As Donald Trump’s campaign advances, there’s nothing subtle about the former president’s anti-immigrant messaging. As a substantive matter, the Republican is running on a platform of militarized mass deportations and detention camps. As a rhetorical matter, he’s complaining about migrants “poisoning the blood of our country” — echoing Adolph Hitler in the process — and publicly declaring that migrants are “not humans.”
All the while, the presumptive GOP nominee is doing his best to exploit crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants — even if that means deceiving the public about the relevant details.
It’s against this backdrop that The New Republic’s Greg Sargent had a report this week on the ways in which the party is expanding the scope of its message.
The Republican National Committee now has an official website devoted to chronicling “migrant crime” and “illegal alien crime,” listed out by state (in some states no “illegal alien crimes” have yet been documented). The casual use of such terms to smear large classes of immigrants is the official party position. All this is straight from the authoritarian playbook.
The RNC’s website, unveiled this week, is called BidenBloodbath.com, and as the conservative Washington Times noted, the online project allows visitors to sign up to be messaged when undocumented immigrants are accused of committing crimes.
The election-season website dovetails with Trump’s latest rhetoric: The former president told supporters this week that “migrant crime” is his “favorite new term,” adding, “It’s a new category of crime.”
At this point, I could spend several paragraphs explaining that immigrants, on average, commit fewer crimes than those born in the United States. I could also remind readers, not only of the role immigrants have played in the American tradition, but of the ongoing benefits to increased immigration.
But for now, I’m instead inclined to focus on Trump’s claim that this is “a new category of crime.”
It really isn’t.
In fact, not long after taking office seven years ago, the Republican and his team created a Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office, which included a hotline Americans could call if they were a victim of a specific kind of crime: those perpetrated by undocumented immigrants (or as Trump called them at the time, “criminal aliens”).
A year later, the Trump White House distributed to reporters a “round-up” of “immigration crime stories,” purporting to show — in some cases, falsely — evidence of immigrants breaking the law. Soon after, the then-president hosted a special event for the victims of crimes committed by immigrants, complete with a special name: “Angel Families.”
The event was filled was brazen falsehoods and weird autographs, though Trump didn’t appear to care. The point, of course, is that there’s nothing especially “new” about any of this. On the contrary, related efforts — including some with genuinely scary antecedents — have been around for far too long. Team Trump, in particular, has long embraced the idea that crimes can and should be divided based on the immigration status of alleged perpetrators. As for the merits, I’m reminded of a USA Today editorial published after Trump’s VOICE initiative was launched. [T]here are good reasons this country doesn’t create separate programs for victims of crimes by Jews or Catholics or African Americans or Asians or juveniles or short people. Categorizing criminals in this way is not going to provide any special comfort to victims. And, by underscoring and overpublicizing the acts of some members, such efforts are the first step toward assigning guilt to a group. This runs contrary to the core American value that people deserve to be judged as individuals, based on their own behavior. To do otherwise is the very definition of prejudice.
The piece added, “Blaming an already unpopular minority group for the actions of a few has no place in America.” It was true when the editorial ran seven years ago, and it’s a point that remains true now.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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