Collective punishment is a hateful and unjust practice that has been used by bigots throughout history to harm entire groups of people for the actions or alleged actions of a few individuals. President Trump is now cruelly imposing collective punishment on millions of people around the world in response to deadly shootings in Washington, at Brown University and near MIT.
Following the attack on two National Guard members near the White House in November, Trump imposed new restrictions to keep people from 39 countries out of the U.S.
An Afghan immigrant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, faces murder and other charges in the attack that killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom and gravely wounded guardsman Andrew Wolfe. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
After a December shooting attack at Brown University left two students dead and nine wounded, followed by the fatal shooting of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, Trump suspended a diversity lottery program that awarded up to 50,000 green cards annually to enable people from countries (primarily in Africa) with few citizens in the U.S. to immigrate to America.
Portuguese immigrant Claudio Neves Valente, whom authorities said was responsible for shooting the Brown students and the MIT professor, was found dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound Dec. 18.
No one other than Lakanwal and Valente is believed by authorities to have been involved in the shootings.
Trump’s collective punishment of millions people for the alleged actions of two immigrants makes no sense.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was born in Louisiana. Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was born in upstate New York. By Trump’s faulty logic, the millions of people living in Louisiana and New York should have been collectively punished following those heinous crimes.
Numerous studies dating back to 1870 have found that immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. A Cato Institute study published in September found that among people born in 1990, “native-born Americans were 267 percent more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants by age 33.”
The overwhelming majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. are grateful for the opportunity and want to work hard, play by the rules and achieve the American Dream. About 52 million immigrants live in the U.S., including about 14 million who are unauthorized, and together they make up 19 percent of the nation’s workforce, the Pew Research Center reported in August.
Trump — whose mother, paternal grandparents and two of his wives all came to the U.S. from Europe — has spent years demonizing other immigrants, especially those from non-European nations. The shootings of National Guard members, Brown students and the MIT professor gave Trump just the excuse he needed to justify intensifying his anti-immigrant campaign.
The president has attacked nonwhite immigrants from Somalia and other countries with particular fury. He recently compared allowing Somali immigrants into the U.S. to taking “garbage into our country” and denounced Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a U.S. citizen who is a legal Somali immigrant. “Ilhan Omar is garbage,” Trump said. “Her friends are garbage.” He later falsely stated that she’s “here illegally” and said “we ought to get her the hell out.”
Trump’s bigoted characterization of human beings as subhuman garbage is dangerous and reminiscent of the way Adolf Hitler dehumanized Jews by referring to them as rats, lice, cockroaches, vultures and other animals. In the same way, enslavers of Africans in the United States considered them subhuman animals who could be owned like cattle or horses.
Categorizing people as subhuman means it is fine to deprive them of human rights and inflict unlimited collective punishment on them — up to and including murder.
Leaders around the world have scapegoated racial, religious, ethnic and other minorities since ancient times — collectively punishing vast numbers of people. Black Americans have been frequent targets.
For example, in 1921, a Black man in Tulsa, Okla., was falsely accused of attempting to rape a white female elevator operator. Whites then rioted in a Black neighborhood and in a horrific case of collective punishment killed up to 300 Black residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses, looting and burning them in what is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I’m well aware that xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and other forms of prejudice remain an ugly reality in America and around the world, used by the haters among us to justify all sorts of collective punishment. But until Trump came onto the political scene, I never imagined that a president of the United States would publicly embrace evil and immoral hatreds in the 21st century. Sadly, Trump has proven me wrong.
A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.
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