I have always felt that America has always been a place of two stories.
It has always been a place where we’ve seen the worst of humanity and the best of humanity. Witnessing the triumph of the best of us, over the worst of what we’ve seen, is also a very big part of who we are.
When it comes to ICE, it’s where both of these elements meet. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this xenophobia and anti-immigrant feeling is happening at the same time as record levels of income inequality.
When you feel like “you could be next”, when you feel like you are one accident away from losing your house, or everything, the lesser impulse of us is to subjugate or to feel like there’s another class of people that is below us.
Capitalism and our society requires us to internalize the failures of our system.
It’s not the school that failed the kids, it's that you’re the dropout.
It’s not that Walmart pays less than a living wage, it’s that “I’m poor, and I didn’t work hard enough so I didn’t earn a better station in life.”
We’ve internalized this moralized system: The economic elite are smarter, better, more sophisticated — therefore, the people at the bottom are uneducated, lazy, etc.
In a history of racism and colonialism, this is served up to you on a platter. That’s Jim Crow, that’s racism, that’s a lot of this immigration story.
Another real problem in that code is that we start making exceptions to our values, exceptions to the society that we want to live in.
All of a sudden, we now have a paramilitary force that thinks they don’t need judicial warrants, so you don’t get due process.
We create this blackbox system where you can just point a finger — again, like we saw with Jim Crow — and accuse someone of something. If you think that once you build that machine that it’s reserved for that, think again.
These things eat profit. It’s not just ICE. It’s CoreCivic, it’s GEO Group. These are corporations that run ICE detention centers. They are for-profit. They are traded on Wall Street.
And what happens is that this system does not accept anything but growth.
It’s not enough to be profitable — you have to keep growing those profits.
And so once they’ve rounded up every “illegal” person in this country, who do you think is next?
Donald Trump wants you to believe that this is who we are as a country. We are here to say that it is not.
We are a country that has fought and defeated the confederacy. That has defeated a history of civil rights violations, of secret police, of fascism. We can, and will, again.
Help us continue the fight with a grassroots contribution today.
In solidarity,
Alexandria
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