


In its merciless pursuit of people without papers — most of them Latino — and its demonization of asylum seekers, refugees, holders of temporary protected status, Muslims and Palestinian rights activists, the Trump administration is accelerating toward a new, modern nadir of Juan Crow, just downstream of Jim and Jane.
When a sitting U.S. senator refers to New York immigrants as “inner-city rats,” when a Florida governor waxes rapturously about the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center, when a presidential administration takes two months to dismantle decades of civil rights law, we must admit that these are acts in a feature presentation of neo-Confederate revanchism targeting brown and Black people. The targeting of the undocumented has a name, after all, based in ugly history and shameful tradition: Juan Crow.
The phrase was popularized by the journalist Roberto Lovato to describe the “matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems” that isolate and control undocumented immigrants. The domestic policies of the Trump administration have taken this legacy to a more dangerous place.
The policies of this administration reinstate an era in which the rights conferred to all people in the United States by the Constitution are subject to a sliding scale of extralegal violability depending on one’s race, ethnicity or assumed immigration status. Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents don’t “need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them and question them.” The administration has created a hostile, systematic stripping of basic dignities that works in concert with stymying official methods people are meant to use to seek relief and redress for governmental abuse.
A familiar, if not altogether new, dawn of racialized mistreatment is being enacted by imposing daily ICE arrest quotas. The claims in a Human Rights Watch report on three Florida detention facilities read like a nightmare mash-up of Guantánamo Bay and American mass incarceration: freezing, overcrowded facilities; routine denial of medical treatment; shackling the hands and wrists of detainees; feeding detainees meager amounts of rotting food or forcing them to eat it “like dogs,” with their hands behind their backs; forcing detainees to sleep on concrete floors.
The White House is attempting to rewrite the constitutional order via executive fiat, spreading terror through immigrant communities by reportedly subjecting detainees to callous, inhumane and even deadly treatment. The senior adviser Stephen Miller routinely conflates immigrants with criminality even though the majority of those detained by ICE have no criminal convictions or have committed no violent offenses.