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There are no bounds to leftwing progressives’ Trump Derangement Syndrome. They are triggered by virtually everything that President Trump does, especially by the hard line he is taking to strictly enforce the nation’s immigration laws.
Some pro-illegal immigration fanatics have even compared enforcement of the immigration laws to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s. According to proponents of this bizarre theory, ICE agents are today’s version of the pre-Civil War slave catchers. In their minds, militants who obstruct ICE agents from apprehending criminally violent illegal immigrants for deportation are heroes just like the abolitionists who tried to rescue runaway slaves from being recaptured and returned to their lives of servitude.
For example, MSNBC contributor and Princeton University professor Dr. Eddie Glaude accused Trump supporters of enjoying seeing ICE agents act like “slave catchers” as they carry out their law enforcement duties.
Garrett Epps, the legal affairs editor at the Washington Monthly, wrote that “The federal government is now committed to treating immigrants almost precisely as the antebellum South treated slaves.”
Charles M. Blow, an MSNBC analyst and former New York Times op-ed columnist, claimed that “the visual echo between today’s ICE raiders and yesterday’s slave catchers is eerie.”
Newark’s Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka said last spring that “black folks” have “come from a whole lot of undocumented people.” In an obvious allusion to the Left’s slave catcher comparison, Mayor Baraka added, “And if they knew you didn’t have your papers, you going back to the plantation. They have people chasing, catching you. It wasn’t called ICE then.”
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS ), the self-described online publication of the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its affiliated sections in the Socialist Equality Parties, minced no words:
“The US and global population is currently witnessing vicious raids carried out by heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and various other organs of state repression. These agents are the widely despised ‘slave catchers’ of our time, directed by the would-be dictator Donald Trump.”
U.S. District Court Judge Trina Thompson, a Biden appointee, used the slavery analogy when she ordered the interim suspension of the Trump administration’s planned elimination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 60,000 migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal. In addition to playing the race card against the Trump administration, the judge shamelessly compared ending TPS for migrants from these three countries to the transatlantic slave trade!
Judge Thompson wrote that “The Court recognizes that the United States has a long history of transporting individuals against their will, to places unfamiliar to them, and for the purposes of trade. For example, the United States was an active participant in the transatlantic slave trade which uprooted individuals in Africa and brought them to this continent.”
Judge Thompson seems to have forgotten about the word “temporary” in the name of the immigration program that she is perpetrating – Temporary Protected Status. (Emphasis added) To equate the Trump administration’s decision not to further extend this temporary protection from deportation for a group of migrants with the transatlantic slave trade is judicial malpractice.
The truth is that the real slave traders and slave masters controlling many illegal immigrants’ lives today are the human traffickers who exact their pound of flesh as payment for smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States. Mexican cartels and other criminal organizations force their illegal immigrant targets into prostitution, involuntary labor, and other forms of servitude.
ICE is working to disrupt and dismantle such human trafficking criminal organizations. Moreover, ICE’s strict enforcement of the immigration laws, coupled with the Trump administration’s closing of the border, are significantly diminishing the human traffickers’ profit opportunities by deterring would-be migrants from seeking to enter the U.S. illegally.
Slave catchers served the economic interests of slave owners who regarded the escaped slaves as their private property. Slave catchers did so by tracking down the escapees who had yearned to be free from the shackles of slavery and returning these poor souls to their self-declared owners.
By contrast, ICE agents are serving the American people by protecting them from dangerous individuals who had no business being in the United States in the first place. ICE agents are doing so by prioritizing the apprehension of illegal immigrants with violent criminal records so that they can be detained and then expeditiously deported to their home countries or to third countries willing to accept them.
In short, accusing ICE agents of being today’s version of the slave catchers of the mid-1800s is pure leftwing demagoguery. And U.S. District Court Judge Trina Thompson’s TPS ruling comparing termination of Temporary Protected Status for some migrants to the transatlantic slave trade demonstrates once again an out-of-control, progressive judicial activist who does not belong on the bench.
