Friday, Dec. 15, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Donald Trump’s leading opponents for the Republican presidential nomination are engaged in a tragic, ill-fated contest to out-Trump Trump.
At the fourth Republican presidential debate, which took place last week, they spoke of immigration as if trying out for a western cowboy film rather than for a chance at the White House. “There’s going to be a new sheriff in town and these cartels better buckle up,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who defended his calls to shoot suspected drug smugglers at the border. (Remember Trump’s fantasies of shooting migrants’ legs?)
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said, “We’re gonna smoke the terrorists on our own southern border.” He said he believes in the “great replacement theory,” a once-fringe racist and antisemitic conspiracy theory that has inspired numerous white supremacist shootings, such as the El Paso massacre targeting Mexican Americans in 2019.
It was comments from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley that showed how deeply the Republican field has fallen into Trump’s extremist mind-set. She supports deporting everyone who has arrived in the country during President Joe Biden’s term, including hundreds of thousands of people who were admitted legally with temporary protected status. “You have to go and deport these people,” she said.
At times, she hinted at a capacity for restraint that distinguished her from the others. She said that when it comes to people who’ve lived here a long time, it might be important to consider whether they’ve been paying taxes and otherwise contributing to the U.S. before deporting them. She rejected Trump’s idea for ideological screening of immigrants. But Haley has an increasingly belligerent tone on immigration, calling for closing the border and defunding sanctuary cities. It seems unlikely that she’ll have the courage to provide conservative voters with a true alternative to the xenophobic bully.
Trump has vowed to launch the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. He’s planning huge internment camps for immigrants, including people who’ve lived here for decades. His operation would separate millions of mixed-status families across the country and leave countless U.S. citizen children, including babies, without their parents. It would make his family separation policy, which focused on recent arrivals at the border and was halted by a national outcry, look restrained.
Trump’s rivals were silent on the evil of those proposals, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who previously had criticized Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. But they’ve all expressed support for rounding people up and removing them en masse. If a Republican wins in 2024, every mixed-status family in America could face the threat of separation.
Eight years ago, Trump’s call to “build a wall” was not yet part of standard GOP rhetoric. Now, the party’s new normal includes dreams of internment camps and bombing Mexico to stop the cartels. It includes calls to end birthright citizenship, a constitutional right, and proposals to deputize local and state officials to round people up for the camps.
The mainstreaming of extreme ideas would’ve been impossible without Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser responsible for some of the demagogue’s most restrictionist policies, including strangling refugee access and other legal pathways into the country. It was Miller’s idea to use a public health rule to reject asylum seekers during the pandemic, a policy Trump hopes to revive. Miller, who would quite likely hold a top position in a future Trump White House, reportedly advocated for using Predator drones to blow up boats full of unarmed migrants in 2018. He routinely supported Trump’s most sadistic instincts.
If Trump wins a second term, he would very likely bring back the Muslim ban, cancel protections for Afghans evacuated during the Taliban takeover in 2021, and deport people based on their undesirable beliefs, such as support for the Palestinians. To ensure this agenda could not be thwarted as frequently as it was in 2017-20, Trump would install far-right attorneys and other loyalist officials in the administration.
Trump’s challengers are all scrambling to go as low as possible on immigration, but nobody can play the tyrant better than Trump. The strategy of his challengers — to try to outperform the showman on his signature issue — is doomed to fail. Instead, it’s empowering him and stoking anti-immigrant hate that is endangering the lives of ethnic minorities across the country. No matter what his rivals promise to inflict on immigrants, Trump, the despot, wins with hate.
Jean Guerrero is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
