★ ICE Raids Are an Escalation of Our Long-Simmering De Facto Cold Civil War

Sareen Habeshian and Russell Contreras, reporting for Axios, “Mayor Accuses ICE of Detaining Vet, U.S. Citizens in N.J. Immigration Raid”:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided a Newark, New Jersey, business venue on Thursday and detained undocumented immigrants as well as U.S. citizens without warrants, the city’s mayor said. [...]

ICE agents entered the Ocean Food Depot restaurant where owner Luis Janota said around a dozen immigration authorities detained three people after receiving a complaint, PIX11 News in New York reports.

“I asked [the agents] what documentation they were looking for, and they said it was a license or a passport. I thought, who walks around with a passport?” Janota told the station. Janota said among the workers questioned was the manager of the restaurant’s warehouse, a Puerto Rican man and military veteran. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

“It looked to me like they were specifically going after certain kinds of people — not every kind, because they did not ask me for documentation or my American workers, Portuguese workers or white workers.”

That these raids are beginning and will surely escalate is no surprise. Trump campaigned heavily on the promise of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. This is an issue where he’s doing what he said he’d do.

But there’s an obvious aspect of where these raids are taking place that isn’t being talked about enough. During the campaign Trump broadly promised to deport all of “them”. Even as recently as December he told NBC News’s Kristen Welker, in an interview on Meet the Press, that his aim was to deport all undocumented immigrants in the US.

The raids are taking place in deep blue cities in blue states. These are places that voted heavily against Trump. People in Newark didn’t vote for this. People in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston didn’t vote for this. If this was really about following through on the popular demand of the voters who elected Trump, who see undocumented immigrants as a scourge on their communities, wouldn’t these raids focus on the states that voted for Trump — like, say, Texas and Arizona, which actually border on Mexico?

Liberals, who are more empathetic by nature, tend to focus on the direct human toll of immigration enforcement. Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay for The Atlantic is, if anything, more relevant today than when he wrote it: “The Cruelty Is the Point”. (Sub-head: “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” Also, Serwer expounded upon the argument into a best-selling book of the same title.) Those with bleeding hearts have trouble looking past the heartbreak of these raids.

But the second-order effect of widespread deportations will be economic. Undocumented workers make up a remarkably large sector of the US economy. The economic effects of mass deportations will be local, directly affecting the communities and cities where the deportations occur. Focusing these ICE raids on blue cities in blue states, is first and foremost, an attack on these immigrants themselves and their families and friends. But if, as I expect they will, the raids mostly or exclusively take place in Democratic cities and communities in Democratic states, it’s a de facto economic attack on blue states.

Trump voters in red states will get to enjoy watching footage of the raids on TV and social media, but it won’t be their neighbors getting deported, not their contractors and custodians and dishwashers, and it won’t be their communities whose economies suffer as a result. It’s seemingly impractical operationally and would be ruinous economically for the Trump administration to actually try to deport all undocumented immigrants in America. What is practical operationally are targeted raids in big cities. And the deleterious economic effects will be largely contained to those cities. It’s a big “fuck you” to blue states.

I’ve altered my media diet significantly after the election, deliberately choosing to skim, rather than consume, news regarding political affairs outside my interests in the tech industry in general and, of course, Apple in particular. I wrote a few weeks ago, in my column on Zuckerberg’s content-moderation-policy zig-zag at Meta:

My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I’m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there’s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there’s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations amounts to nothing but a distraction.

This entire post is in contravention of my own guideline quoted above. But I’m making a hopefully rare exception on this undocumented immigration enforcement issue because so much attention, from both sides, is focused on the cruelty and heartbreak. And it does come down to paying attention to what Trump and his administration do, not say. He says they’re targeting all undocumented immigrants, but so far they’re only targeting those who live in places that are popularly opposed to it. And that’s where the costs — both emotional and economic — will be felt.