If you’ve ever wondered how a Hitleresque dictator treats illegal immigrants, Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) we have given us the answer to that question over the past four years.
Last year, Trump abused his executive power when he declared a non-existent national emergency at the border so he could raid the defense budget and reallocate those funds toward his border wall.
Earlier this year, Trump renewed his national emergency declaration ahead of another round of his spending shell game when he will shifted nearly $4 billion of Defense funds approved by Congress to pay for things like an American-Class Amphibian Assault Ship, F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, upgrades to National Guard Humvees, MQ-9 Reaper Drones, C-130 cargo aircraft, and P-8 spy planes. That money was transferred to the Pentagon’s Counter-Drug fund, where it could be spent on the wall.
Amazingly, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry (TX), pushed back on Trump’s unconstitutional scheme, calling it a violation of Congressional authority. “Congress has the Constitutional authority to determine how defense dollars are spent,” he said at the time. “I will be working with my colleagues to determine the appropriate steps to take.”
Despite Thornberry’s objection, Trump’s bought-and-paid-for Republican Party made no effort to stop his Hitleresque abuse of power. But even if they had, a little-known change by the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board last year essentially legalized “off the books” secret national security spending.
The change made it possible for the federal government to keep two sets of books — one for public consumption and the other top secret — and Trump took full advantage.
Like any Hitleresque dictator, Trump relies on his “Gestapo” thugs to enforce his wishes. And when it comes to handling illegal immigrants, his Gestapo goes by the name of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Created in response to the 9/11 attacks, ICE was launched in March 2003 as one of the component agencies in the Department of Homeland Security which was also formed post-9/11.
ICE was granted special authority over civil and criminal activities in the name of protecting national security and strengthening public safety, resulting in a powerful and sophisticated federal law enforcement agency never seen before.
But just like the rest of the government’s liberty-killing response to 9/11, ICE has far-exceeded its intended purpose concerning its handling of illegal immigrants and has become more Hitleresque.
For example, in January 2018, it was announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had secured agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database that gave government the power of real-time location tracking of billions of plates.
ICE claimed at the time that the program “[wasn’t] seeking to build a license place reader database and [would] not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database.” However, it’s important to remember that Republicans said something similar about the spying practices of the NSA.
By the way, Donald Trump has fought to make NSA spying permanent. Just sayin’.
But a recent article on Reason.com shows us how truly Hitleresque Trump and ICE have been when addressing the illegal immigrant problem.
Several immigrant detainees and a former nurse at an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Georgia say detainees there are subjected to medical neglect, filthy conditions, inadequate protections against COVID-19, and a disturbingly high rate of hysterectomies performed by a doctor the nurse called the “uterus collector.”
In a complaint filed Monday to the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General on behalf of the detainees and the nurse, several social justice advocacy and whistleblower protection groups say interviews revealed “jarring medical neglect,” shredded and fabricated medical records, and “red flags regarding the rate at which hysterectomies are performed on immigrant women” at the Irwin County Detention Center in in Ocilla, Georgia. The claims in the complaint have not yet been substantiated.
“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center until this July, says in the complaint. “It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”
Wooten said the suspicious hysterectomies, a surgical procedure to remove the uterus, were all linked to one doctor in particular.
The Hitleresque parallels are unmistakable.
Hitler considered the Aryan race to be the ‘perfect’ race — consisting of blonde-haired, blue-eyed men and women, with distinctive German features. Members of the Aryan race were encouraged to breed to expand the superior race.
This led to targeting so-called “undesirables.” Besides Jews and Communists, everyone who didn’t belong to the Aryan race was considered a pollutant in an otherwise pure German atmosphere.
In an attempt to “cleanse” his nation, Hitler persecuted many races of people. Forced sterilizations occurred, and anyone considered to be impure or unhealthy had forced hysterectomies or vasectomies to prevent them from producing offspring with their conditions.
While ICE has had some success over the years in detaining and deporting illegal immigrants since its inception, abusive enforcement practices have often been found to be constitutionally questionable and a direct threat to civil liberties.
The Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection, and the Civil Right to be free from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and national origin have all been disregarded in many instances.
The illegal immigration problem is real, and so is Trump’s failure to fix it. However, we cannot stand idly by while he and ICE deploy Hitleresque solutions to the problem.
I know there will be many who call this hyperbolic nonsense, and in response I offer these words spoken by Winston Churchill — a man who knew a little bit about Hitler — in a 1948 speech given to the House of Commons:
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
Follow the Strident Conservative on Twitter and Facebook.
Subscribe to receive podcasts of his daily two-minute radio feature: iTunes | Stitcher | Tune In | RSS
sp;
1 comment for “Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrants is absolutely Hitleresque”