The Trump administration’s blunderbuss approach to immigration enforcement is literally putting Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations on ice. Local leaders across the country have cancelled annual public gatherings to keep members of Hispanic communities safe from a president and his minions bent on ruling by fear and intimidation, tactics reminiscent of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
Most regrettably, the Supreme Court for the time being has allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to continue to stop, detain and question people because they speak Spanish or are deemed to look like they’re Hispanics, who can be of any race.
One conservative justice thinks it’s a minor inconvenience for someone to prove on the spot they are citizens or lawful immigrants. How many people carry their passport, birth certificate or green card with them all the time? Requiring members of a minority to do so harks back to the onerous pass systems during slavery in this country or apartheid in South Africa.
In their indiscriminate zeal, ICE agents have made mistakes — which they have been slow to admit and correct — scooping up citizens and lawful immigrants and locking them up.
This overwrought drive to achieve mass deportation is keeping some Hispanics and other people of color who don’t have legal “papers” or have refugee or temporary status off the streets unless they need to be out. That self-protective tendency must have a dampening effect on the nation’s economy.
Now the administration aims to keep Hispanics out of college or less comfortable if they do manage to reach campus.
The U.S. Education Department has withdrawn $350 million in funding to Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), colleges whose enrollments are at least 25% Hispanic. Massachusetts has 11 HSIs, including Bunker Hill Community College, Benjamin Franklin Institute and Urban College, all in Boston.
The ICE roundups, Supreme Court embrace of racial-ethnic profiling and withdrawal of federal funding for colleges that serve Hispanics have occurred on the cusp of Hispanic Heritage Month, a federal designation that goes back almost 40 years.
The annual commemoration runs from Sept.15 to Oct. 15. It overlaps two months because Sept. 15 was when Mexico’s war for independence from Spain began and the day when five Central American countries celebrate their independence, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
The localities that have canceled celebrations represent a diverse swath of the country. City officials in Everett reluctantly called off the Fiesta Del Rio scheduled Sept. 20 at River Green Park along the Malden River.
In Chicago, organizers postponed the Mexican Independence festival because ICE planned to target the gathering. Other celebrations pulled off the calendar include the Hispanic Heritage Festival of the Carolinas in Charlotte, N.C., Hispanic Heritage Fest in Kenner, Louisiana, north of New Orleans and FIESTA in Indianapolis.
On Sept. 8, the Supreme Court, acting on the Trump administration’s appeal, overruled two lower courts that found the Trump administration’s use of racial-ethnic profiling in Los Angeles violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh didn’t see what the big deal was.
“As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States,” he wrote in his opinion.
Does Kavanaugh carry his passport or birth certificate with him all the time? When was the last time a law enforcement officer demanded he prove his citizenship or be locked up until he could? To an ICE agent, he might look like a white Hispanic.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only Hispanic on the court, saw clearly the flaw in the conservative majority’s decision.
“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers,’” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. She cited a 1975 case holding that it was unconstitutional for Border Patrol agents to stop a car and question its occupants because they looked like they were of Mexican descent.
Trump administration officials have developed a habit of acting like they are judges who know what’s discriminatory when the courts have never said so. The federal government had been providing Hispanic-Serving Institutions funding for 30 years without legal dispute.
On Sept. 10, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who doesn’t have a law degree, decided that the funding discriminated against students who don’t go to HSIs. If they wanted the benefit of the funding, they could have gone to an HSI. There are plenty of them in the country, more than 600. Many don’t have selective admissions. Has even one non-HSI student ever sued over this alleged discrimination?
It is cruel and tone deaf that the Trump administration would load up these anti-Hispanic actions days before the month celebrating the ethnic group’s culture and contributions. The administration’s actions are designed to instill fear in the country’s fastest-growing ethnic group.
At the same time, those actions show that President Trump, his handpicked officials and racist supporters are the ones who are afraid. They’re afraid of the day in the future, as soon as 2045, when white people descended from Europeans no longer constitute a majority of this country’s population.
This is just another instance where Trump is showing he doesn’t believe in this country’s civic creed of equality and individual rights for all. The first words of the Constitution are “We the people,” not “We white people.”
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
