Monday 27 February 2017

The Nazis Called It a “Rafle”


“The Rafle was a Nazi directed raid to mass arrest Jews in Paris by the French police in 1942.”
This is what we know so far.
Trump/Bannon have made good on their promise to make life miserable for Latino immigrants undocumented or not.
Millions of them now face a real possibility of being kicked out.  These include friends of ours so I take Trump’s racial purge seriously and personally.
Trump/Bannon have told the Marine general who now runs Homeland Security to immediately start arresting for deportation anyone in the country regardless of whether they’ve committed a “crime” such as shoplifting or a traffic warrant.
God help you if you fib to get food stamps or take your child to an emergency room or apply for rent money to the government.
Past privacy protection is null and void.  Anyone with a badge can poke into your personal records.
Deportations will be “expedited” (speeded up).  If arrested, you’ll be dumped in a privately run (often squalid) “detention center” and sent back (to where?) by impossibly overstressed immigration judges.  Even if you’re a Central American, like Salvadoran or Guatamalan, you’ll be pushed back into Mexico if Mexico doesn’t push back.
Local police will be enlisted as immigration cops to find “criminal aliens” a category now expanded to include almost anyone with a brown skin and dubious ID.  Crime-fighting against murderous gangs like MS-13 will be harder because witnesses will think twice about stepping forward.
For now DACA kids, brought here as children, are exempt…unless they commit a “crime” like anything you can think of.
To manage the unmanageable 10,000 new ICE agents will be hired though nobody knows where the money will come from except to take it away from my Veterans Admin which critically needs more doctors and social workers.
ICE cops will have an easier time arresting mothers and fathers in previous “sensitive locations” like hospitals, schools or sanctuary churches.  A woman who reports sexual assault is at high risk of being arrested herself.
What parent won’t think twice about seeking medical care or taking their kid to school?
Hiding in the shadows is the only smart tactic.
Days after the election ICE jumped the gun with a series of raids across the country.  600 in the first grab, much more to come.
I don’t know who will and who won’t stand up to Trump’s racial purge.  Or what, for a non-lawyer citizen like me, “standing up” means.
Make no mistake, a great many Americans, not all of them Neanderthals, think hammering illegal immigrants is a fine idea.
I was at the Nuremberg war crimes trial which scared me then.  What’s happening now reminds me of why we put those guys on trial in the first place.
Trump will keep chopping and changing his race purge to (a) keep us off balance (b) terrify anyone with a brown skin (c) scare us into silence and passivity.
That’s all I know for now.
If you hear any hard facts please let us all know.
Good luck to all of us.
Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist. His latest book is Black Sunset
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/24/the-nazis-called-it-a-rafle/

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