The Dehumanizing Cruelty at the Texas Border Is Part of a Larger GOP Pattern

Horrific details emerged last week of Texas state troopers deployed by Gov. Greg Abbott denying water to pregnant women and pushing children back into the Rio Grande and the accompanying dangers of deployed razor wire. The barriers are designed to harm and ensnare people seeking asylum in the U.S. Rather than treating it as a vile story that soon fades from the news and our consciousness, we must view the revelations through their larger context.

Unfortunately, it’s just the latest—and a particularly troubling—example of a larger pattern of dehumanizing, dangerous, and politically motivated nativism advanced by Republicans and right wing media. It’s predicated on a false portrayal of immigrants and asylum seekers as threats, invaders, and replacers. And its relentless and accompanying messaging barrage is helping to mainstream dangerous white nationalist conspiracies that are directly linked to real acts of deadly violence.

All of this should be a wake-up call about the consequences of dehumanizing immigrants and should be a focus of real and bipartisan accountability, alongside policy efforts focused on solutions to a broken immigration system. Instead, we expect Republicans to continue in a dangerous, alternate direction.

The GOP prefers chaos and obstruction, designed to keep a sense of crisis involving non-white immigrants in the headlines and portraying “us” as under siege from threatening invaders.

While investigations should proceed to ensure accountability for those responsible for the horrors near the Rio Grande, we also need to fight against the other fronts of the GOP’s all-out nativist assault on our values and its dangerous implications for our country. This includes House Republicans’ effort to pursue a sham impeachment of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—an effort that will hurtle forward this week when Secretary Mayorkas testifies before the House Judiciary Committee in the latest installment of right-wing alternate reality TV.

Keep in mind, domestic extremists—predominantly right-wing extremists—pose the greatest lethal terrorism threat to the U.S. per our government’s own assessments. Yet Republicans are intent to impeach the leader tasked with protecting our homeland, while basing their supposed case on immigration falsehoods, using many of the same talking points as the domestic extremists themselves.

This is impeachment over policy differences, and the GOP’s refusal to admit that their apocalyptic predictions about the end of Title 42 got it exactly backwards. Border encounter numbers have plummeted since the overdue end of Title 42, including because of new legal pathways announced by the Biden administration that alleviate border pressures and provide alternatives to the trek to the border.

Yet instead of acknowledging these facts, Republicans are suing to block these legal pathways while proceeding with their pre-baked attacks on Secretary Mayorkas as if their predictions got it right. None of the Republican alternative approaches would advance real solutions or move us closer to the full-scale modernization our immigration system needs—or even greater management and control—but the GOP keeps blocking anything like solutions.

The GOP prefers chaos and obstruction, designed to keep a sense of crisis involving non-white immigrants in the headlines and portraying “us” as under siege from threatening invaders. It’s dangerous, and it’s motivated by keeping the GOP base animated and inflamed. In reality, their latest impeachment push continues a political attack that GOP and right-wing leaders started long before President Joe Biden was even in office, when they blamed candidate Biden’s immigration policies for a rise in border encounters occurring during the Trump presidency.

It's all independent from the facts, moves us farther from the solutions we need, and opens the door to dangerous violence and dehumanizing treatment of immigrants by amplifying dangerous white nationalist conspiracies about “invasions” and an effort to “replace” white Americans with immigrants. In the 118th Congress alone, tracking by America’s Voice has revealed that 33 Republican Members of Congress have employed the “invasion” conspiracy, including GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee that Secretary Mayorkas will testify before.

From the horrific revelations emanating from Texas to the renewed sham impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, we need to fight against the dehumanization of immigrants and the normalization of extremism in all its forms.