This is a guest post from Abraham Marquez, which was originally shared on his Substack.
President Trump started his second term exactly where he left off in 2021, waging an everyday psychological and physical war on immigrants. Joe Biden's Presidential term was no help because he continued Trump’s immigration policies and did not provide a pathway to citizenship as he had campaigned, abandoning an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants to their fate under the more openly fascist Trump regime. As a result, it has brought more attention to our undocumented community and our immigration policies.
The tug and pull by Democrats and Republicans of whether immigrants should have some rights to a dignified life has left us with a dysfunctional, incoherent immigration system for working-class people to understand, leaving people lost in how our system works or should work.
Consulting history reveals that our government does not work for the people; it works for the ruling class, the capitalist class. This is their system, not ours. We are conditioned to believe what politicians tell us, that we need to repeatedly vote for the next “good” candidate, which leaves us disappointed each time. In reality, we should challenge the system as a whole and its treatment of our most vulnerable community members.
Trump’s racist agenda against immigrants is nothing new. Trump is not an outsider who landed in the U.S. from Mars a few years ago and suddenly started attacking our people with hateful rhetoric and executive orders. Trump is homegrown and falls in line with all U.S. presidents before him in attacking our immigrant community. From the colonial period to the “founding” of this country to today, immigration law is rooted in racism. Therefore, Trump is following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Democrat or Republican, because the system allows him to do so.