Donald Trumps Looming Mass Criminalization

[deminks]

https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trumps-looming-mass-criminalization/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

The only way to quickly deport 3 million immigrants is to first make them into criminals—and he’ll have the tools to do so on day one.

(snip)

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records—gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 
2 million, it could be even 3 million—we are getting them out of our country,” Trump said in an interview on 60 Minutes four days after his victory. “Or,” he added, “we are going to incarcerate.”

This statement had the appearance of softening his earlier position; at times during the campaign, Trump threatened to deport every one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who live in the United States. But the impact on families and communities of immediately removing even 3 million people would be cataclysmic. That’s equal to the population of the state of Mississippi, and more people than Barack Obama removed during his entire presidency.

The people Trump says he will target—those “bringing drugs,” “bringing crime,” who are “rapists,” as he put it in the speech that launched his campaign—sound terribly scary. The idea that there are millions of them is quickly seeping into our political discourse as though it were fact. In reality, any effort to deport 3 million “criminal” immigrants will first require branding law-abiding people as 
criminals—a process that’s been unfolding across presidential administrations stretching back to Bill Clinton’s, but that Trump plans to escalate massively.

(end snip)

For most, the 'crime' will be the immigration itself.