Why do people hate ICE...

[RocksInMyHead]

The part I bolded would be a bit of a stretch.

I can't be the only one who remembers all the bickering and protesting about "The Wall", family separation at the border, "kids in cages" photo ops, and his executive order that progressives branded as the "Muslim Ban"

And some of those protests were pretty noteworthy in size.

30,000 New Yorkers March to End Refugee & Muslim Ban - NYC, Long Island, New York State | New York Immigration Coalition - Revision

At least 30,000 New Yorkers - including immigrants, refugees, Muslims and allies - gathered in Battery Park City across from the Statue of Liberty to demand that Trump rescind his recent executive orders and end all hateful policies. You can see photos here. They then marched to Foley Square...

www.nyic.org

Tens of thousands rallied for Families Belong Together

SAN FRANCISCO – An estimated 20,000 demonstrators gathered at City Hall in San Francisco June 30 for a massive Families Belong Together march and rally, demanding an end to the Trump administration’s harsh policies of family separation and detention and its failure to reunite thousands of famili...

www.peoplesworld.org

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/03/who-came-out-in-the-brutal-heat-to-the-families-belong-together-march-heres-our-data/

WaPo estimates that 400,000 people participated in those various protests about his first-term immigration policies.

What threshold are we using to quantify "significant"?

Fair; I misspoke - I intended to reiterate my previous post, where I said that there were no significant protests against ICE. Because we've been talking about deportations. Some of Trump's immigration policies were protested during his first term (again, largely because of his rhetoric on them), but I don't recall any that had to do with deportations, so again, your hypothesis that it was okay for a young black man to deport people but not an old white man doesn't appear to have any basis in reality.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Fair; I misspoke - I intended to reiterate my previous post, where I said that there were no significant protests against ICE. Because we've been talking about deportations. Some of Trump's immigration policies were protested during his first term (again, largely because of his rhetoric on them), but I don't recall any that had to do with deportations, so again, your hypothesis that it was okay for a young black man to deport people but not an old white man doesn't appear to have any basis in reality.

I'll have to dig around on the Wayback machine and find it (I know I linked it here some years back in a debate during Trump's first term)

It was a New York Times piece called "The Great Expulsion" (I want to say it was from between 2012-2014), and one of the people interviewed was an Immigration Studies professor from UC.

The professor speculated that Obama's identity as a person of color, and the fact that his campaign was surrounded in progressive branding helped soften the public reaction to certain immigration enforcement practices that, under a white conservative president, would have triggered a much stronger backlash.

I'll see if I can find it on one of the archive sources later.

The part of that article that still sticks out in my mind was that his position as the first Black president gave Democrats a "tendency toward deference", making it politically difficult for them to vocally oppose his actions without feeling disloyal or divisive.

I put the "tendency toward deference" in quotes because that's the line that more vividly remember from the piece.

 

[camille70]

I'll have to dig around on the Wayback machine and find it (I know I linked it here some years back in a debate during Trump's first term)

It was a New York Times piece called "The Great Expulsion" (I want to say it was from between 2012-2014), and one of the people interviewed was an Immigration Studies professor from UC.

The professor speculated that Obama's identity as a person of color, and the fact that his campaign was surrounded in progressive branding helped soften the public reaction to certain immigration enforcement practices that, under a white conservative president, would have triggered a much stronger backlash.

I'll see if I can find it on one of the archive sources later.

The part of that article that still sticks out in my mind was that his position as the first Black president gave Democrats a "tendency toward deference", making it politically difficult for them to vocally oppose his actions without feeling disloyal or divisive.

I put the "tendency toward deference" in quotes because that's the line that more vividly remember from the piece.

Obama was known as the Deporter-in-Chief. He had some pushback but they weren't framing deportations in dehumanizing terms and wasn't using it as a policy to motivate his base. They also used ankle monitors while people were going through the asylum process and had a 90+% show rate even when people were getting deported. He also wasn't using the process to enrich private detention center owners and focused on actual criminals.

Stephen Miller under Trump is trying to cause immigrants as much pain and humiliation as possible and immigrants serve as a foil for people to blame their problems on and a tool for fear mongering. They cant both be taking all the jobs and all the welfare.

 

[GoldenBoy89]

I'll have to dig around on the Wayback machine and find it (I know I linked it here some years back in a debate during Trump's first term)

It was a New York Times piece called "The Great Expulsion" (I want to say it was from between 2012-2014), and one of the people interviewed was an Immigration Studies professor from UC.

The professor speculated that Obama's identity as a person of color, and the fact that his campaign was surrounded in progressive branding helped soften the public reaction to certain immigration enforcement practices that, under a white conservative president, would have triggered a much stronger backlash.

I'll see if I can find it on one of the archive sources later.

The part of that article that still sticks out in my mind was that his position as the first Black president gave Democrats a "tendency toward deference", making it politically difficult for them to vocally oppose his actions without feeling disloyal or divisive.

I put the "tendency toward deference" in quotes because that's the line that more vividly remember from the piece.

Well that explains the left but how do you explain the right going from at the time complaining about Obama not doing enough or anything on immigration to now seemingly holding him up as the gold standard of immigration enforcement?

 

[RocksInMyHead]

I'll have to dig around on the Wayback machine and find it (I know I linked it here some years back in a debate during Trump's first term)

It was a New York Times piece called "The Great Expulsion" (I want to say it was from between 2012-2014), and one of the people interviewed was an Immigration Studies professor from UC.

The professor speculated that Obama's identity as a person of color, and the fact that his campaign was surrounded in progressive branding helped soften the public reaction to certain immigration enforcement practices that, under a white conservative president, would have triggered a much stronger backlash.

I'll see if I can find it on one of the archive sources later.

The part of that article that still sticks out in my mind was that his position as the first Black president gave Democrats a "tendency toward deference", making it politically difficult for them to vocally oppose his actions without feeling disloyal or divisive.

I put the "tendency toward deference" in quotes because that's the line that more vividly remember from the piece.

Fine, but that's speculation from more than a decade ago. Since then, we've had two old white men in the Presidency to test the hypothesis, and neither of them got appreciably more pushback on deportation than Obama did. That's despite Biden deporting significantly more people than Obama. It's only the shifting of rhetoric and the changing of tactics that have actually had any real effect on public opinion on this issue, not the skin color of the guy in the Oval Office.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Well that explains the left but how do you explain the right going from at the time complaining about Obama not doing enough or anything on immigration to now seemingly holding him up as the gold standard of immigration enforcement?

That would tie into what I mentioned to someone else earlier in the chain...

When it comes (very) vocal activism, it tends to be centered around whoever the "highest value political target" is from the other team, and the things they happen to be engaging in at the time.


So much like during Biden's tenure (despite him doing a lot of deportations, and holding a position on Israel that progressives probably didn't care for too much), social justice activists opted to focus more on what governors like Ron DeSantis were doing with school libraries.

Likewise. During the Biden admin, republicans were very vocal about federal overreach, now that their guy is in the big chair, despite the fact there's quite a bit of federal overreach Trump is engaging in, they've shifted their focus to the things they don't like that Democratic governors and mayors are doing.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Fine, but that's speculation from more than a decade ago. Since then, we've had two old white men in the Presidency to test the hypothesis, and neither of them got appreciably more pushback on deportation than Obama did. That's despite Biden deporting significantly more people than Obama. It's only the shifting of rhetoric and the changing of tactics that have actually had any real effect on public opinion on this issue, not the skin color of the guy in the Oval Office.

There was more pushback against Trump in his first term than Obama got...so much so (and so many legal challenges), that it effectively prevented him from doing as many as he wanted to do in the first term.

Day Without Immigrants (2017) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Day Without Immigrants (or A Day Without Immigrants) was a protest and boycott that took place on February 16, 2017, to demonstrate the importance of immigration,[1][2] and to protest President Donald Trump's plans to build a border wall and to potentially deport millions of undocumented immigrants.[3]

Families Belong Together - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Protesters demand: ‘Reunite migrant families! No detentions or deportations!’

Outrage has been sweeping the U.S. with mass protests erupting from coast to coast since April 6 when the Trump administration announced a racist “zero-tolerance policy” for all migrants entering the country through the Mexican border. That meant all im/migrants, including asylum seekers, would be t

www.workers.org

Even Trump's plan of deporting more people was enough to spark coast to coast protests and demonstrations. Whereas, Obama did actually do quite a bit of deporting, and the only noteworthy pushback he got was from libertarian think tanks and a few Immigrant advocacy groups.


And as I noted before, during the Biden admin (despite doing a lot of deporting), the social justice activists opted to focus on other things (BLM-related activism, protesting against Florida book bans, and then Israel/Gaza)

 

[RocksInMyHead]

Even Trump's plan of deporting more people was enough to spark coast to coast protests and demonstrations. Whereas, Obama did actually do quite a bit of deporting, and the only noteworthy pushback he got was from libertarian think tanks and a few Immigrant advocacy groups.

You say "Obama actually did do quite a bit of deporting" as though Trump didn't also "actually" deport similar numbers of people during his first term. People were opposed to upping deportation numbers and the rhetoric that Trump used; notice that all of the examples of protests you linked were about changes to policy or rhetoric, not the existing policies that remained in place.

And as I noted before, during the Biden admin (despite doing a lot of deporting), the social justice activists opted to focus on other things (BLM-related activism, protesting against Florida book bans, and then Israel/Gaza)

You're trying waaay too hard to make the race card stick on this one.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

You're trying waaay too hard to make the race card stick on this one.

Why would anyone expect the sentiments surrounding the racial complexities of his presidency to be any different for this specific issue, when it was in place for many of the other issues?

There are other political scientists and sociologists who've written about how the dynamics of his historic presidency (being the first Black president) made progressive (in particular, white progressives) very hesitant to publicly critique his policies.

Charles M. Blow: Democrats must avoid the Obama-era silence trap

Charles M. Blow writes that Democrats will not gain anything by trying to appeal to the mushy middle.

www.sltrib.com

Progressives Can’t Repeat the Mistakes of 2008

For the left to be effective in a post-Trump Washington, it must avoid the culture of deference that set in after Obama’s victory.

www.theatlantic.com

Political scientist Jane Junn and sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza have written that Obama’s racial identity created a kind of moral legitimacy for progressives, making them hesitant to oppose him lest they appear disloyal to a broader cause of racial progress.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Michelle Alexander argued that Obama’s symbolic importance made it politically difficult for progressives—particularly white ones—to mount strong opposition to certain policy choices.
Taylor wrote that the symbolism of a Black president created a “shield” that deflected criticism from the left, even as his administration pursued policies like expanded drone warfare and Wall Street bailouts.


So if they were willing to "temper" their criticisms of Wall Street bailouts and drone strikes (something they've never been coy about with regards to other presidents), why would anyone believe their approach would be any different for the topic of deportations?


Are you suggesting that the concept of "White progressives being afraid to criticize Obama, out of fear of being labelled racist or impeding racial progress and undermining a historic acheivement" wasn't a thing back then?

 

[RocksInMyHead]

Why would anyone expect the sentiments surrounding the racial complexities of his presidency to be any different for this specific issue, when it was in place for many of the other issues?

Because there's a far simpler and more straightforward explanation.