In October 2018, a “Hiking caravan” on his way to the United States, setting off on foot from Honduras. The group consisted of refugee seekers of all ages fleeing contexts of acute violence and poverty—a regional reality shaped by decades of punitive foreign policy machinations by none other than the United States itself.
Then-President Donald Trump, never one to miss an opportunity for an overzealous xenophobic spectacle, used Twitter to broadcast a “national emergency” (sic) and warn that “criminals and unknown people from the Middle East” were moving into the country Mix caravan. In preparation for the pedestrian assault on the country, Trump ordered 5,200 active-duty U.S. military troops to be stationed at the southern border along with helicopters, reams of barbed wire and other “emergency” equipment.
Apparently the US is still telling the story – although the same cannot be said of the thousands of refugee seekers who have died over the years trying to reach perceived safety in the country. Now that Trump is preparing for his second round As commander-in-chief of the nation, we are also facing another round of the anti-immigrant “emergency” that the president-elect preemptively declared.
After promising during the campaign to carry out the “largest deportation operation” in US history, Trump confirmed in November that he was “ready” to declare a national emergency and use the US military to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the country . Of course, the use of the armed forces for this particular task leaves no doubt that this is war – not to mention Trump’s image as a leader who is somehow anti-war.
Not that that US war on asylum seekers is something new. Of course, this is not a war waged exclusively by Trump supporters and members of the Republican Party. For his part, outgoing US President Joe Biden has done a good job on the battlefield, overseeing more than 142,000 deportations in the 2023 fiscal year alone. Then there was this Decision that the Biden administration is waiving a slew of federal laws and regulations to expand Trump’s beloved border wall, contrary to Biden’s own promises.
Instead of doing all the dirty work himself, Biden increasingly enlisted the help of the Mexican government, which already has one established employee by making life hell for the dispossessed of the world who travel to the USA. And the more the US forced Mexico to crack down on migration, the more existential it became for the people on the run – and the more profitable for them Mexican authorities addicted to extortion and organized crime alike.
After all, “border security” is big business on both sides of the border. And on the US side it is a completely bipartisan issue that will only become more evident and more nefarious with Trump at the helm; Recall, for example, the man’s 2019 vision of a U.S.-Mexico border that included a “water-filled ditch full of snakes or alligators” and a wall with “spikes at the top that could pierce human flesh.” . And while the alligators are not yet extinct, it seems like they are dying Fire at a Mexican detention center for migrants or succumbing to dehydration and heat stroke in the desert is probably terribly painful enough.
Meanwhile, the Trump fantasy that Biden recklessly embraced an open-borders, free-for-all policy will only add fuel to Trump’s renewed war effort on the southern border. Like Trump, Biden pushed through his own de facto asylum bans That violated both U.S. and international law — and as Trump embarks on the second installment of his mission to “Make America Great Again,” you can bet that the human right to asylum will continue to falter.
And yet National Emergy 2.0 is not just a war against refugee seekers. Paradoxically, it is also a war against the United States itself, which cannot exist in its current form without the support of mass undocumented workers – the very ones Trump is threatening with the “largest deportation operation” in US history.
According to a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. is suffering from a severe labor shortage: “If every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have millions of open positions.” In May 2024, a CNBC analysis found that “immigrants are contributing to to stimulate the U.S. labor market,” which accounted for a record 18.6 percent of the workforce in 2023.
The analysis continued: “As Americans increasingly leave the workforce and birth rates remain low, economists and the Federal Reserve point to the importance of immigrant workers to future overall economic growth.”
But why should Trump worry about future, er, “emergencies” when he can instead focus on spreading such absurd falsehoods as the claim about Haitian immigrants in Ohio? Eating pets?
Certainly there are many things in America that objectively qualify as national emergencies, including the regularity of School shootings and other deadly gun violence. Institutionalized racism also comes to mind, as well as the homeless epidemic and others a predatory healthcare industry that is deadly in itself.
But the whole point of a “national emergency” is to distract from real problems by replacing reason with paranoid absurdity. And as Trump rallies the troops for the impending surge in his pet war, it only makes sense that logic will also fall victim.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
