Shelley Powers

I had planned on writing about Project 2025 and its emphasis on deportation—particularly its unstated but understood emphasis on deporting people Who Are Not White. But I got caught up in the sheer impossibility of Project 2025 and Trump’s grand ideas of mass deportation. What they want, is insane.

Thankfully, in the last few weeks, other media companies, profit or otherwise, took up the challenge. And they did a good job of it. I could have wished they had done so before people starting voting, but better late than never.

ProPublica has done a series of stories on immigration under the main title of The New Immigration. Not only did the nonprofit cover the data that overwhelmed me, it also put a human face on the story of immigration in our country.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

This week, both the Vegas Sun and the Texas Observer noted how chaotic Trump’s deportation plans would be for their states of Nevada and Texas. Yet, in Texas at least, state legislators embrace Trump’s plans.

Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—second in the United States only to California—and another roughly 1.4 million U.S. citizens in the state live with at least one undocumented family member, per studies in recent years. Unauthorized workers form the backbone of crucial sectors; in the construction industry, up to 50 percent of laborers building the state are undocumented, according to a 2013 survey by the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project. All this means Texas would be uniquely disrupted by Trump’s plans, with the tearing apart of mixed-status families placing a possibly massive burden on the state’s meager social services systems, and the exiling of a chunk of its workforce imperiling the economic development and affordability known as the so-called Texas Miracle.

Yet Texas’ statewide Republican leaders are full-throated backers of a Trump return to the White House, leaving dissenters within the immigrant and business community and Democratic Party to advocate for millions of Texas families, workers, and consumers.

Vox called into question the polls that seemingly show most people in the US favor mass deportation. As it found, though, the polls don’t capture the complexity of the issue. (Polls rarely do.)

CBS News noted the impossibly high price tag associated with mass deportation. Business Insider noted how mass deportation would gut the construction industry. And economists warn that Trump’s mass deportation in addition to his plans on tariffs on all international goods will tank the economy.

What is rarely mentioned in any of these news stories, however, is how truly unAmerican mass deportation is. We are a land of immigrants. Immigration and the diversity that has come from immigration are our greatest strengths. In addition, the people most targeted for deportation are not the enemy; migration is not an invasion. People from south and central America are our neighbors. Folks from the islands just off the main land are our neighbors.

To cherry pick out a few bad actors and ignore the vast numbers of hard-working people just trying to build a better life for their families is to ignore what drove our own ancestors to this land. And to target people of color—and make no mistake, Trump and his minions are targeting people of color—is to enshrine racism and bigotry. We the People becomes We the White People, or even We the White People Who Think the Same.

I’d like to think we’re better than that. Even with the ugliness that all too often forms the basis of a Trump rally, I still want to hold on to the belief that we’re better than that.

In the last week, the LA Times and the Washington Post—both owned by billionaires with no newspaper experience—gave notice they wouldn’t publish an editorial endorsing a presidential candidate.

Both publications had endorsements ready to go. Both endorsed Kamala Harris. But in each case, the rich guy owning the paper defaulted to his personal financial interests rather than uphold editorial independence and integrity. And both have suffered losses, as employees have quit and subscribers have cancelled. More importantly, the have lost credibility.

The excuse given is some form of ‘neutrality’, which comes across as disingenuous, at best. There is no neutrality in this election. We have two candidates whose vision for this country differs so drastically, one can’t help wonder if we’ve crossed into another dimension of space and time when comparing the two.

Kamala Harris is for a country to remain strong into the future, while Trump has built his campaign on lies, more lies, and an ugly view of the country and its people that should sicken any decent human being.

When you have all but a few of the nation’s economists coming out in favor of the Democratic candidate, you know the Republican contender is bad. Really bad. His economic proposals based on deporting millions of migrant workers and setting massive tariffs on all goods coming into the country will send us beyond a recession directly into a depression.

(Not to mention setting the Social Security fund clock back several years, so that we face a crisis in funding in a scant six years from now.)

Morally, Trump is corrupt. He’s a malignant narcissist. And he’s consistently demonstrated how dangerously incapable he is of leading our country.

He literally cares for no one but himself, and has surrounded himself with self-serving toadies such as Elon Musk and RFK Jr, both whom can’t wait to destroy our country’s foundations. As for his co-partner in crime, JD. Vance, this man isn’t even liked by his own party—a vapid, gormless chimera basically considered the also-ran of the Trump ticket.

And potentially the next President if Trump decides to serve out his term doddering around his golf courses.

Our precious civil rights have suffered unbelievable damage solely because of the judges Trump has appointed to courts. The only thing that has held back this slide into the dark ages has been President Biden and his administration, as well as Democratically-elected state leaders and nonprofit organizations. And a few good judges, even Republican-appointed ones, who remembered they’re actually here to serve the law, not their own ideological fantasies.

With a Trump Presidency, the destruction of our country will be complete. He will continue to remove rights for women, for the LGBTQ+ community, for people of color, and even for people of religions other than the dominant evangelical religion. He will continue to appoint the worst judges, who will gleefully pull down Madam Justice and kick her into the dirt.

He will destroy what is now a booming economy, and he will sledgehammer our civil rights.

If he wins, white racist bigots will celebrate in the streets, while the rest of us desperately search for safe havens. And he will pursue us in these safe havens in his quest for revenge…promising to use both the DOJ and the military against us.

This is no time for faux ‘neutrality’. This is a time for all good and decent people to realize that we are at a decisive moment: one choice leads to hope and a determined effort to stitch together the torn fabric of our society; the other choice leads to a darkness I can’t even comprehend.

The LA Times and the Washington Post have failed in their duty to their readers. I hope that the Georgia media does not follow their lead.