The candidate described in Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears’ campaign ad for governor immigrated to a nation that barely exists anymore.
“A U.S. Marine. A mom. A first-generation American,” says Gov. Glenn Youngkin in the commercial. “Winsome lived the American dream and will fight for it every day, just like she has her whole life.”
If that’s the case, the Marine veteran is fighting on the wrong side.
Virginia politics at the moment has other noteworthy immigrant stories, including state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, and Richmond Mayor Danny Avula. Attorney General Jason Miyares is the son of an immigrant. But the MAGA movement is reducing the American dream to a nightmarish cautionary tale.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority put its stamp of approval on the use of racial profiling in the stopping of Hispanics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who deem them, however superficially, to be in the nation illegally.
A U.S. district judge had barred ICE agents from stopping individuals in Southern California based solely on their race, accent, line of work or some other stereotype, rather than “reasonable suspicion.” But the Supreme Court granted the federal government’s request to lift that order in a 6-3 vote last week.
The ruling sends a clear and chilling signal that this court majority sees itself less as a protector of the Constitution than a partner in the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing project.
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” said Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
Cecillia Wang, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said of the ruling: “For anyone perceived as Latino by an ICE agent, this means living in a fearful ‘papers please’ regime, with risks of violent ICE arrests and detention.”
What makes this Supreme Court’s sign-off on racial profiling especially hypocritical is the majority’s myopic and convenient colorblindness in gutting remedies to historical (and clearly ongoing) racial discrimination.
“It doesn’t matter if you put your head down, and if you try to blend in, because there are laws that are going to be passed that will target you simply for being Hispanic,” said Fernanda Diaz-Castro of Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality. “Because this is not about keeping the country safe; this is not keeping people safe. It’s essentially about pushing a white supremacist agenda and taking people away that don’t fit that standard.”
Among the Defenders’ demands to Richmond City Council are legislation banning local collaboration with ICE; a ban on masked and unidentified policing; no renegotiation of any contract with Flock surveillance cameras; and the securing of legal and financial support for those detained.
Virginia Defenders is also calling on city councilors, state lawmakers and members of Congress to stop the expansion of detention centers in Virginia and close current facilities; to accompany Richmond residents to immigration hearings “to protect against ICE kidnappings”; and to protect and fund sanctuary spaces such as the Sacred Heart Community Center.
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America today is like an individual whose body has rejected a transplanted heart. Perhaps this American experiment was doomed to fail because its heart was never in the right place, or it could not survive the persistent chasm between its eloquent ideals and its deeds.
Not coincidentally amid this mass deportation program, MAGA is feverishly attempting to bleach people of color out of the American story, just as the narrative was acquiring a whiff of truth.
At the recent National Conservatism Conference in Washington, Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt went on an anti-immigration screed that was remarkable in its contempt — through erasure and framing — of Indigenous, Black, Asian and Hispanic people who apparently don’t fit his idea of who gets to be called an American.
Who does? “The sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world. … America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright. It’s our heritage, our destiny,” Schmitt said. “If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all.”
Not exactly “E pluribus unum,” is it? The Native Americans critical to the survival of those early colonists and the enslaved Africans who built this nation literally and financially would like a word.
If ideas like Schmitt’s are animating American conservatism today, it’s no wonder that existing, speaking and working while Hispanic has been criminalized. Or that MAGA has extended the welcome mat to Afrikaners, descendants of the White-supremacist ruling class of apartheid-era South Africa.
This hysteria-fueled response to a purported immigrant crime wave debunked by empirical data has turned out to be an indiscriminate dragnet. “We have been seeing that in Virginia, 80% arrested this year have no criminal record,” Diaz-Castro said. “And throughout the U.S., people with work permits, visas, residencies and even citizenship have been detained and disappeared.”
Meanwhile, what she described as an expensive and antiquated immigration system is not conducive to folks achieving legal residency. And as we have seen, those who attempted to immigrate “the right way” too frequently ended up being nabbed by ICE at the courthouse.
Janet Murguía, president and CEO of UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, said the Supreme Court ruling “authorizes targeting by authorities that makes all immigrants, Hispanics and other non-white Americans suspects simply because of the color of their skin or the language they speak. In doing so, the Court has put the civil rights of every person in the United States at risk.”
The ACLU of Virginia recently cited civil rights abuses in calling out what it called dangerous conditions at the ICE temporary holding facilities in Chantilly, “where ICE is holding up to 80 people in a single room for more than a week at a time with no access to a lawyer, medical care or even basic hygiene.”
In a Sept. 4 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and acting ICE field office director Joseph Simon, the ACLU of Virginia demanded that ICE stop holding people for more than 12 hours, stop pressuring people to consent to deportation, release anyone who needs medical care, grant people confidential access to lawyers, and give people enough food, beds, showers, clean clothes and space to lie down.
All of which makes that Earle-Sears ad utterly disingenuous. The America that opened its doors to her no longer exists. A more apt face of Jamaican immigration nowadays is Jon Luke Evans, who was arrested and detained for attempting to purchase a firearm for his job as a police officer in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
Old Orchard Beach officials said Evans had been cleared to work legally based on the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify system. Evans agreed to return to Jamaica. One more slot for an Afrikaner, I guess.
America, dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, has not been keen about non-White immigrants. The immigration gates did not truly open until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, now under assault by MAGA.
Dismantling multiracial democracy is not merely a feature of this movement. It’s the goal.
Michael Paul Williams is a columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. A Richmond native, he joined the paper in 1982 and became a columnist in 1992. In 2021, Williams was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the Richmond protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
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