Even as we have done to the least of these, so have we done to
ourselves. Once a nation decides to ignore basic human rights for its
non citizens, and for its non white citizens, it is only one small
step to removing the rights of all the People.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/2/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Disappeared by the State: What Tuesday's Supreme Court Decision on
Indefinite Detention Means for Immigrants
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
By Kelly Hayes, Truthout | Op-Ed
Protesters gather in front of the Supreme Court to voice opposition to
Donald Trump's executive order barring immigrants from certain countries
entry into the US, January 30, 2017. (Photo: Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call)
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that US immigration officials can
detain
immigrants within the US indefinitely, without offering periodic bond
hearings. Immigrants with permanent legal status and those seeking asylum
would not be exempt from this policy. In 2015, the 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals ruled that immigrants must be given a bond hearing every six
months,
so long as they are not deemed a flight risk or a threat to national
security. The Supreme Court's decision to reverse the lower court's ruling
and remand the case for reconsideration by the Circuit Court marks yet
another victory in the Trump administration's xenophobic crusade against
immigrants.
Being "disappeared" by the state is hardly a new concept amongst
undocumented people. Alejandro Rodriguez, the lead plaintiff in Tuesday's
case, is a legal permanent resident who lingered in detention for three
years, without access to a bond hearing, due to a misdemeanor drug offense.
The ACLU ultimately took up Rodriguez's case, scoring a victory in the
circuit court, wherein the court ruled that immigrant detainees were
entitled to bond hearings every six months. The Obama administration
appealed that ruling, arguing that the United States government has the
right to detain "criminal and terrorist aliens," and the Trump
administration predictably opted to continue the case. But while the case
and controversy predate the Trump administration, this decision comes at a
particularly frightening time for undocumented immigrants, who are already
living in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
It is hard to overstate the disturbing nature of Trump's attacks on
immigrant communities. The administration's propaganda campaign, which
includes Trump's absurdist inflation of MS-13 as a national threat, paired
with the idea that immigrants have become an impediment to the prosperity
of
"real Americans" has fostered an alarmist, nativist environment, in which
violent public policy and white vigilantism are to be expected. In this
aggressively racist climate, grassroots immigrant rights activists have
been
targeted for deportation, creating a climate of fear and hypervigilance
around their defensive political work. "I have spent the past few weeks in
late night conversations with countless undocumented folks sharing with me
their fears, trauma and constant struggles with basic mental health," Aly
Wane, an organizer who serves on the Steering Committee of the Black
Immigration Network, told Truthout in an interview. "I spoke with two
undocumented immigrants in particular who expressed suicidal ideation just
in the past three weeks."
Another weapon in Trump's propaganda war is the controversial VOICE project
-- an effort to catalog alleged crimes supposedly committed by immigrants.
The project is a tool to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, emphasizing
their "other" status. Then there are the attacks on visa programs, the
horrendous commentary, the raids, the threats against sanctuary cities, the
pending collapse of DACA and Trump's endless pursuit of a "big, beautiful"
wall. But as easy as it would be to attribute Tuesday's egregious Supreme
Court decision to the climate the Trump administration has cultivated, to
do
so would be a dangerous mistake -- one that overlooks an ongoing political
project that was expanding its reach, and grinding immigrants and others
under its wheels long before Trump's rise to television stardom.
A Long-Term Project
What we are witnessing, in this fraught political moment, is the
furtherance
of the larger project of American militarization. While this particular
ruling pertains to incarceration, militarism and the carceral state are
grounded in the same histories, and in similar violent practices. American
policing, in all its forms, and American military violence are both rooted
in colonial violence, in the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples, and the
forced exploitation of Black people. American militarization is not new,
and
it has been experienced by some communities for as long as any form of US
militarization has existed. But in a global climate, we see the sins of
colonialism reiterated in imperialism, and the violence of imperialism
repackaged, shipped home, and wielded against marginalized communities in
the United States.
The status of "enemy combatant," born of the "war on terror," created an
official category for people who existed outside the realm of human rights
-- which simultaneously buttressed Islamophobic policies and attitudes
within the United States itself. "Enemy combatant" introduced a
categorization of "other" that took due process off the table, and allowed
people to be tossed into carceral oblivion indefinitely, or even killed. We
have seen manifestations of that idea -- one that has always existed in US
practice, but that undeniably went mainstream under the administration of
George W. Bush -- conjured with abandon when it comes to people in foreign
countries, whose confinement, or deaths, we are not meant to question,
because they have been duly categorized. They are "enemy combatants,"
existing outside our scope of concern or, often, awareness. Whether they
are
disappeared into black sites or by drones, the daily routines of people
living in the United States are rarely affected, and the movements led in
the names of such victims score few headlines in the United States.
We have repeatedly seen the specter of terrorism used as a justification
for
the dehumanization, abandonment and betrayal of immigrants and refugees.
But
with our eyes wide open, we should also realize that we are witnessing an
even greater broadening of the enemy combatant construct -- much of which
is
happening on US soil. The vilification of Black activists, some of whom
have
now been deemed "Black Identity Extremists" (another official category),
sets the stage for the FBI, and other agents of law enforcement, to treat
Black activists as terrorists, and act accordingly. The abuse of Native
people in Standing Rock, and elsewhere, reveals how quickly the trappings
of
military occupation can be turned upon Native protesters in the United
States -- just as the first military mobilizations in US history sought to
remove Native people, by any means necessary, for the sake of acquiring
land
and resource. A desire for Indigenous resources, was in fact, the only
moral
justification that the first formations of the US military required, and
the
hoarding of that land, those resources, and any opportunities attached to
them have likewise been the product of glorified racism and avarice. That
origin of military purpose and intent has never been confronted, socially
or
historically, in the United States, and thus, there has never been a
significant departure from our country's original, immoral compass.
It has become increasingly clear that safety, in the United States, and
abroad, is only a governmental priority when white lives or liberty are at
stake. From our nation's disparate reactions to terrorist attacks in white
European nations and those that occur in African nations, to the striking
contrast between our reactions to the bulk of gun violence in the United
States and the mass school shootings that tend to occur in mostly white
spaces (and make up a tiny fraction of overall US gun violence), we have
been conditioned for this. The normalization of violence against those
outside the dominant culture is so extreme that the military prison at
Guantanamo Bay has all but fallen from public conversation. When discussing
political standoffs with countries like North Korea, Americans will often
refer to the United States as potentially "going to war" -- forgetting in
real time that the United States is already at war, and has been for over
16
years.
It is also worth noting that while the US eventually ceased to acknowledge
most of its military conflicts as "wars," it has steadily continued to wage
them.
The surveillance of Water Protectors, both in and outside of Standing Rock,
and the violence waged for the sake of the Dakota Access pipeline, serve as
a stark reminder of how easily this country reenacts its true origin
stories, and how quickly militarization can be deployed against dehumanized
peoples. The fact that TigerSwan -- a private company that markets its
ability to "anticipate, manage and mitigate" supposed militant threats
abroad -- worked in concert with law enforcement in Standing Rock, is
evidence of the political and cultural connection between imperialism,
colonialism, the surveillance state and the criminalization of Indigenous
and Black peoples in the United States. Many US immigrants have an
Indigenous connection to the lands the United States has drawn borders
around, which makes their displacement another reflection of our country's
original sins, which have never been reconciled. But unlike the United
States itself, US militarism knows no borders, and our willingness to allow
any immigrant to be othered, in blatant terms, coded language or in policy
itself, only lends more power to the militaristic authoritarianism we
currently face.
The state, and those who function in its service, draw no dividing lines
between oppressed people who live within its borders and those who do not.
In their view, we are all peoples in the margins, which means we are living
on the edge of literal disposability.
In a time of dizzying right-wing attacks on marginalized people, observers
may feel torn between issues, overwhelmed by whether to pay attention to
Native issues, anti-Black state violence, immigration crises or foreign
wars. Such questions are thematically simplified when we embrace the truth
of the American political project: There is a singular death-making
mechanism waging war against all who it would deem disposable. That
realization may be a difficult one for some people -- that the character of
their country, that the origins of their much-idealized military and
police,
are at the heart of America's liberty-crushing practices -- but so long as
we refuse to grab the problem by its roots, we will be, at best, fighting
skirmishes, while the other side commits itself to an endless war against
us.
The divisions between these fronts of struggle are as imaginary as the
borders Trump seeks to defend. As Aly Wane told me after Tuesday's verdict,
"The war on terror uses race as a way to hide the neocolonialist nature of
the current US empire, to cleanse it of its sins. This is why many of us
who
are undocumented and Black are skeptical that even access to paperwork will
save us from the brutality of this system."
Moreover, as climate catastrophe worsens, and refugee crises and wars over
resources escalate, we can expect the cycle of American militarism to
continue at the expense of the "others," with the tightening of borders and
the seizure of more foreign resources. It is, after all, the American way.
US military mechanisms are well poised to continue recreating the cycle of
American violence as needed for the sake of US dominance. Manifest Destiny
will see new iterations, on a global scale, in potentially apocalyptic
times. The dehumanization such conquest will require is already in the
works, and at work, here amongst us.
It is in this context that undocumented people saw an escalation in their
terrorization by the US government on Tuesday. In Wane's words, "The logics
are baked into the system."
Stories like this are more important than ever! To make sure Truthout can
keep publishing them, please give a tax-deductible donation today.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Kelly Hayes
Kelly Hayes is Truthout's social media strategist, as well as a
contributing
writer. She is also a direct action trainer and a cofounder of The Chicago
Light Brigade and the direct action collective Lifted Voices. Kelly's
contribution to Truthout's anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?
stems from her work as an organizer and her ongoing analysis of movements
in
the United States. Her work can also be found on her blog, Transformative
Spaces, in Yes! Magazine, BGD and the BGD anthology The Solidarity
Struggle:
How People of Color Succeed and Fail At Showing Up For Each Other In the
Fight For Freedom. Kelly is also a movement photographer whose work is
featured in the "Freedom and Resistance" exhibit of the DuSable Museum of
African American History.
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