Latinos are in danger. But they aren’t the only ones

What makes someone suspect enough to be seized by the masked federal authorities?

Is it a Mexican family who dines at a table near a truck of tacos?

Afghan women in hijabs working on a Middle East market?

South Asian girls in colorful lehengas, speaking Hindi at an Indian wedding?

According to the Brett judge Mr. Kavanaugh, writing competition in the emergency decision of the Supreme Court, allowing itinerant immigration raids in Los Angeles, any of them could be a fair game, using law and “common sense”.

Brown people, speaking of brown languages, dragging with other brown and doing brown things like low -wage jobs now meet the legal standard of “reasonable suspicion” required for immigration stops.

Living while Brown has become the new driving in black.

Of course, this particular decision of the High Court – and our general anxiety – focused on Latin immigrants. It’s just and understandable. In California, about half of our immigrants come from Mexico, and thousands of other Latin and South American countries.

But more and more, in particular for new immigrants, more people come from Africa and Asian countries such as China and India – some of which, you may remember, Donald Trump called “Shithole countries” in 2018, while wondering why America does not take more immigrants from white places such as Norway.

It is a dangerous error to think that Trump’s immigration purge just concerns Latinos. He made this himself clearly. We have reached the point of our nascent white nationalism when our high court judged Brown synonymous with illegal, whatever the country in which the pigment is from. The false distinctions on which is targeted create divisions at a time when solidarity is our greatest power.

“It is really a racial subordination, and it is really a question of promoting white supremacy in this nation,” said George Galvis, executive director of the UNITED for Restorative Youth Justice. It is partly Amerindian and partly Latin, and 100% against policies like the one that targets people through the color of the skin.

Mexico, India, China, Iran. People in these places do not always see what they have in common, but let me help you.

The racists see two colors: white and not white. Although this particular case has been filed on behalf of Latin defendants, there is nothing that limits its scope to the Latinos.

“It is not targeting, you know, the Eastern Europeans. It is not targeting the people who are of the white race,” said Amr Shabaik, legal director of the American-Islamic Relations Council in Los Angeles, an organization for the defense of non-profit civil rights pleading for American Muslims. “It will be on black and brown communities, and that is going to feel the weight.”

For black Americans, this argument is as old as dirt. Our criminal justice system, our society, has a long and documented history of seeing black Americans with suspicion – considering that it is “common sense” to think that they are up to something harmful for actions like taking the wheel of a car. But, for the most part, our courts have frowned on such obvious racism – but not always.

This anti-black discrimination can be seen today in the deployment by Trump of the National Guard in urban centers in what Trump described as a “war” against crime, a recall to the war against drugs of the 1990s which targeted black Americans with devastating consequences.

This decision on the application of the Immigration Act goes hand in hand with this military deployment, two teeth in a strategy to exhaust our indignation and our chole of the dismantling of civil rights.

As judge Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, the 4th amendment is supposed to protect us all from “arbitrary interference” by the police.

“After today,” she wrote, “it may not be true for those who seem in a certain way, speak in a certain way and seem to work a certain type of legitimate work which pays very little.”

This makes this decision “unconsciously irreconcilable” with the Constitution, she wrote.

Ice has held around 67,000 people across the country since last October, according to government data. Among these, nearly 18,000 are Mexico. The detentions of people from Guatemala and Honduras add nearly 14,000 Latinos to this number. Places such as Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela add thousands of others. Admittedly, by any measure, Latinos carry the weight of the application of immigration.

However, other parts of the brown world are not immune. More than 2,800 people in India were detained, as are more than 1,400 Chinese. Thousands of people from all over Africa, including more than 800 Egyptians, were also locked up.

So we are not only talking about Latino in car washes or home deposits. We are talking about the little artesia India; The little Ethiopia of mid-city; The Sri Lankan community of West Covina.

We are talking about Boulevard Stockton de Sacramento, where Vietnamese men gather in cafes every afternoon.

We are talking about farms, schools and cities in the central valley and the central coast, where Latin and Asian immigrants cultivate our food.

We are talking about cities like Fremont in the bay region, where 50% of the population is Asian, places such as India, China and the Philippines.

We are talking about California, where immigrants represent 27% of the state population, more than double the national average. And yes, many of them lack documents or live in families of mixed status.

A recent UC Merced study revealed that there are around 2.2 million undocumented immigrants in California. Among these, about two-thirds have been here for more than a decade, and half has been here for more than 20 years.

“It is not a question of enforcing immigration laws – it is a question of targeting the Latinos and anyone who does not resemble or does not resemble the idea of ​​Stephen Miller of an American, including American citizens and children, to deliberately harm the families and small businesses of California,” wrote Governor Gavin Newsom on social media. “Trump’s private police forces now have a green light to come after your family – and each person is now a target.”

Remember a few months ago when our dear chef swore that they only succeed after the criminals? How much has it transformed into criminals being anyone who had crossed the border illegally?

And now he has become openly anyone who is brown – and we are not even shocked. We are delighted to debate what will be the rules of these general scales, having completely abandoned the fact that wide scannings are horrible.

Do you think it will stop with immigration or even crime? What about LGBTQ +people? Or demonstrators? Who becomes the next threat?

Immigration scannings are not a Latin problem, a Latin fear. We have opened the door to target people who “common sense” tell us that it is non -American.

The only way to close this door is with our collective strength, undressed by the kind of discrimination of “common sense” that men like Kavanaugh embrace.