Escalating Gestapo techniques

Hispanic U.S. citizens, some of whom were in the U.S. military, are not being allowed to renew their passports. This is reportedly happening to “hundreds, even thousands” of Latinos, according to a report in the Washington Post. They’re getting letters from the State Department saying it does not believe they are citizens. The government claims their citizenships are fraudulent. “I’ve had probably 20 people who have been sent to the detention center—U.S. citizens,” Jaime Diez, an attorney in Brownsville, told The Washington Post.

The Washington Post also reports on ICE officials coming to citizens' homes and taking their passports away. This is an escalation from a few months ago, when Americans were detained by ICE officials just for speaking Spanish to one another.

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Fraud in these cases is exceedingly rare. The last time the government tried to strip people of their citizenship was, according to Columbia Professor Mae Ngai, during The Red Scare of the 1950s.

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Fans of Trump will claim these measures are just about sending people back to their homelands, and therefore, getting people who did not belong in America out. Well, what do you think the holocaust was about? Jews were not considered citizens.

Franz Rademacher, head of the German Foreign Office’s “Jewish desk” in the 1940s, claimed that the main goal was “All Jews Out of Europe.” Nazis proposed a lot of deportation solutions—most notably, transporting all Jews to Madagascar—before concluding that one way to get an unwanted population out was just to kill them.

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The steps that lead up to genocide, besides stripping minorities of their citizenship, are about “othering” a population enough that the strife they experience is not seen as akin to anything we might experience. It’s what allows people like Tucker Carlson to see children in internment camps and say that anyone who is horrified is part of a “ruling class” who “cares more about foreigners than their own people.”

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If you think it can’t get worse, remember that we’re already at a place where we’re drugging children.

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I can’t tell you what actions you should take, because I don’t know what talents you have at your disposal. Do you have legal skills to help people who may be threatened by these new changes? Use them. Can you write about what’s going on? Write about it. Do you have a church or place or worship to help organize refuge for the persecuted? Do so. Do you have time to call your senators and congressmen? Call. Keep calling. Make them hear you.

  Harper's Bazaar

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.