Every now and then I hear or read something about Donald Trump doing well among Hispanics. As Mexican journalist León Krauze argues, Hispanic voters who support the former president need to know exactly what he is planning.
Here is a taste of Krauze’s piece at The Washington Post:
Trump’s plan to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in history are no secret — he refers to them frequently in stump speeches. And the outlines of the plan have been amply documented. Trump is aiming to expel at least 15 million undocumented people from the country. (For a sense of scale, compare this figure to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which currently protects more than 500,000 “dreamers.”) These vulnerable millions know no other country but this one. If they are forced to leave everything they have behind overnight, their anguish will make the hideous stories of family separations we heard during the first Trump term pale in comparison.
If carried out, Trump’s planned mass deportation would leave nearly 4½ million children in the United States partially or wholly orphaned. The impact of mass deportation on families would be profound. In Florida, nearly 2 million U.S. citizens or non-undocumented residents live in households with at least one undocumented person; in California, it’s more than 4 million. The sudden disappearance of a parent or a main provider will be devastating: It is estimated that more than 900,000 households with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen will fall below the poverty line if the undocumented breadwinners in these families are deported.
Some Latino voters who are considering Trump seem skeptical of the plan’s actual implementation. “I don’t think he is going to start rounding up Mexicans or Venezuelans,” said Anthony Gavic, a potential Trump voter of Mexican descent in a recent interview with the New York Times.
Other Trump voters appear willing to disregard the human costs of an unforgiving immigration policy. “Terrible for those who came after. Congratulations to me,” Santiago Ferran Barnet, a Cuban immigrant, told the Miami Herald during a Trump rally. Other Trump supporters share this moral meanness and lack of empathy. “Putting them in a camp and deporting them? It sounds great to me,” said Anais Refujol, a Trump voter from California, when asked about detention centers for recent Venezuelan immigrants. Ironically, Refujol herself earned citizenship after arriving as a refugee in 2004 — from Venezuela.
Can voters like these be reached? Perhaps not, but Democrats must try.
Read the entire piece here.
Leon Krauze and his father Enrique are national treasures in Mexico. Often maligned, they both have a consistent record of opposing the twin authoritarianisms of right and left. I’m glad Leon has taken aim at Trump’s mass-deportation proposal and the authoritarian tendencies it exposes.