How a Newfound Love of Quotas Drove Trump's Military Invasion of Los Angeles

There’s a little-discussed word behind the escalating Gestapo-style abductions and deportations of ordinary working people, many longtime residents, that has produced increasing confrontations and mass protests across the U.S., most prominently in Los Angeles in recent days.

The term is quota. Yes, a word long viewed by the right as wicked as socialism or, more recently, woke.

From affirmative action to diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI), and other social justice aims that sometimes include numeric percentages, quotas, are intended to redress centuries of racial, gender, and other discriminatory practices in employment, education, politics, and other sectors of society. Such quotas are designed to shift societal behaviors to create opportunities for historically marginalized people.

But those goals have repeatedly been a target for eradication by federal and state governments and the U.S. Supreme Court, and not just from conservatives. Under President Trump, purging any vestige of DEI has been the cover for wholesale assaults on federal employment, university practices, and elsewhere. It coincides with the white supremacist dream of reversing demographic changes in the U.S. and protecting white and far-right political, social, and economic control.

Yet a quota is no longer an anathema when it comes to their own right-wing policies, as is now playing out in the most draconian and inhumane perversion of immigration policy and “border security” in recent history.

Frustrated by what he viewed as a slow pace in deportations through the first four months of his reign, Trump pushed his top immigration staff to drastically ratchet up daily arrests of migrants to reach a flashy goal of one million deportations in his first year. That meant a steroid level explosion from an average of 660 arrests a day to a mandate–a quota–of 3,000 per day.

Marching orders in late May went to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Department of Homeland Security minister Kristi Noem, and Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement border czar Tom Homan.

All three are hardline Trump devotees who have relished carrying out their daily abductions in the most cruel manner possible–dispatching teams of masked agents roughly kidnapping lone individuals on the street, pulling parents away from their children, students on their way to school or volleyball practice, breaking windows in cars to drag out targets.

It all fit the demeanor for Trump’s secret police architects, especially the fanatical Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration policy guru. A man aptly described by ABC correspondent Terry Moran as “richly endowed by hate” whose “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” fueled not by his brains but his “bile.” And when Moran’s tweet, following the heavy-handed mass raids in Los Angeles and Trump’s autocratic commandeering of the California National Guard to assault the mass protests, prompted Trump’s machine to demand ABC fire Moran, ABC predictably caved and suspended him. Because that’s what major media frequently do on the road to dictatorship.

Trump defended his Los Angeles militarized order as a response to the supposed “invasion” of that city by undocumented immigrants. The real invasion, of course, was the mass deportation arrests of ordinary working people and students, followed by the dispatch of federally commissioned troops, over the objection of state and city officials, to enforce it and quell dissent.

The high-profile Los Angeles showdown symbolizes a significant switch in Trump’s deportation tactics driven by his newfound affection for a quota. It would also require a full repudiation of who Trump had defined as the focus for his deportation plans, outlined in frequent racist demagogy, such as labeling legal Haitian immigrants as eating pet cats and dogs. In a rally in Dayton, Ohioh Trump insisted “I don’t know if you call them (immigrants) people,” Trump said. “In some cases, they’re not people.”

Trump’s campaign rhetoric led many voters into expecting he would focus on deporting immigrants accused of violent and other dangerous crimes, like murder, sexual assault, domestic violence, drunk driving, and child pornography, many of whom are often already in custody.

Over the past decade, reports the Texas Tribune, 70 percent of ICE arrests were “handoffs by local police or federal prisons, according to an analysis by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.” Even with passage of the repressive Laken Riley Act in January, with the votes of 48 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats, the category was stretched to include lesser crimes, such as burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting

But to meet Trump’s demanding quotas, Miller, Homan, and company had to reach far broader, to immigrants with no record, using larger teams of masked federal agents to raid workplaces like factories, restaurants, construction sites, as well as schools and housing centers. The use of unidentified, masked, heavily armed agents is intended to terrorize and intimidate not just the undocumented, but anyone who stands in their way, especially for people who have already witnessed the shredding of legal due process rights.

The New York Times reported how masked agents stormed a student housing complex under construction in Tallahassee, Fl. abducting dozens of migrants, and seizing 15 people working on a flood control project in New Orleans. Massive raids in Martha’s Vineyard and the Berkshires sparked vehement local opposition. And when heavily armed, masked agents in tactical gear raided two San Diego restaurants putting 15 workers in handcuffs, scores of outraged neighborhood residents came out to confront them.

Suddenly, people who had been living and working peacefully for years or decades in the U.S.–janitors, housekeepers, dishwashers, factory, construction, nursing home, laundry, landscape and farm workers–were subject to large scale arrest by heavily armed swat teams in scenes conjuring up images from every dictatorship of the past century. The opposition messaging should clearly identify the everyday people who are being kidnapped and the tactics that are being employed to convey a message of unleashed, unaccountable autocratic power.

Trump’s brown shirt campaign has also sabotaged long-standing immigration system protections, such as courthouses, arresting non-citizens properly showing up for scheduled court hearings. And they were pressuring judges to quickly dismiss cases to more easily avoid due process procedures for quicker deportation, all of which ignores the long-term consequences of discouraging undocumented people from fulfilling their legal judicial expectations. Overall, the quotas remove any incentive to ensure all persons, whether documented or not, are guaranteed the legal rights stipulated by the Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments.

“They are desperate to reach a certain number of arrests per day. And the only way they can find non-citizens easily and quickly is to go to the courthouses, where they [immigrants] are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director for the American Immigration Council. “This administration came into office with the illusion that they had been given a broad mandate to effectuate an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, and they are doubling down now on that agenda.”

“Public polling,” Gupta added, “is showing decreasing support for Trump’s immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies.”

That’s the danger Trump is creating for what for not only his signature issue, but also a longtime fundamental theme for Trumpism and the far right. Even in rural communities. One such example being a Missouri county that voted by 80 percent for Trump where Carol Mayorga, originally from Hong Kong, who had lived peacefully for 20 years, raising a family and making friends in a local pancake and waffle house. Her arrest sparked a vocal backlash and broad public support.

In red states and blue states, many Trump supporters watching neighbors and friends arrested, even deported, and their communities militarized and invaded by images they may have only seen on movie screens, are increasingly feeling betrayed.