Xenophobia. Interrogation. Deportation

[This is a message from the American Civil Liberties Union I found in my mailbox this morning. Why have I reproduced it here? Because the best way to take the wind out of the sails of Putin and his Herrenvolk back in the Motherland is to demonstratively reject and dismantle all the quasi-fascist and nationalist practices that the so-called western democracies have been indulging in more and more often in recent years. By rejecting them, we also encourage the brave folk in Russia who are fighting the same evils. TRR.]

Last week President Trump tweeted plans to unleash a wave of ICE raids across the country to conduct mass arrests and deportations. Whether or not the raids occur, he’s playing games with millions of people’s lives and stoking fear and uncertainty in our communities.

ICE has already been out of control under his administration, and one reason why is because of controversial 287(g) agreements that give local law enforcement the authority to racially profile, detain, and deport members of their communities. Your state or local police could be doing ICE’s dirty work as we speak.

287(g) agreements expire on June 30 and have to be affirmatively renewed. That means we have a chance to squash them before the month’s end. Tell Congress to eliminate 287(g) agreements in one fell swoop by passing the PROTECT Immigration Act right now.

Under 287(g) agreements, police get federal ICE authority that can lead them to racially profile people who look or sound “like immigrants” and interrogate them about their immigration status. They also use ICE’s database to deport people who come into contact with local police for minor non-immigration offenses. And they can hold people for up to 48 hours on ICE detainers, even if all charges have been dropped.

To date, local police have helped deport over 12,000 immigrants in the Trump years alone – but we can fight back. If passed, the PROTECT Immigration Act would eliminate 287(g) agreements altogether.

Sign the petition demanding that Congress pass the PROTECT Immigration Act and restore trust and inclusivity in our communities.

It’s not easy going up against Trump’s deportation machine. But if enough of us speak out, then we can put an end to this administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, one abusive policy at a time.

This is just one of several dozen racist European parliamentary election posters I found less than a month ago near the commuter train station in Buch, Berlin’s northernmost district. All of them were in support of the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NDP). A local friend of mine said the fact the posters were still up a week after the elections could have been interpreted as a violation of election law on the part of local authorities. In any case, the sheer profusion of Islamophobic and racist hate speech near its train station is at odds with Buch’s status as a place chockablock with cutting-edge medical research clinics and life sciences labs. If you were, say, a scientist from India who had come to Berlin at the invitation of Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and you saw what I saw in Buch, the center’s home, would you accept a job offer to work there, knowing your new neighbors and the local officials were cool with neo-Nazi propaganda gracing their town’s streets? As it was, despite their efforts to make Buch look like Neo-Naziland (they scared me away for good, that’s for sure), the NDP won no seats in the elections and were relegated to the “Others” category in the final tallies. But their “more respectable” friends in the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), who would also no doubt wish that all immigrants of a certain type would have a “good flight home,” received over four million votes on May 26, 2019, meaning they would have six seats in the new parliament, up one from the previous sitting. Photograph by the Russian Reader