I visited Annunciation House in November of 2019. This is a Catholic run haven for homeless migrants, a drop of water to combat a limitless thirst. Most people, fleeing climate catastrophe and the political violence orchestrated by decades of US efforts to destroy progressive regimes in Latin America, find no such respite. Nonetheless, people flee starvation, political instability and death squads, even if the trek across the searing desert kills a great many of them. Families, children, pregnant women, the elderly – people with absolutely nothing – have been trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place. During my 2019 visit to El Paso, Annunciation House was nearly empty due to Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy. 

Refugees flee from deadly conditions no matter how slight their chances for asylum. These migrants are chess pieces for US politicians. North of the Rio Grande, refugees seeking asylum encounter the myths and biases of political theater. Immigrants – suffering, dreaming, striving and dying – have only symbolic worth to politicians. They are the commodities that can be driven with the sledge hammer of propaganda, deep into our reptilian brains. 

Many Americans have always hated immigrants, and US leaders have used that hatred to pump up frothing voters. We have drawn a peculiar line of delineation between those whose ancestors arrived long ago, and those who belatedly attempt to make the same transition. The collective sport of reviling the foreign born has grown in direct proportion to the ruin of forests and fields. As the climate slashes bloody fissures in the agricultural systems of the global south, politicians in wealthy countries gather the spoils and trade cruelty for votes.

On the walls of Annunciation House residents display their works of art – a random jumble of shoes lie haphazardly within a glass display case. These shoes represent those who died in the desert. Thousands of people succumb to heat stroke, hypothermia, falls in rough terrain and dehydration. Border patrol agents have famously spilled water from containers left by good Samaritans. The Chihuahuan Desert heat acts in tandem with the merciless border agents. One staff person at Annunciation House told me about a man and a small child on their knees in prayer. They gave thanks for having survived a ten day ordeal in the desert, she told me.

One recalls that a much larger pile of shoes represent the gassed victims of Auschwitz. We associate shoes with mobility, opportunity, life – “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” When an assassin’s bullet flicked off a piece of Trump’s ear, he dropped and his shoes fell off to be photographed on the stage. Even the near death of a tyrant can be reduced to shoes.

Our media pundits seldom focus on refugees with discipline and depth. We rarely reflect on why people come to seek asylum – it is our government that has assisted in the installation of right wing military juntas, and thus intervened in the political systems of Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, The Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The US has instituted embargos upon Cuba and Venezuela in the effort to inflict suffering on citizens of these countries and spread instability. Our relentless burning of fossil fuels and our corporate plunder of Amazonian rain forest has caused climate collapse in the global south.

We don’t usually have an election that has been as perfectly choreographed as this one in 2024. Every brick, every bolt, wire and ornament has been lovingly placed by predetermined forces. Biden’s descent into slobbering senility, a bullet that precisely pinpricked Trump’s ear (drawing just enough blood for dramatic effect and not a drop more) a cascading series of events in Israel and Gaza to frame the Democratic Party’s suicidal connection to the genocidal IDF, the rise of the Supreme Court in its newly mutated enormity – everything has been hand crafted to give us fair warning. Every nuance of random chance has fallen exactly in the direction of Republican favor.

It may seem that Biden’s withdrawal and the abrupt emergence of Kamala Harris from the crypt of vice-presidential anonymity now changes Republican good fortunes, but it does not. Harris will not distance herself from the travesty of Gaza, or crawl out from Biden’s shadow. Democrats continue on the treadmill of hasty choices. So long as the Democrats fail to produce a movement of working class passion in favor of pulling centrists out of the emergency supply closet, the groundswell of fascism will continue. This will not be an election like 2016, where people wake up in shock the next morning.

In 2016 comedian Jim Jeffries quipped that he might vote for Trump to see “just how crazy shit gets.” We more or less know now, but not exactly. Trump has no policy, no platform, no values. He is absolutely not Hitler with an orange wig. Hitler was young and riveted upon the fine details of a society driven by the principles of eugenics. Trump is ancient, scattered, barely intelligent and trivial to the core.

His bigotry is less deeply felt than transactional. Still, like a rat that understands which lever releases a pellet of food, Trump has figured out that cruelty toward immigrants inspires the love of his acolytes. His chaotic, stupid, disorganized blather gains coherence and meaning only by returning again and again to the fantasy that millions of snarling migrants have been marauding throughout the nation, murdering, raping, selling fentanyl, living in luxurious hotels, and sucking the life blood out of the American people.

Without this preposterous, delusional tale, Trump could not get enough votes to become the animal control officer of the town of Bumfuck. Immigration, or rather, the racist fairytale about dark skinned, barbarian invaders raping and pillaging at the urging of the Biden administration – which allegedly aspires to bludgeon white political power with an unlimited roster of illegal voters – is pretty much the solitary plank in the MAGA platform.

There are a few so called cultural issues that add flavor to the MAGA gruel – stuff like eliminating transgender access to bathrooms of choice and tossing books willy-nilly out of schools and public libraries. The Republicans also cling to their free market/neocon policies – welfare for billionaires, charity for fossil fuel megaliths, private prisons, increased funding for military and police – but these are honorable, bipartisan policies near and dear to the heart of America. No one gets excited about erasing Darren Woods’ tax bill. The crown jewel, indeed the only jewel, in the MAGA world view is the imminent public display of vicious and violent military force enacted upon unarmed, dark skinned civilians. Immigration narratives provides cover for an old fashioned, Tulsa styled race riot.

That is what energizes voters, and that is why Trump rambles distractedly about windmills and flushed toilets, but always returns to the horror story of a nation being ravaged by criminals and insane asylum escapees from the global south. The true target of MAGA rage is not even immigrants or illegals, but rather, poor people. This passage from Ken Cuccinelli, writing for The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – the reimagining of the Department of Homeland Security as The Waffen SS – displays the MAGA passion for a eugenics informed policy of immigration:

“The incoming Administration should spearhead an immigration legislative agenda focused on creating a merit-based immigration system that rewards highskilled aliens instead of the current system that favors extended family–based and luck-of-the-draw immigration. To that end, the diversity visa lottery should be repealed, chain migration should be ended while focusing on the nuclear family, and the existing employment visa program should be replaced with a system to award visas only to the “best and brightest.” “

Cuccinelli’s vision involves military deployment on the southern border and Coast Guard intervention on the high seas. Cuccinelli’s MAGA utopia features internment camps and strong armed threats of sanctions against countries that balk at receiving the millions and millions of rounded up unfortunates. Police forces across the nation will be preoccupied with this anti-Latino pogram. 

How will this be implemented? We all have the German WW II template in our brains – we picture door to door roundups, a bureaucratized system of collaborators and para-military forces, and a parallel deployment of selected members of the targeted victims. But the US is not WW II Germany or occupied Eastern Europe. Jews were well under 1% of the German population whereas undocumented people comprise 3% of US residents, and many of these have blood or marriage connections to people with US citizenship. Those with Hispanic heritage comprise nearly a fifth of the US population. If Trump is able to leap from unhinged fantasy to bureaucratic policy, he will initiate an act of genocide that has no recent precedent in scope. Many writers have argued that forced evacuation ought to be included among the defining features of genocide in Article II of the UN Genocide Convention. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-threat-deport-migrants

We have been warned well before the fact, that the Trump administration, upon its inauguration in January of 2025, will launch a protracted genocidal action upon a large segment of our fellow US residents. This policy will be costly, potentially ruinous to our economy with lost labor and tax money in the trillions. But political theater defines life in the US. Trump is a mirage – we never quite understand the connection between his lies and his behavior. Do Trump’s reprehensible promises inevitably become policy? Likely, yes. Trump has staked his legacy to his vow to punish undocumented residents mercilessly.

Depend on the Democratic Party to do little. The Dems are already neck deep in MAGA immigration mimicry. What about the rest of us? Are we to watch passively as up to twenty million innocent souls are dragged from their homes to be interned, deported or butchered? The only line of defense against genocide is the American public.

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