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Trump's Mass Deportation Plan

Right-Wing Spanish Media Cover Up Trump's Mass Deportation Plan

Conservative Spanish-language media personalities have been downplaying President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations, claiming that Democrats and the media are fearmongering about Trump’s deportation scheme, which economists suggest would increase inflation as well as food and housing costs. These media figures have claimed that Trump “will not deport working immigrants” and that he is considering “immigration reform for all of those in the United States that are doing it right.”

In truth, Trump has vowed to stage the “largest deportation operation in American History,” and Tom Homan — the Project 2025 contributor and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director who Trump selected to carry out this campaign — has claimed, “No one’s off the table.”

Recently, during an interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker, Trump doubled down on his campaign promise to end birthright citizenship, falsely suggesting he could enact his plan through executive action and that he would “change” the 14th Amendment.

Rather than focusing on these claims, conservative personalities on social media turned attention to Trump’s claims that he was willing to “work something out” for Dreamers, immigrants who were brought to the US as minors and remain undocumented. Ignoring his previous failed attempt to gut the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — which has provided benefits like temporary relief from deportation and work authorization to more than 835,000 migrants who came to the U.S. as children — conservative personalities argued Trump has “dismantled the narrative” that he is “racist.”

Downplaying Trump's plans for mass deportations

Conservative Spanish-language personalities are claiming that the left is “sowing fear” about Trump’s plans for mass deportations and that Trump “will not deport working migrants.”

  • On Actualidad Radio’s Cada Tarde, conservative personality Marian de la Fuente claimed, “There has been a lot of misinformation” about “family separation and kids and parents who will be deported.” She added, “This type of information, in the way the liberal networks are conveying it, should really be modified,” explaining that “they are obviously trying to sow fear.”[Actualidad Radio, Cada Tarde, 11/12/24]
  • During a guest appearance on Fox Noticias, Voz Media political analyst Alfonso Aguilar argued that Democrats “want to sow fear.” He said that they “say this is an effort to deport people indiscriminately, that the country will be militarized, that we will have patrols of soldiers through urban migrant communities, and that is totally false.” He also claimed, “The armed forces will be used, or the national guard, but in a supporting role.” [Fox Deportes, Fox Noticias, 11/20/24]
  • On his Voz Media podcast, Aguilar claimed, “The left and many in the media are sowing fear” and that “they want to tell us the country is going to be militarized, that there will be mass indiscriminate deportations [and] that they will deport grandma.” He added, “That has become a Democratic talking point.” Aguilar made these claims in an episode where he interviewed Fox News contributor Sara Carter. [YouTube, 11/26/24]
  • In a segment criticizing The View’s Ana Navarro’s claims that Trump’s plan for mass deportations “means grandmothers,” Fox Noticias host Rachel Campos-Duffy claimed that “liberals are losing their mind over Trump’s new border czar.” During the segment, Campos-Duffy mistranslated an Axios headline that said, “Immigrant advocates mobilize against mass deportation,” to claim, “According to the media, immigration advocates are mobilizing against the plan to impose law and order at our borders.” [Fox Deportes, Fox Noticias, 11/13/24; Axios, 11/12/24]
  • On TikTok, Luis Sin Filtro, a conservative influencer with over 566,000 followers, argued that “it's obviously impossible” for the Trump administration to deport American citizens. He also claimed that Homan “has clearly and specifically said that threats to public safety will be the priority,” arguing, “It's most likely that if you find yourself in one of those raids, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. If you are informed and have not committed any crimes in this country, you won't be affected negatively. On the contrary, there is a very big chance for you to build your case in an immigration court and end up with a working permit.” [TikTok, 11/12/24]
  • PelucasGB, a conservative personality with over 56,300 followers, shared a video arguing that “Trump will not deport working immigrants” and that “Trump’s rhetoric has always been against criminals.” He also claimed that Trump could “pass immigration reform for all of those in the United States that are doing it right,” and that Trump “will be the one to make your dream of having status in the United States come true.” [TikTok, 11/26/24]

Ignoring Trump's hostility to DACA

Despite Trump’s previous attempts to gut DACA, Spanish-language social media figures are claiming his comments on Meet the Press that he would potentially “work something out” for Dreamers “dismantled the narrative” that he is “racist” and “the most anti-immigrant man ever.”

  • Luiyo2.0, a conservative personality with over 152,700 followers on TikTok, argued Trump’s comments on Meet the Press “completely dismantled the narrative against Donald Trump in which they claim he is racist.” He added, “If this is true and Trump can solve the DACA problem, he will undoubtedly become one of the best presidents in the United States of America.” [TikTok, 12/9/24]
  • LuisSinFiltro shared a video claiming, “Trump said he plans to work with Democrats to legalize Dreamers, that is to give them permanent status, not just temporary protection like DACA.” He added, “Trump just dragged all those political activists and ‘pro-immigration,’ ‘non-for-profit’ organizations that said Donald Trump is the most anti-immigrant man in history.” [TikTok, 12/9/24]
  • PelucasGB shared a video claiming that “while Democrats try to discredit Donald Trump by saying he wants to deport everyone,” he “said he wants Dreamers to be able to stay in the United States.” He went on to claim that Trump “could become the second Republican president in history to deliver a reform for everyone regardless of nationality.” [TikTok, 12/9/24]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Tom Homan

'They're Building Our Houses': Contractors Warn Against Trump's Mass Deportation

One key plank of former President Donald Trump's second-term agenda is mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. That policy proposal is now getting heavy criticism from construction industry leaders.

According to NBC News, homebuilders in particular are coming out against the ex-president's call to deport millions of immigrants. this includes builders in Republican-dominated states like Florida and Texas. Construction business leaders are worried that an already shallow labor pool could dry up even further if Trump followed through on his signature campaign initiative.

"They don’t think it’s going to happen,” Stan Marek, CEO of the Texas-based Marek Family of Companies, said of his colleagues in the construction industry. “You’d lose so many people that you couldn’t put a crew together to frame a house.”

“We need them. They’re building our houses — have been for 30 years,” Marek added. “Losing the workers would devastate our companies, our industry and our economy.”

Tampa, Florida homebuilder Brent Taylor, who runs a five-person construction business, said building is already a "very, very difficult industry," and is only "getting worse." He told NBC that Trump's proposed deportations would have a particularly adverse impact on both his company and his clients.

Taylor said that he often subcontracts labor, and that those who provide him with workers typically don't check workers' immigration status before sending them out to construction sites. He added that Trump's deportations would mean that he hypothetically "can only do 10 jobs a year instead of 20." He then noted: “Either I make half as much money or I up my prices. And who ultimately pays for that? The homeowner.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are roughly 370,000 open construction jobs, and that figure would likely climb even higher if migrants are rounded up and deported en masse. And according to the National Immigration Forum, roughly 30 percent of construction workers in the United States are immigrants. That share of non-native born Americans working in construction climbs up to 40 percent in larger states like California and Texas.

Trump has said he would deport as many as 20 million immigrants if he were elected to a second term. That figure is noticeably higher than the number of undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S., which is currently estimated to be around 11 million. The former president has suggested he would revoke the Temporary Protected Status granted to migrants from unstable nations reeling from political violence and war like Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, among others.

The logistics of rounding up, detaining and deporting that many people would be a massive endeavor. During the National Conservatism conference in July, Tom Homan — the former director of the Trump administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — hinted that ICE would kick its operations into high gear if Trump wins the November election.

"Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan said. “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Elon Musk

Why Migrant Musk Wants To Control The U.S. Presidency

Elon Musk is a migrant.

There is a difference between a migrant and an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who moves to another country with the intention of living there permanently. The great majority of immigrants to America come for work or personal safety or affection for the way of life. Their goal is to assimilate.

A migrant is someone who moves from one place to another, often across country borders, for various reasons with money high on the list. The United States is Musk's third nationality. He started off as a South African. He then became a Canadian. Now he's an American.

Musk is an entrepreneurial genius. Of that there's no doubt. But his pursuit of wealth and power has shown him soulless regarding the communities he lords over. And his support of the man who tried to overthrow this country's elected government does not speak of any strong attachment to American tradition, namely, the U.S. Constitution.

Though already wealthy, Donald Trump's slobbering before Vladimir Putin strongly suggests he wants to become oligarch wealthy. It's unclear whether Musk or Putin is the richest man alive. Either might assume Trump could be acquired.

For all his bashing of California, Musk got his start soaking in the advantages of being a tech entrepreneur there. In 2002, he launched SpaceX in the Los Angeles area. In 2004, he joined Tesla, based in Palo Alto, and made it the electric vehicle giant it is today. And along the way, he helped himself to more than $3.2 billion in direct and indirect California subsidies since 2009.

Musk had every right to move SpaceX and social media company X, formerly Twitter, to Texas or anywhere else. But he should spare us the baloney of his stated reason, California's law aimed at protecting transgender children. I share his aversion to a lot of the wokeness, but Musk's tweet that the bill was "attacking both families and companies" was laughably histrionic.

Look, Musk wanted less regulation, lower taxes, and official hostility to organized labor. Why didn't he just say that?

He did stop the United Auto Workers from unionizing the giant Tesla plant in Fremont, California, threatening those who joined with loss of their stock options. That would have been illegal.

In a recent conversation on X, Trump praised Musk for firing workers who went on strike. "You're the greatest cutter," Trump gushed. "I look at what you do. You walk in and say, 'You want to quit?' I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, 'That's OK. You're all gone.'" They laughed in unison.

The worst part of this exchange wasn't the firings. It was the evident pleasure Trump took in visiting pain on workers.

California does have ways to get even. Tesla sales there have fallen 17 percent in the first half of this year, whereas sales by other EV makers soared — from 26 percent for Ford to 77 percent for Rivian. And a state commission just voted against more SpaceX launches from the Vandenberg Space Force Base outside Los Angeles.

Musk recently played the yahoo arguing that the budget deficit under Biden was "insane." It happens that Trump ran up the national debt by twice as much as Biden. His plans for tax cuts and spending would add $7.5 trillion to budget deficits over the next decade, according to The Wall Street Journal. Kamala Harris' proposals would add half as much.

But, you know, this isn't really about government spending. Trump says he'd invent a position for Musk in a future administration. If so, what a convenient stop the United States would have been for Elon Musk.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Trump's Debate Debacle Is Shock Therapy For Distracted Voters

Trump's Debate Debacle Is Shock Therapy For Distracted Voters

As we tuned into the big debate, the Trump camp was peddling the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people's dogs and cats. When the debate turned to the subject of immigration, Donald Trump jumped on that hallucination without prompt.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs!" he howled. "The people who came, they're eating the cats!"

The split screen showed Harris initially laughing at the lunacy. Then her face screwed up with the concern of a psychiatric nurse.

There are no credible claims of dogs, cats or other pets being eaten by immigrants in Ohio. A debate moderator inserted that modest fact check. His source was Springfield's city manager, who would know.

Nurse Ratched is a character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Ken Kesey novel made into a movie then a Netflix series. The head nurse in a mental institution, Nurse Ratched exerted authoritarian control over the patients, enforcing rules. Harris could have channeled that disciplinarian at the debate, herding Trump's outlandish statements into a padded cell with a strong hand.

Harris further tormented Trump by noting his references at rallies to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional psychiatrist and serial killer. Lecter was a cannibal who ate his human victims, never mind dogs.

She baited him into meltdown over the crowd size at his rallies. Of course, she was going to do that. And he responded with what shrinks might call "a dissociative episode," a means to cope with the overwhelming stress of hearing that some of his rallygoers left early.

Trump went on about the 75 million people who voted for him. Harris pointed out that 75 million is less than 81 million, the number who voted for Joe Biden.

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people," she said. "Clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that."

Harris used the words "tired" and "old," leaving out the word senile. Trump had repeatedly referred to Barack Obama as his 2024 opponent at a time that Biden was the presumed candidate. And he has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. We call these episodes memory lapses.

At a certain point, Harris had to say, "It's important to remind the former president, you're not running against Joe Biden. You're running against me."

Immediately after the debate, Harris called for another one. Serious commentators opined that if Trump went for round two with her, he'd have to prepare. This is something he's known not to do and for which he may lack the mental capacity. Staffers working for Trump at the White House say that when they tried to hand him simple one-page summaries, he wouldn't read them. Or couldn't.

In the reality-based world, a new report has inflation slowed to 2.5 percent in August — another reason the Federal Reserve is expected to soon lower interest rates. Violent crime is way down. The Southern border is now calm.

And dogs trot the streets of Springfield, Ohio, unthreatened by hungry migrants.

You can't "sane wash" this guy, as much as some Trump supporters, real or paid, may try. This debate treated Americans to an informal forensic psych eval of Donald Trump. Such assessments are used to determine an individual's competency to stand trial.

As for how therapists might manage Trump in the future, one might borrow from Ratched's "comforting" quote to an unruly patient: "The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine."

Donald Trump has administered a kind of political shock therapy to the part of the voting public that hasn't been watching closely. Lest he regain possession of the nuclear codes, intervention is called for, preferably at the polls.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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