Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. Each week, we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. This is Andrea Pitzer. Donald Trump won last month's election by vowing to exact retribution against many groups. In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. He often put a target on immigrants backs. They're poisoning the blood of our country with the hate that he directed at them. Democrats said, please don't call them animals. They're humans. I said, no, they're not humans. They're not humans. They're animals. With the hate that he conjured from his supporters in response. Do you know anybody that crossed the border without applying for green card? Oh, yes, unfortunately, I have met family members that did. Cousins, nephews, nieces, because those people might be deported if Donald Trump wins. That's okay. That's okay. And with the fear he generated in vulnerable communities, everybody enjoys really basic rights to be safe in their homes, to be, you know, to remain silent if questioned by law enforcement, to not sign any documents they don't understand, and to speak with and be represented by attorneys. Now Americans who want to protect their immigrant neighbors are trying to understand how vicious threats of spectacle and violence might unfold. Next month and beyond, we begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. How did we get to such a low, surreal moment? Getting them out will be a bloody story. So today I want to talk about the past, present, and future of immigration through a lens that sheds some light on how the US has wound up publicly embracing violence on a national scale. Says mass deportations now. Mass deportations now against some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. And I want to look at this current widespread fear that the US Will establish a concentration camp system for immigrants. I'm curious, what do you call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial? For decades, anti immigration sentiment has been a political weapon used by members of both parties. People are driving across that border with tons, tons, hear me, tons of everything from byproducts of methamphetamine to cocaine to heroin. It's all coming up to corrupt Mexico. But Republicans have driven the policies and rhetoric further and further into inhumane territory. If you come back, you will be executed. You will be killed immediately. Today, I'll consider where we are now, how we got here, what's likely to happen and what it's possible to do. The idea of dangerous foreigners had been pushed by anti alien groups on both the American and British publics in the first decade of the 20th century. Nativism is a constant phenomenon in American history. Goes back to the colonial period. It surges in the old immigration period before the Civil War with Irish and German and other immigrant groups. And again it surges in the late 19th century when these new immigrants begin to arrive in England. Anti alien groups tried to strip foreigners of rights even in peacetime, with a particular interest in limiting Jewish immigration. I need money bad, Mr. Pagan, and they all tell me you're the man to come to. Depends upon what it is and how much you want for it, my dear. I'm a businessman. In Blackstone's commentaries on the law of England, there was a sort of codifying of this category of alien enemy. And it crystallized centuries of British common law to say that alien friends had rights, but alien enemies have no rights, no privileges. During a time of war. More people came into this country in 1907 than any other time in our history. This surge of anti immigrant acts a little over 100 years ago in England put this concept of discriminating against foreigners into law in many new ways, with many new legal restrictions that went into place, especially with the advent of World War I. Once the United States enters the war, suspicions of immigrants turn into outright fear. At the start of the war, existing anti immigrant sentiment targeted even foreigners who had lived peaceably in England for decades. The immigrant group that suffered the most were German immigrants. They were considered enemy aliens. By the end of the First World War, popular sentiment in the US Too had turned against German Americans, one of our biggest minority populations at that time. They had to go down to the police station, be figure printed, photographed and had to carry around an identification card. They were put under surveillance by the government and also by their communities. You're no longer allowed to teach German in schools. Any expression of German culture is repressed. And German newspapers, of which there were many, were forced to cancel. We had some silly things like people changing the name of hamburgers to liberty sandwiches and some not silly things where vigilante groups would attack German immigrants. In both cases, thousands of enemy alien civilians were locked up with more than 30,000 internees held in the UK in 1915. That was the peak year of holding. And this process happened during World War I. In Germany too, antisemitism was a kind of a signal for those who belong to the cultural sphere of the right. If you can call it that in German society, that is, if you were anti Semitic, one could immediately imagine what else you are. A monarchist, an anti democrat, an imperialist and so on. And also in cultural matter, one could identify you as someone who is anti modern, as somebody who is basically conservative, but has also a radical element in it, an anti present element in it. I've talked before about how Adolf Hitler's preoccupation at the end of World War I, more than a decade before he came to power. This preoccupation he had with changing the legal status of German Jews so that they would have no more rights than aliens, so that Jews would be treated as immigrant foreigners. And Hitler specifically cited the alien laws and he wanted them applied against Germany's Jewish population. Enacted in 1935, the Nuremberg Race Laws were one of the first steps towards legalizing this false Nazi ideology. There were two the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. The first of the two laws, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined a citizen as a person who is of German or related blood. In November 1938, almost a year before Hitler invaded Poland and launched World War II, the government of Edouard Daladier in France issued a decree allowing for the detention of undesirable foreigners. So France too got in the action. For 30 years, the Reevesolt camp in southwestern France was the largest internment camp in Western Europe. And across France's mountainous southern border, the Pyrenees. Spanish republicans were locked at that time in a bloody civil war with the forces of fascist dictator Francisco Francois. And in early 1939, a few months after that, French decree was put out when Spanish republicans were thrown into a massive retreat. Some 450,000 crossed the border on foot in winter into France as refugees, just in a period of weeks. Originally built as a military camp, it was used to house Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War. The government was deeply threatened by the idea of French southern cities being swamped by foreign leftists and they decided to isolate most of the military aged men by exiling them into concentration camps in remote and poorly sited areas with no housing and sometimes limited access to fresh water. During the Second World War it became home to thousands of Jews, many of whom were sent on to concentration camp and also to travelers. In the late 50s it was a prison for those supporting Algerian independence. These laws stigmatizing aliens, normalized the detention of groups that could be shoehorned into this undesirable foreigner category, particularly targeting vulnerable refugees and those fleeing persecution. And it was no longer limited to wartime enemies. The day has Come, the truth must be told. The words of President Francois Hollande admitting for the first time, France bore broad responsibility for the internment of thousands of Roma during World War II. These are just some of the ways that immigrants were relegated to mass civilian detention without trial in the first half of the 20th century, before World War II, when this kind of detention of immigrants became a perfectly normal thing to do. Like the uk, the United States of America has its own history of dealing with enemy aliens that dates to the 1700s. America passed its own Alien Enemies act in 1798 as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The general understanding even at the time was that the Alien and Sedition Acts went too far, that they impinged on civil liberties and that they aggrandized presidential power in ways that were unsustainable. Most of these acts were repealed before Thomas Jefferson left the presidency. But the 1798 Alien Enemies act endured, allowing enemy foreigners to be detained or deported without trial, used repeatedly against people who have committed no crime and are not even suspected of criminal activity. Because the United states back in 1798 had virtually no criminal law and literally no immigration law, Congress decided that the President should have some sort of sweeping wartime authority. First to regulate noncitizens from a hostile foreign power or hostile belligerent, to detain those non citizens, and then, if necessary, to deport them all without a hearing. This was the basis on which immigrants from countries at war with the US were held in concentration camps, popularly called internment camps, during World War I and World War II. This was the basis in fact on which FDR's wartime administration rounded up some 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II and put them into camps, including Paul and his family. Before I would get moved, I would get something called due process. All that did not happen within a short period of time. We had to leave Los Angeles, where I was born and where I had all my friends. It's important to note that the majority of these people had not only been in the US for many years, the majority of them were also American citizens. And the fact that the Alien Enemies act clearly applied to subjects or citizens of enemy nations was given a fig leaf rationalization to cover the detention of these American citizens alongside foreign nationals. The Alien enemies Act of 1798 is the law that the incoming Trump administration is citing as the core authorization for the massive deportation program that they would like to impose. The Alien Enemies act covers these noncitizens based on their identity, not based on their conduct. And anyone born in or who holds the citizenship of that foreign hostile power that can be targeted. The act sets out the ability to impose detention and deportation in the face of, quote, invasion or predatory incursion by a foreign nation or government. An invasion is, as James Madison put it, an operation of war, an organized armed attack. It's not merely illegal activity of some lesser kind, like illegal migration or drug smuggling or the like. This issue was debated in the founding era not so much in response to the Alien Enemies act, but rather because the Constitution actually mentions invasion in several places. Now, in the past, US Individual states have brought court cases claiming that immigration constitutes this invasion or predatory incursion mentioned in the Act. Those cases were dismissed by the courts, but the judges involved didn't rule that the act could not be applied to immigrants coming over the border. One would assume that the use of invasion in the Constitution and its use just a few years later in the Alien Enemies act have the same meaning. Instead, they argued that the courts didn't have the authority to judge whether an invasion was underway, leaving these matters to the executive and legislative branches. So, against this context of concentration camps established in the past under the Enemy Aliens act, the incoming Trump administration is talking about using exactly this law against immigrants. The Alien Enemies act affects all of us because there is no way to tell just by looking at someone if they are here legally or not. And so the federal government could, in that situation, be given the authority to essentially suspect any, anyone that might look or sound foreign. While we should not give any ground in this invasion argument, which is dishonest and I think doesn't actually apply here, to create this false equivalence between the attack on Pearl harbor and narcotics trafficking or, you know, migrants fleeing persecution, is a little ridiculous and frankly, a little offensive as well. We also shouldn't assume that the courts, which have previously left this question to the executive and legislative branches, we can't assume that they're going to defy Trump. If he has two appointments, that means he will have appointed five Supreme Court justices. In fact, I think there's a good chance that they would go along with this argument. And during the first Trump administration, the Supreme Court did side with the president on what was popularly known as the Muslim ban. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, which barred citizens entering the US from five mostly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and Venezuela. The law in question there was the Immigrant and Nationality Act. But in her dissent, Justice Sotomayor drew direct parallels to the ways that Trump's stated intent to discriminate against Muslims had been papered over. Comparing the Court's decision to its rationalizations for Japanese American internment during World War II. Sotomayor recited some of those campaign statements as proof that travel ban is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers. At that time, she wrote, history will not look kindly on the Court's decision today, nor should it. But immigration policy is not only some panoramic conceptual argument, it plays out on the ground in concrete ways. So to talk about how it has played out in the past and how it's likely to play out now, I talked with Aaron Reichland Melnick. I'm a senior fellow of the American Immigration Council on an immigrant rights nonprofit. In terms of the past, he noted that the rise of deportation and detention is bipartisan. It is not one party over the other. He also talked about how after the closure of ellis island in 1954, the US didn't have significant capacity for immigration detention just for several decades. There were some small facilities where people would be held for a few days or for a few weeks or months, but it was very small numbers of people, and it didn't get it again until the first Reagan administration in the 1980s. The thing that changed was the rise of Haitian and Cuban refugees. In 1981, the first modern immigration detention center opened under the Reagan administration in Miami, the Chrome Detention center, which is still there, still in operation. William French Smith in the Reagan administration was paraphrased in the New York Times at that time, saying, detention of people like the Haitians is necessary to stop them from setting sail in the first place. What that emphasized was detention as deterrence from seeking asylum. And the combination of detention and the border in tandem has existed continuously ever since. The last time there have been any major changes to immigration enforcement laws was 1996. And in 1996, Congress created the idea of mandatory detention for certain non citizens who have committed certain criminal offenses as well as asylum seekers. And the thing about mandatory detention, though, is that there has never been enough capacity to actually detain every person who would be subject to mandatory detention. So there also have always been releases. But broadly in the 1990s, the general bipartisan consensus was that too many people were being released from detention and disappearing into the country. And therefore we had to jack up detention start, you know, increasing the number of Border Patrol agents, increasing the number of internal INS agents at the time, now ICE agents and build more detention centers. That same influx of Haitians during massive instability in their home country was also the spur for the earliest use of Guantanamo Naval Base for massive detention without trial. By capturing refugees at sea before they could reach shores, the government reduced the number likely to gain asylum. I've talked before about Guantanamo's evolution from immigration detention to a concentration camp holding facility for the war on terror, a shift made possible by the gray areas in immigration detention that have persisted for a century now. So one of the things I'd like to say is camps don't always end up where they start either. What do you mean by that? That very, very frequently. Another example we could say would be Guantanamo. In the 1990s, Guantanamo was used as a migrant detention camp for refugees, for tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Haiti and Cuba and really serious political instability there. And they were held long without knowing what was going to be happening to them. There were riots, HIV positive patients were segregated without medical help or legal help. And eventually the courts had to intervene. And that whole story is really how we ended up with post 911 detention at Guantanamo and all that that became, which was quite a different thing than it had started out in the 90s. It's a sign of American preoccupation with race that for the purposes of political drama, Haitians are frequently singled out as the public targets of these policies. From the Reagan era then to, to 1990s Guantanamo to Springfield, Ohio this year during the campaign where Trump and J.D. vance condemned Haitian refugees in the U.S. legally, accusing them on the national stage of crimes they hadn't committed. Former President Trump and Senator Vance have been leaning into dehumanizing and racist tropes about people in need who are legally in your state, saying that they're stealing jobs and that they're stealing homes and accusing them of, without evidence of barbaric behavior. Is that language fueling these threats? They have been hired by our local businessmen and women. And when we talked to them the other morning, they told us these are great workers. So they have been a boost to the economy. Springfield and Ohio is really coming back, and Springfield has seen a lot of new industry come in and there weren't enough workers. So those comments are, you know, about eating dogs and things. They're very hurtful. They're very hurtful for these men and women who work very, very hard. They're obviously very hurtful for their children. They're hurtful. But are they also fueling these threats? Well, look, as the mayor said today, Mayor Roux, he said, you know, before this, you know, we had Haitians here for three years, four years, and we did not have any of these. I spoke publicly during the first Trump administration about border detention and family separation policies to say that this punitive approach to mass detention echoed concentration camp history in ways that made it hard to distinguish from past human rights abuses in similar camps. My research showed pretty conclusively that these camps don't close themselves, that outside the end of a war that marks the end of needing to detain what you see as a foreign or hostile population outside of being overthrown or serious political outside force being used. They don't just end because they're useful. Consistently, in the US and in many places around the world, there has been a back and forth and fine lines that allow what appears to be unconstitutional arbitrary detention that is regularly accepted as long as it's done to immigrants. They serve as a target of undesirable people. You can point to these people are the problem and see we're doing something about it. What's more, recent talk by Trump allies about the southern border and incursions into Mexico to punish drug cartels could easily play into these muddled distinctions. What do you mean by that? There are few better ways for a problematic leader to consolidate support than generate a border conflict, and few topics more effective to posture over in the US Than immigration and drugs. If invasion could mean just illegal migration, it would have dire implications not just for the use of the Alien Enemies act, but also for things like suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which means in plain English, that the executive, in that situation could hold and detain people, including even US Citizens, without charge and without a trial. How will immigration, detention and deportation actually work under a second Trump administration? I've sort of broadly identified a couple of different visions of that. There is the Stephen Miller view, which is the one that he has been talking about for quite some time now, where immigration enforcement looks categorically different than it has in the past. What do you mean by that? Where the National Guard is involved in, is deputized to roundup immigrants in blue states, where red state National Guard troops, or maybe deployed in other states, and where they build dozens of new detention centers and start running deportation flights out of them, maybe even use the Alien Enemies act to start removing people without any due process. And there is Tom Homan's approach, which is more like the current model, but with an intensification of scope and tactics. I will run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen. It's not to say that either one of them would be good. They would both be pretty awful. But if Miller's categorically different Vision prevails. America is for Americans and Americans only. The situation could unravel more rapidly in more direction. I would say the Miller version would be Trump 2.0 and the Hoban version is Trump 1.5. In either case, any plan to increase arrests and detentions is going to hit bottlenecks. Aaron listed several areas that will likely lead to delays and challenges in 2025. One big early hurdle is the staggering budgetary request that's being made. $120 billion more than two times the entire current budget of the Department of Homeland Security. It is a just staggering sum of money. But even if that is met, there will be other challenges. Barron outlined that there are several steps necessary for each deportation, beginning with arrest and continuing on to detention, legal processing, and actual removal. There are these bottlenecks and delays built into the system, either legal or logistical. Logistical challenges include adequate detention facilities to hold people going through the deportation process, both in terms of physical space, adequate medical staff, guards, and administrators. You cannot come in on the first day and suddenly have 40,000 new beds available to put people in. That's just not how the system works. You have to have a legal order, and that creates a docket with a backlog of years in many cases. Transportation is also an issue. Aaron noted that ICE currently has 13 planes that they use to carry out removals. They're going to have to make choices on that basis. He further explained that currently they have to shuffle people regularly from one detention center to another to meet contract bed minimums and to ramp up overland transportation. To achieve that, you're going to need people with commercial driver's licenses. There's a shortage of people with CDLs in the United States right now. Everybody wants to hire people with CDLs. It isn't just a transportation issue. Certain countries do not accept the removal of their nationals. On the diplomatic front, too, planes cannot simply land wherever the US Government wants them to. Deporting immigrants to other countries requires agreements and negotiations. Radiations. It's hard to say where the biggest bottlenecks will be, but these challenges are very, very real. And at the same time, it's important we not minimize what we're facing. Aaron told me, we know that the question is not whether they're going to attempt mass deportation, because of course they aren't. The question is how fast can they move and how much can they increase the capacity of the system. Right now, the system is so overloaded that the capacity is actually quite low. He also said that if the Stephen Miller version prevails and they start deputizing National Guards and local sheriffs to arrest people and really expand the number of people who do have the authority to carry out arrests. You could very significantly start increasing arrests. But you would still run into the issue of basic physical realities around available detention beds. If there's five detention beds and you've arrested 10 people, you have to release five, or you have to release five other people and then you've got 10 beds free, you can put those new 10 in there. This increased arrests without an increase in capacity would be the scenario that would more closely begin to approximate concentration camp history yet again in the U.S. what do you mean by that? Just in time. Detention and outsourcing is one thing I noticed in concentration camps around the world in the 1970s and the 1980s. In South America and a few other places, these business principles are already in play with immigration programs in the US now too, enforcement may be outsourced to parties who will be authorized to arrest in new ways. Detention is already a patchwork of private and public sites, with some kinds outsourced to really unusual venues. There's a limited amount of people who are doing the detained cases in Louisiana because it is there are so far so rural, so difficult to get to and to handle. Most of Lopez's clients are at the Pine Prairie Ice Processing Center. It's 180 miles northwest of New Orleans. This atomizes and disperses enforcement, making it harder to know what's happening and to stop policies from being implemented by several different actors in a wide range of categories of detention. Though it's a federal facility, it's run and staffed by GEO Group, a private prison company that contracts with the US Government. GEO declined our request to tour the detention center, but we were permitted to enter the visitation area and meet some of Lopez's clients. It can make private companies and local jails alike dependent on the money they receive for detaining immigrants. 32 year old Christian De Leon has been in ICE custody for 14 months in the US case. It becomes more difficult to fight this kind of detention once it's become lucrative for local officials and businesses. A native of Guatemala, De Leon came to the US on a work visa, which has since expired. He was living in Alabama with his fiance and their three children and working in constructions. But that's not the same as saying that there's no way to fight back. State and local leaders from Austin to Oregon under the first Trump administration cut contacts and agreements with ice, refusing to take part in the increasingly punitive border policies. Do I support mass deportations why would I do that? Yeah, if they're illegal, these people are contributing to the United States. They're contributing to the gdp. As I mentioned on a prior episode, several governors have already come forward in recent weeks to say that they will embrace that same role after Trump's return and defy the federal government to protect immigrant populations from arbitrary abuse and detention. If the Trump administration requests it, would the Massachusetts State Police assist in mass deportations? No, absolutely not. In the first Trump administration, they adopted what was called a blank spaces policy so that any fields that were left blank on asylum and some visa applications would result in immediate denial, even if the fields were left blank because there was no relevant information to provide. But a group of asylum seekers and visa applicants brought a suit against the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and they won their case. The no blank spaces policy was eliminated and barred from reintroduction. A third example of public action was the June 2019 walkout of Wayfair employees who protested the company's sale of furniture to detention facilities under the first Trump administration during a time of abusive conditions and family separations, which had been reported publicly. Employees staged the protest Wednesday afternoon after learning about an order by the nonprofit bcfs, which operates migrant facilities for the Department of Health and Human Services. That story was covered nationwide and brought massive negative attention to a private firm that was profiting from policies that were harming immigrants. Protesters want the profits from the BCFS sale to go to the Refugee and Immigrant Sales center for Education and Legal Services. More recently, governor Greg Abbott is directing the state's Health and Human Services Commission to collect information on undocumented immigrants who use public hospitals for emergency care. In response, Texas cardiologist Tony Pastor posted on TikTok to remind immigrants that they don't have to answer this question. And my second sort of proposal is wouldn't it be amazing if everyone who comes in doesn't answer it and really messes with whatever data that they're looking for? In retaliation, Governor Abbott threatened Texas Children's Hospital where Pastor works, resulting in the post being removed. The way the country's moving, I worry that this is information that people are going to use to deport people. But the takedown itself got additional news and drew attention to immigrants rights not to respond. We're going to still keep advocating for our patients because that's why we went to medical school and not to be like ICE deportation people. One issue with public awareness and raising public awareness around this issue in a broader sense of how we treat immigrants is that our system has stagnated in ways that the public has largely missed. The polling on this is complicated. A 2024 report from the American Immigration Council explained that it has been 38 years since Congress last provided a path to permanent legal status for most undocumented immigrants. That's almost two generations. The polling on this is complicated because most people don't know what the system currently is. The immigration system that Americans imagine, Aaron told me, is when he talked to them, something quite different. You see this all the time when people say things like, well, you've been in the country for 25 years, why didn't you get your citizenship already? People don't realize that under current law there is no way most undocumented people will ever be able to fix their paperwork. There is nothing effectively that they can do to get a green card. Congress has affirmatively made it impossible for a person to do that. When you actually explain to Americans what the situation is, people overwhelmingly say they want to create that system, the system they thought already existed. But when the media asks, do you support deporting people who are here illegally? Without context, people are often willing to support that idea. Most people want a system that kicks out the bad people and lets the good people stay. But usually the system people think is in place is not anywhere close to the one that actually exists. Aaron had several suggestions for what people concerned about mass deportations can do on a broader scale. He noted that it really is still critical to make a case for why we should treat immigrants humanely. And when you see stories of a woman like Lake and Riley, the nursing student in Georgia who was brutally murdered by Nellie Omari, yeah, you think blood is on the hands. The right wing likes to pull that out and forget that native born Americans are much more committing of crimes and are much more responsible for the crime rate that we have than any immigrants. Immigrants have traditionally low crime rates, and so that's just more nonsense from the far right to distract people from what the facts are. But there are other things you can do along the way, because that's a long battle. First, if you're a lawyer or if you speak Spanish or another relevant language like Haitian Creole and you want to assist, the council has an immigration justice campaign which you can participate in remotely or in person. If you've got a law degree and you're interested in working on this, we have an opportunity, a whole mentorship process and training so that people can learn how to take cases and help people with bond or maybe with asylum or something else. You can check it out at immigrationjustice us. He also suggested that listeners check out projects that have grown up around regional and local detention facilities around the country, which often have similar efforts and need a lot of help. In the Pacific Northwest, there is the Tacoma ICE Detention center and there is the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in New York City. You've got the nearest detention center is in Goshen, New York, and the Orange County Detention Center. I noticed that Aaron's organization put out an article this month talking about the important nature of guaranteeing rights at the state and local levels and how those rights make a huge difference to immigrants that could be pulled into deportation proceedings. On a legislative level, you can work to establish measures protecting immigrants where you work and live. Those are already enacted in many places like Washington and Colorado and even individual cities like Denver. These laws limit how information is shared or even gathered, and the goal is to secure privacy for immigrants and also for everybody else. What one really fascinating study from David Housman in 2020 found was that sanctuary policies do reduce the deportations of people with no criminal convictions. So people who don't get convicted, anything where charges are dropped or whatever, deportations of those individuals go down. Meanwhile, deportations of people with violent defenses stays the same, does not go down because ICE is now forced to pick and choose rather than being able to round up everybody. These measures can help keep people from being identified, targeted and deported. And states like Washington, as well as communities like Denver, Colorado, Long Beach, California and some others, have also adopted legislation to fund immigrant legal services. Even among immigrants who are actively willing to pursue their cases, having legal representation to do so makes a defendant nearly five times more likely to prevail. My sense is that people who oppose current or future policies toward immigrants should continue to address these issues on the meta level of decency and humanity, and definitely should continue to reach out to the representatives in Washington and help make sure these laws are in place locally that will also offer some protection. That's a starting point, and that's an important marker for elected representatives to put down. Many of them, even in the Democratic Party, have so far been unwilling to do so. But others have, and that public stance on the national stage may peel off some people unwilling to be associated with the cruelest elements that are brought to light as we move into a more brutal period. But just again, to emphasize that local action is critical, to be a part of an integrated community that immigrants are a part of on the ground is just as important. It's harder to ignore the reality of these policies on the ground where they're happening. If they're happening right where you are and in places where everybody can see it. So make those stands not just on social media for your virtual audience, but like the Texas doctor did in your community. Wouldn't it be amazing? Even where the actions may eventually be defeated, they will rally other people and call attention to mistreatment. And by taking those direct action to support immigrant communities, they also can be heartened and better able to continue in their own efforts, of course, which many of which they themselves lead. And without minimizing the toll that all this will take on immigrants. I want to be clear that immigrants are far from being the only targets in the next administration, whether they're naturalized, whether they are birthright citizens, or whether they are undocumented people. Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families? Of course there is. Families can be deported together. Anti black racism persists, Misogyny persists. But nominally, most officials won't openly embrace white supremacy or the subjugation of women quite so directly and openly. Elon Musk said that migrants will, quote, come for your home after a video was shared to X of migrants being dropped off at a school in New York City. They have to hedge, cover it up, and offer explanations. But the bigotry against immigrants is one that has never fully escaped legal, enthusiastic endorsement. As each generation gets established, there's always a segment of the population that looks with resentment on the new arrivals, that says, these people are holding our community down. Maybe they're darker, maybe they're less well educated, they're certainly poor. We really need to restrict immigration because only by restricting immigration can we show that we're actually now part of the American mainstream. It's the bigotry that allowed camps to flourish in the US and find quasi legal loopholes across the 20th century and into the present. Clearly, the KKK wanted to fight modernity by protecting traditionalism. But what's shocking is how successful they became. Not only did the group grow to its largest size in the 1920s, but their ideas on immigration actually influenced national legislation for reasons both moral and practical. We have to take this issue on. It's a deeply American prejudice that sustains all the others and allows them to return again and again. All right, that's it. Thanks for listening to Next comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcast. All right.