This Land Is Your Land

The US has deported immigrants before.

Photograph by Martha Ture

The United States has always included a powerful population of sociopaths. To quote S. Clay Wilson, the “The hog ridin’ fools is not a large gang. They’re sort of a medium-sized gang. Just large guys.”

Writing in The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout points out that many mental health professionals refer to the condition of little or no conscience as "antisocial personality disorder," a noncorrectable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population-that is to say, one in twenty-five people... Guiltlessness was in fact the first personality disorder to be recognized by psychiatry, and terms that have been used at times over the past century include manie sans delire, psychopathic inferiority, moral insanity, and moral imbecility.

Anti-Chinese riot in Denver, Colorado, on October 31, 1880

In the 19^th century, negative stereotypes of Chinese immigrants as diseased heathens and perverts combined with fears among labor unions and other West Coast residents that Chinese manual laborers represented unfair competition for jobs. The result was a growing anti-Chinese movement that rapidly gained social and political ground during the years after the Civil War. But other Americans, including Republicans, big business, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, pushed back against what they identified as the paranoia and racism of those on the West Coast.

The sociopaths won. In 1882 Congress passed Chinese Exclusion Act, one of the first federal policies to restrict immigration. This decision helped shape the course of American immigration policy in the early twentieth century.

In the 1930’s, up to 1.8 million people of Mexican descent—most of them American-born, U.S. citizens—were rounded up in informal raids and deported. Former California State Senator Joseph Dunn, investigated the deportations under President Herbert Hoover. Dunn estimates around 60 percent of these people were actually American citizens, many of them born in the United States to first-generation immigrants.

Local governments and officers simply arrested people and put them on trucks, buses or trains bound for Mexico, regardless of whether they were documented immigrants or citizens. Deporters rounded up children and adults however they could, often raiding public places where they thought Mexican Americans hung out. In 1931, one Los Angeles raid rounded up more than 400 people at La Placita Park and deported them to Mexico.

Imagine these men, grabbing children. Do they have children? Families? Mothers? The sociopaths won again.

There was no federal law or executive order authorizing the 1930s raids. President Herbert Hoover’s administration used the slogan, “American jobs for real Americans.” His secretary of labor, William Doak, also helped pass local laws and arrange agreements that prevented Mexican Americans from holding jobs. Some laws banned Mexican Americans from government employment, regardless of their citizenship status. US companies Ford, U.S. Steel and the Southern Pacific Railroad agreed to lay off thousands of Mexican American workers.

A 2017 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “The repatriation of Mexicans, who were mostly laborers and farm workers, reduced demand for other jobs mainly held by natives, such as skilled craftsman and managerial, administrative and sales jobs. In fact, our estimates suggest that it may have further increased their levels of unemployment and depressed their wages.”

Photo by Dorothea Lange

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the mass incarceration of Japanese people and their descendants. Japanese residents of the U.S. West Coast were forced to abandon their homes and, with no clue about their fate, had to work out what to do with their belongings within a short time. Most of them sold their properties at a substantial loss; others rented their homes to neighbors or left them to friends or religious communities, while others simply abandoned their homes.

Each family was given an ID number and taken by car, bus, truck and train, carrying what they could hold. Under military surveillance, they were transferred to 17 temporary reception centers, situated in race tracks, fairgrounds, and similar facilities in Washington, Oregon, California and Arizona. Afterwards, they were taken to 10 “relocation centers.” By November 1942 the full relocation had been completed.

By July, 10,000 people were living in 36 blocks at Manzanar, fenced with barbed wire and surrounded by eight watch towers. It is estimated that two thirds of the people confined there had been born in the United States, making them United States citizens. One of my undergraduate roommates was born at Manzanar.

The sociopaths won again.

Manzanar, Photo attributed to National Park Service

Manzanar has been termed a concentration camp.

What is a concentration camp?

At a meeting held at the offices of the American Jewish Committee in New York City, leaders representing Japanese Americans and Jewish Americans reached an understanding about the use of the term, and the Japanese American National Museum and the AJC issued a joint statement:

A concentration camp is a place where people are imprisoned not because of any crimes they have committed, but simply because of who they are. Although many groups have been singled out for such persecution throughout history, the term 'concentration camp' was first used at the turn of the 20th century in the Spanish American and Boer Wars. During World War II, America's concentration camps were clearly distinguishable from Nazi Germany's. Nazi camps were places of torture, barbarous medical experiments and summary executions; some were extermination centers with gas chambers.

President Trump has signed an executive order to prepare a so-far secret facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to house 30,000 immigrants.

Per The Guardian,

The secretive immigrant detention facility does not appear in public government reports, and details have only recently surfaced, including about alarming conditions. As of February 2024, four people were being held at the facility, the New York Times reported, citing the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump made the initial announcement as he signed the Laken Riley Act, which mandates the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with theft-related crimes. The act is named after a 22-year-old nursing student from Georgia who was murdered in 2023 by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela.

Trump’s executive order about Guantánamo itself came a little later on Wednesday afternoon, saying: “I hereby direct the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs identified by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.”

It added: “This memorandum is issued in order to halt the border invasion, dismantle criminal cartels, and restore national sovereignty.”

Cuba responded to Trump’s announcement that he plans to open a detention center for migrants at Guantánamo Bay, with the foreign minister claiming the idea “shows contempt towards the human condition and international law”.

Writing on X, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla slammed “the US government’s decision to imprison migrants at the Guantánamo Naval Base, in an enclave where it created torture centers and indefinite detention”.

Also writing on X, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, called the plan “an act of brutality”.

Amnesty International said Guantánamo has been a “site of torture, indefinite detention without charge or trial and other unlawful practices”, adding that Trump should be using his authority to close the prison and not repurposing it for offshore immigration detention.

The sociopaths are winning again. We know what a concentration camp is.

Here is a photo of some members of my family. Only two of them survived the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

Photo property of Martha Ture

Trump seems to be turning the United States of America into a Fourth Reich. We have a duty to warn, a duty to obstruct, and a duty to prevent him.

The conscience of a people is their power.-John Dryden