Immigration and the border have quickly become a central focus among U.S. citizens, as we eye a looming Donald Trump presidency. Trump built his campaign on threats to our nation’s more than 45 million immigrants, and there’s a good chance he’ll see them through.
Broad threats and a clear disdain for supposedly all non-U.S.-born Americans dominated the Trump campaign, but all that hate seems to skate by at least a few immigrants, leaving them unscathed. Trump wants mass deportations, family separation, and harsh punishments, but only for the immigrants who don’t support him. That seems to give the likes of Melania Trump and Elon Musk a pass, despite their status in that camp of typically-despised foreign nationals.
The president-elect already tapped Tom Homan, his former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, as the new administration’s “border czar,” and people see a mass deportation in our future. Homan is already well-established in the realm of border policy, and has a history with ICE, through which he rose our arrest rate among immigrants by nearly 40% in just a few months.
It looks like Homan will be granted even broader freedom in the second Trump administration, and given Homan’s distaste for sanctuary cities — he thinks politicians who support them should be brought up on criminal charges — and his unabashed support for separating families, that is a scary thought. But the threat extends only for the immigrants Trump has painted as villains — all the rest are “good people” and patriots, after all.
Trump’s heartless campaign against immigrants completely ignores the many immigrants with whom he shares a bed — sometimes literally. Immigrants like Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the former president’s own mother, who took more than a decade after arriving in the States to get naturalized. She was never a so-called “illegal,” but her status as an immigrant is registered fact.
As is that of Ivana Trump, the gassy groper’s first wife. She didn’t become a U.S. citizen until all three of the children she shares with Trump were born, once again making her one of those terrifying migrants her ex loves to vilify so much.
Then we have Melania, Trump’s current wife, and Elon Musk, his newest political paramour. Unlike Trump’s mother and first wife, it appears — based on an AP report and subsequent Snopes investigation — that Melania did enter this country illegally. She’s since become a legal citizen, but her origins are just as lawbreaking as all the people Trump is looking to boot from our country, so will she be added to the list? She may thank him for it.
Finally we have Musk, who’s currently facing down reports that he spent his early years working illegally within U.S. borders. Musk challenges the claim, but even his own explanations leave plenty of questions unanswered. More importantly, regardless of whether or not he did build his early career illegally, Musk is, and always will be, an immigrant. Its a title he should be proud of, if not for his constant bashing of the very group he belongs to.
Its no surprise that Trump and Musk are blind to their own transgressions even as they mastermind heartless policies aiming to punish others for doing the exact same thing they did, but it is infuriating. Trump thinks he’s completely untouchable, too powerful to topple, and if all it takes is a little brazen hypocrisy to get what he wants, you can bet we’ll be seeing plenty more before the credits roll on his second term.