Washington, DC — The following is a statement from Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, reacting to the immigration and 2024 political implications of today’s Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity:
“Today’s ruling promises to replace our system of checks and balances with bright green lights to empower the nativist fever dreams of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. This is terrifying from the perspective of immigration, American values, democracy, and our national economic interests.
There are no longer legal constraints to what a president can and cannot do in an ‘official’ capacity unless both houses of Congress agree to impeach and remove from office the sitting president.
The prospects are terrifying – from military and red state National Guard troops terrorizing American communities and putting long-settled immigrants into military detention camps to bombing Mexico with impunity to virtually every other horrific immigration scenario one can conjure up. And all of these things have been openly discussed in Congress and on the campaign trail by Republicans. We fear there will no longer be constitutional and criminal constraints on whatever cruel and chaotic policy Stephen Miller and his extremist friends have, including Project 2025.”
As leading political observer and journalist Ron Brownstein assessed today of the SCOTUS ruling and implications for Trump, “…he’s already indicated that he intends to send federal forces into blue jurisdictions for multiple purposes & that one of his biggest 1st term regrets was not doing so when local officials objected … The signal Roberts & GOP Justices have sent him today is that such deployments of federal forces (or even red state National Guard) would almost certainly be protected, no matter how they play out on the ground. Everything re this decision will embolden him to push the boundaries.”
Also, the vision Trump has for his second term is based on a set of policies described as a “terror” campaign. As reported yesterday day in a BBC News Mundo story for its Spanish language service:
“The Republican presidential candidate has shown that when he talks about mass deportation, he plans to follow a specific model: Operation Wetback, carried out by Dwight Eisenhower’s government in the summer of 1954, exactly 70 years ago…it has also been denounced by its critics as a ‘terror’ campaign that not only affected undocumented immigrants but also American citizens of Mexican origin, separated families, and marked the beginning of the use of military tactics to control migration.
Historian Delia Fernández commented in an article by Ohio State University: ‘This new policy marked the beginning of the modern deportation raids and militarization of the border that we know today.’” [Translation by America’s Voice].”
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