Power and low-hanging fruit

As someone who spent many years as a drug policy reporter, I am struck by some uncomfortable parallels between old-style marijuana enforcement and Trump’s over-the-top immigration enforcement.

Polls show that people overwhelmingly support deporting immigrant criminals and gang members, but that they overwhelmingly oppose deporting people who have lived here for many years, raised families, worked, paid taxes, and followed all the rules.

And during the height of marijuana enforcement, people supported arresting drug traffickers, but opposed arrests and outrageous sentences for simple marijuana possession.

Both situations are victims of the low-hanging-fruit syndrome and crass political opportunism, which conflict with the actual will of the people.

President Nixon’s policy chief John Ehrlichman: “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The war against immigrants today, the “invasion emergency,” the blatant lies by the administration, and the supposed need to ratchet up the military presence are a similar calculation. It’s not about the actual danger posed by immigrants, but rather about using the power of the state to impose political control on the population.

During the height of drug enforcement before marijuana legalization, there was massive funding for drug enforcement: drug task forces and special grants for police (with bonuses based on the number of drug arrests). This provided incentives for drug arrests, and it was easier to find the marijuana users than the drug traffickers. There weren’t the same grants for other crimes, so enforcement was sometimes focused more on potheads than rapists.

Today, we have white supremacist Stephen Miller pushing for millions of deportations and establishing law enforcement quotas. Still, there aren’t that many immigrant criminals and gang members (despite the lies they’ve been telling you). So the only way to satisfy him and Trump is to go after the low-hanging fruit. People who are valuable members of the community, belong to the church, have lived and worked here for decades, and are doing everything correctly. They’re even picking them up when they show up for citizenship hearings. And they’ve been trying to grab the data from the IRS to make it easier to find immigrants who pay taxes. That’s right — they’re focusing on and penalizing the immigrants who are following the rules. And the Trump administration has been shifting the FBI and other police agencies away from investigating other crimes.

There are numerous problems with this, not only for the individuals caught in the dragnet, but also for the rest of us.

For example…
Then: I see a criminal breaking into my neighbor’s house, but I think my neighbor smokes marijuana. Maybe I shouldn’t call the cops, because if they come, they might arrest my neighbor instead.
Now: I see a criminal breaking into my neighbor’s house, but I don’t know if my neighbor has completed their citizenship steps. Maybe I shouldn’t call the cops, because if they come, they might arrest and deport my neighbor instead.

This approach to policing weakens law enforcement, making it harder for them to do their job and rendering them less valuable to the community. And it makes us dramatically less safe. Particularly when, as now, they use military-style tactics inside our country. To be clear, being opposed to the abusive use of law enforcement is not anti-police. It supports good policing. Good policing protects and serves — it doesn’t treat the people as enemies. It defuses rather than incites.

This mass deportation approach also hurts our communities as it takes away good people, Americans who are essential to our nation. We’ve failed miserably as a country in providing timely pathways to citizenship, and now we’re blaming those good immigrants for our failure.

When my great-grandfather came to the U.S., he didn’t need to worry about heavily-armed ICE showing up masked, kidnapping him off the street, chaining him up, and putting him in a cramped detention center without food. He showed up, got a job, and became a good American citizen. Perhaps we need stricter rules today, but we also need to be human.

America, the cruel. America, the vicious. America, the self-righteous.

America the short-sighted.