In 2015, announcing his run for the presidency, Donald Trump sparked outrage, made headlines — and gathered significant support — by asserting that Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border.
How quaint.
Now, as he makes his third run for the presidency, Trump has taken the rhetoric of migrant dehumanization to a level literally unprecedented in this country. You’d have to go back to Nazi Germany to find a parallel in political discourse.
“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff,” Trump said early this month. “Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter? We don’t want ’em in this country.”
At another rally the same week, he informed his supporters that the border influx includes “millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages … We have languages coming into our country, nobody that speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them.”
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As if that mind-boggling bit of ignorance and bigotry weren’t enough to define “dehumanize,” Trump last week made sure nobody missed the message about migrants: “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.”
Not people.
Setting aside for a moment the staggering fact that the man quoted above has already sewn up the 2024 presidential nomination of “The Party of Lincoln,” we must now consider the fallout from the fact that on his orders, the House of Representatives has refused to take up bipartisan border-security compromise legislation that would address both the underlying issues and the current crisis of “not people” in the borderlands we call home.
The bitter truth is that the Republican about-face on border security was spurred by Trump’s desire to be able to keep campaigning on the issue and his wish not to have even partial solutions enabled on President Biden’s watch. Therefore, the federal funding that has enabled humanitarian groups like Tucson’s Casa Alitas to keep the “not people” from ending up homeless in our city and others will end April 1.
The overwhelming majority of these “not people” are not fentanyl smugglers. They are not murderers and rapists. Many are traveling in groups actually resembling human “families.” Amazingly, they do speak languages that real people understand. And they are trapped in the jaws of a political dispute that will spit them out, destitute and hopeless, onto our streets unless something is done.
The federal government exists to deal with issues that cross state lines, that are not provincial in nature — things that city or county or state governments do not have the ability to control with local policymaking. And yet the kind of inaction we’ve seen from an utterly paralyzed House of Representatives this year has huge local consequences. It would take roughly $1 million per week to continue to fund necessary border humanitarian work in Pima County alone, and that is not a responsibility that can be shouldered by city or county government.
So many parts of this issue are the responsibility of federal government. Our asylum system is badly broken. If it weren’t, it would not be necessary for the Border Patrol to issue “catch and release” court dates to the “not people” who are seeking legal asylum status. There is no reason why we should not have a system in place to resolve the great majority of asylum cases within a few weeks, right at the border. But the federal government has not funded such a system. It’s easier to bloviate about the problem — and fund-raise on it — than it is to fix it.
It’s been pointed out that the cancellation of the bipartisan border deal has left some sophisticated fentanyl scanners sitting in warehouses because of a lack of funds to install and operate them. Tucson U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva and others have called for Congress to fund them immediately.
Great idea. And say, while they’re at it, Congress could add a few dollars to help the heroes who are keeping “not people” from crashing onto our local social-services network — the “homelessness on steroids” that Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher has correctly warned we will face.
For very different reasons, both Grijalva and U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani announced their opposition to the bipartisan border package. To regain any shred of credibility on this issue, both should be pushing hard for emergency funding to keep Casa Alitas in business and make sure that we are able to maintain a human response to a dehumanized problem.
In the meantime, our thanks go to the volunteers and donors in Tucson who are doing their very best every day to help the “not people” who need compassion, a pair of socks, some baby formula and a bus ticket.
