Josh Earnest addressed Donald Trump's Deportation Force in a press conference yesterday after Trump's long speech where he doubled down on his plans to forcibly remove 11 million undocumented immigrants. Your World with Neil Cavuto invited Donald's son, Eric Trump, to 'sound off' as they say at Fox 'News,' on the claims that his father's plan is inhumane. What ensued was a cavalcade of made up facts and figures, convenient omissions of history and a nostalgia for the policies of the 1950's that is allegorical. Let's face it, the White Nationalist apple doesn't fall far from the tree of Trump.
CAVUTO: I think the point of what Josh Earnest was trying to say is when Donald Trump the other night on Fox Business presidential debate was talking about moving or deporting a large number of illegals who are here, that it's never been done, or that it's callous and indifferent. And in fact, he used the example of Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman who moves large sects of the population.
But of course, he came across as a jerk, you know, clueless, out of step with reality and yet he remains, that is Donald Trump, on top of the polls.
Eric, his son joining me now. You had to know when your dad said that that there would immediately be that trigger, although a lot of the candidates didn't take him on. Jeb Bush who said that it was cruel and John Kasich that it was borderline inhumane. How did you take that and react to that when you heard it?
TRUMP: I don't think there's anything inhumane about it. I mean, the reality is we have 102 million Americans that don't have work. My father is a patriot and he's an American and he thinks the citizens of this country should have a job waiting for them and you see all these, you know, college students out there right now and, you know, many graduate from the best colleges and they literally can't find work.
Yet there are people who are coming across the border illegally, yet, you know, despite the fact that there are, you know, literally millions of people signed up and trying to get to this country legally. They're coming across illegally and no one's doing anything about it.
Let's examine that 102 million Americans that don't have work claim. That would put our unemployment rate, as Trump has suggested in the past, at 42%, which is absolutely false. The hardly liberal Politifact has the worst case scenario figure at 14.8% while CNN puts that ultra-high estimation at 10.3% So, that figure is not even remotely accurate.
The deportation 'renaissance' of the Eisenhower years weren't the success that Eric Trump recalls. His fondness for Eisenhower's brutal 'Operation Wetback' is misdirected because it was definitely not the standard bearer for conducting a successful mass deportation. The whole concept of forced deportation can only be carried out using military tactics, where the humanity factor just disappears.
During fiscal year 1954, the year Operation Wetback began, the US apprehended more than a million unauthorized immigrants. But Operation Wetback started toward the end of the fiscal year — and in fiscal year 1955, which started in October 1954, the government managed to apprehend fewer than 250,000 immigrants. (That's nothing compared to 11 million Trump intends to deport)
Conditions for deported immigrants were horrifying. A later congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a "penal hell ship" and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage. Immigrants who were dumped over the border in trucks didn't fare any better. They were shoved into trucks "like cows," driven 10 miles into Mexico, and unceremoniously dumped into the desert — often in punishing heat, without water. Families were torn apart.
The point of Operation Wetback was to conduct mass deportations quickly and on an impressive scale. It required the government to use all its resources on aggression. There wasn't any room to be humane.
Cavuto and Trump went on about the humaneness of daddy Trump's plan to round them up and ship them out, because there's no ugly images that are conjured up from that scenario. Cavuto and Baby Trump conveniently failed to mention the offensive name that Eric and Donald probably delight in while in private, and the official name of the operation was mentioned exactly zero times. Eric Trump is a proponent of the assertion that all the Latinos who work for the Trump Organization just love him. I imagine that the workers are scared to complain, for fear of losing their jobs, and thus far, have remained largely silent.
President Obama put a damper on Trump's cruel deportation policy, and directly challenged his ideas.
“Imagine the images on the screen flashed around the world as we were dragging parents away from their children, and putting them in what, detention centers, and then systematically sending them out,” the president said. “Nobody thinks that that is realistic. But more importantly, that’s not who we are as Americans.”
The college graduates of this country aren't looking for the jobs traditionally taken by migrant farm workers, the same ones who came and went without incident for decades, until the U.S. border was militarized in 1996. For decades, migrant farm workers returned to Mexico and re-entered the U.S. during the produce harvest seasons. These 'braceros' were hired and legally allowed back into the country yearly. They didn't establish roots like today's larger population of immigrants many of whom are often undocumented. These 'illegals,' as Cavuto puts it callously, have known no other home than the United States.
It's noteworthy that since the border has been made increasingly more difficult to cross, immigration problems have become exponentially worse, and the obsession with 'securing the border' is misdirected. Isn't that reminiscent of what happened to the drug problem since the advent of the War on Drugs? We need to secure the border is still the rallying cry of Republican Nationalists like Trump, but making it more secure will not alleviate illegal immigration one bit.
The Republican machismo of militarizing everything from the U.S. Border to law enforcement, while starting more wars is a pipe dream that has no successful history to draw from. It is nothing but purely idiotic bravado. Trump's deportation ideas, like most of his feeble policy prescriptions, will make America Great Again, if you consider the Great Depression Great.
