Besides Twitter being a meme-fest today and my glimpse into some real-time inauguration day events, I had no other reason to be on that toxic website. And because, of course, Twitter has all the nuance in the world, I also had to restrain myself from the frankly dumb “no, Trump didn’t build a wall and, no, Mexico didn’t’ pay for it” tweets.
Yes, Twitter is about provocation and shoot-from-the-hip-takes that tend to miss just about as much as your amateur shooter actually firing off from the groin. And maybe it’s funny but it doesn’t tend to be when statements that dumb become a sort of tagline.
I know it’s just Twitter but part of me can’t help but find it tiring that that senseless phrase was bopping around today. (And also that the Washington Post apparently got Cesar Chavez confused for Eleanor Roosevelt.)
Take it from the Trump supporter, Nicholas Anastasio, I interviewed at the Trump rally the night before the 2016 election. In the most awkward place to be both a Mexican and journalist, I was next to him and as soon as the ‘build the wall’ chant started, this man turns to me and says that Trump is ”just kidding about that, he means policy and rules. He’s not actually going to build a wall.”
Yeah, no shit. Have you seen the southern border? To think one could just prop up some wall was ludicrous even before Orange Man went into the Oval.
But as he promised, his anti-immigrant policies started from day one though and even in his last few days, Trump made sure to make it as difficult as possible to remove some of his more cruel immigration policies.
He restricted legal immigration, separated families, reduced the number and quotas of asylum seekers and refugees, played with DACA and sought endlessly to do away with it regardless of his ‘big heart’, and stopped actual tax-paying immigrants from receiving benefits and hampered their chances of becoming citizens.
In regards to Mexico, he essentially made their side of the border one of the most dangerous “waiting areas” as migrants now have to claim and process their asylum position there before attempting to do the same in the US. These migration protection protocols caused over 60,000 migrants to wait in Mexico in the most dismal of conditions. Courts hundreds of miles away dictated their fate - so much for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s claims about national sovereignty.
It’s not a wall but it’s definitely paid for with Mexican force.
I could go on, and on, and on but there’s potentially new rules to cover and policies to examine with this new administration.
Again, it’s because of hardworking journalists and activists and human rights advocates that the public is aware of all these heinous acts and policies and because they have made sure that this is recognized as one of the biggest stains in American history.
So yes, Trump ‘Didn’T BuIlD a WalL, anD mExIco Didn’T pAy fOr it’. He did worse.
He built them around families, he forced Mexico to essentially become another one in its southern border and he left a generational trauma that we are seeing now and have yet to experience as hundreds of children cannot find their parents again.
He didn’t even need a wall for that.