T 5758 - "ये महान दृश्य है ...." pic.twitter.com/TN48s2VTrt
— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) May 31, 2026
Pogroms, American Style The Trump administration’s attack on immigrants isn’t about rule of law, crime or jobs. It’s racism and sadism all the way down ......... The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. ........... The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity.
And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor. ................. “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.” .............. For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place. ............. So Federal policy at all levels, including policy tools that were never intended to be used for immigration enforcement, are being weaponized against anyone born outside the US — and some people born here, including American-born children. ............... Federal officials are planning regulatory changes to prevent American-born children from receiving federal day care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not citizens. ................. So we’re going to deny care to children born in the United States — that is, birthright citizens — if they have foreign-born parents, presumably even parents who came to America legally. What’s next? Will these children be required to wear labels on their clothing to reveal that they had a foreign-born parent? A latter-day Star of David badge? ................... Beyond trying to make daily life for immigrants impossible, the Trump administration is trying to terrorize immigrants into leaving.
................ We have only fragmentary information about conditions inside ICE detention centers, largely because ICE has repeatedly blocked independent investigation of what’s happening in these facilities — it has, in particularly, repeatedly broken the law by denying access to members of Congress. A few days ago federal agents pepper-sprayed Sen. Andy Kim outside the Delaney facility in Newark, New Jersey. ICE is also playing hide and seek with detainees, repeatedly transferring themamong facilities to make it hard for families and lawyers to track them down. And there have an alarming number of detainee suicides. .................... Efforts to suppress information about detainee conditions are implicitly an admission that these conditions are terrible, that reports of severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and insufficient and tainted food are true. .................... According to one detainee, a guard told him that .... It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.
...................... And the campaign of harassment and terror against immigrants is working. ICE doesn’t have to be able to find and arrest every immigrant to make life in the United States impossible to endure, just as Iran doesn’t have to be able to target every oil tanker to make passage of the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous to try. Net immigration into the United States has probably turned negative — that is, more people are leaving the country than entering. ................. The Trump administration is pleased. In March it issued a press release hailing Census estimates that show plunging net immigration across U.S. metro areas. .................... none of the claims made by anti-immigration hardliners about the benefits of driving the foreign-born away has survived contact with reality. ...................... The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began:
................. And the idea that immigrants are, as a group, especially crime-prone, has been extensively debunked. Notably, cities like New York that have huge immigrant populations also have very low crime rates by historical standards. ........................ Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration, which was positive when he took office, is now deep in negative territory.
.................. 78 percent of adults believe that people who immigrated illegally should nonetheless have a chance to become U.S. citizens — and 85 percent support offering that chance to children brought in illegally by their parents. ............. So what is all of this about? A lot of it is racism.
The Trump administration has essentially ended refugee admissions to the United States, with only one exception, for whom refugees quotas have been hugely expanded and backed by federal aid to immigrants: white South Africans.
