown, while permitting Trump to profit politically from the claim that migrants are the prime culprits of ​“American carnage.” That this strategy knows no moral or factual limits was evident in the MAGA response to the recent violence in New Orleans and Las Vegas — declaring ​“We need to secure that border” even as both attacks were perpetrated by native-born U.S. citizens with lengthy military backgrounds.