As he runs for reelection in 2024, former president Donald Trump has made the outlandish claim that “millions of people [have crossed the United States border] …from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.” His statement was a combination of two tropes that are often deployed by those seeking political power in election years: Being “tough on immigration,” and—in spite of the fact that he is the first ever major party presidential nominee to be an indicted criminal —“tough on crime.”
Trump has made such racist and violent language a central tenet of his political career, famously launching his presidential campaign in 2015 by claiming that Mexico was sending rapists and criminals across the border to the U.S. In seeking reelection he has used Hitlerian rhetoric, claiming repeatedly that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”
Such words have serious impacts, especially on people of color. After Trump won the 2016 presidential race, a Washington Post analysis found, “that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.” The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in its report, Cause for Concern 2024: The State of Hate, has looked further back in time and found that “Each of the last four presidential campaign cycles has shown an unmistakable pattern: Reported hate crimes increase during elections.” The report’s authors expect a spike in violence this year and worry about “the trend of increased hate to continue into the 2024 election.”
It’s not just Trump. During the first presidential debate of this year, which took place on June 28 between Trump and then-presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, there was a heavy focus on immigration. Trump accused Biden of rolling out the welcome mat to undocumented immigrants, saying, “He decided to open up our border, open up our country.” This is, of course, patently untrue.
In reality, not only did Biden expand on the harsh anti-immigrant policies that Trump enacted during the years 2016 to 2020, but, in January 2024, as he started his reelection campaign, Biden went as far as channeling Trump’s favored rhetoric of threatening to “shut down the border.” He did so in the context of garnering Republican support for a bipartisan deal on funding aid to Ukraine that included border enforcement.
When that deal failed, Biden’s team was, as per an AP report, “planning to campaign to reelect him by emphasizing that Republicans caused the deal to collapse.” A Democratic strategist named Maria Cardona, told AP, “We need to lean into this and not just on border security, but, yes, tough border security coupled with increased legal pathways.”
Then, three weeks before his June debate with Trump, Biden announced “New Actions to Secure the Border,” which included refusing asylum applications for those who crossed the border without papers. The National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) denounced Biden’s plans saying they “mimic” Trump’s policies and predicted that, “[p]eople in need of asylum who are among already marginalized populations will be most gravely harmed.” NIJC further pointed out that, “People arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border who will be turned back under this policy are overwhelmingly Black, Brown and Indigenous people seeking asylum.”
Now, with Vice President Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, Democrats are maintaining what the New York Times called, “decidedly more hard-line” on immigration than in decades.
In other words, Democrats have preferred one-upping Republicans on immigration rather than distinguishing themselves as more humane.
According to Bill Gallegos, a member of the Mexican Solidarity Project who writes for its weekly Spanish-English bulletin, scapegoating immigrants of color helps Republicans “garner votes from a large sector of white voters.” He adds that the anti-immigrant rhetoric also serves to, “make immigrant workers even more vulnerable to exploitation by U.S. companies, and a successful mass deportation campaign of immigrants will smooth the road for a broad attack on all remaining remnants of U.S. democracy.”
Coded language about crime and punishment is also a favorite election campaign tactic. In 2022, the Washington Post found that “Republicans spent 58% of the money for ads focused on crime” while campaigning for office ahead of the last midterm elections. Because the U.S. criminal justice system disproportionately ensnares people of color, fueling fear of crime can result in greater criminalization of Black and Brown people.
Just as Democrats have tended to appease Republican demands on harsh immigration enforcement, they have embraced the “tough on crime” rhetoric rather than distancing themselves from it. Before he stepped out of the 2024 presidential race, Biden, who has a history of supporting law enforcement, pushed a pro-police bill called the Safer America Plan, which critics say is an extension of Clinton’s 1994 bill and would negatively impact Black and Brown communities.
Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist told the NBC News, “If Republicans thought President Biden would hand them a wedge issue for 2024, they thought wrong.” She added that “It’s going to be very hard to define him as soft on crime.” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates challenged Republicans saying they, “need to commit here and now to joining with President Biden — not obstructing him — in fighting the rising crime rate he inherited.”
The U.S. public believes crime rates are up, perhaps because media sources and politicians like Biden and Trump tend to fuel moral panic over crime. Yet, according to Pew Research, “U.S. violent and property crime rates have plunged since the 1990s, regardless of data source.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in particular, found a 15% drop in violent crime in the first part of 2024 compared to the previous year. Crimes of murder and rape were down by about 26% each. A recent Axios reviewof newly available data from U.S. cities found a similar plummeting of crime rates.
Only four years ago, when a nationwide racial justice uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder had politicians on the defensive regarding police violence, Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were ridiculed for their performative promises of justice. Geri Silva, a longtime prison abolition activist and founder of Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, denounced the politicians saying, “I have so much disdain for would-be progressive hypocrites.”
Silva points out that, “Many politicians who support progressive policies like ‘care first’ and ‘rehabilitation over punishment’ do so only to please their BIPOC base.” However, they tend to have, what she calls a “dramatic shift during election season,” towards pro-law-enforcement policies, “revealing them to be the worst kind of opportunists.”
Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates.
Source: CounterPunch
