Ostensibly, the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a government policy or a private practice is intended to produce race and gender neutrality in American society, and most especially, in the practices of the government itself.
That said, the most visible practice of Trump’s most prominent federal employees—the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—is racial profiling.
Trump’s spokespersons and ICE officials keep insisting that they’re targeting convicted felons in their deportation efforts, but it’s clear that they’re preponderantly seizing people because they look Latino, or possibly Black or Asian, who may or may not have documentation. There have been a handful of reports of non-Hispanic whites being detained, including a Danish-born man living in Mississippi, as well as several European and Canadian tourists. But it is simply undeniable that it’s nonwhites whom ICE is targeting.
By sweeping up day laborers, car wash and garment workers, and the attendees at swap meets in the Latino parts of Los Angeles, ICE’s criterion is clearly racial. Of the 722 people arrested by ICE in the Los Angeles area from June 1 through June 10, a Los Angeles Times study revealed, 69 percent had no criminal convictions. But they were in jobs and places that immigrants frequented, and they sure looked Latino. In consequence, as Jackie Ramirez, a Los Angeles radio host, told the Times, “you’re scared to be brown.”
Which is why many thousands of L.A. Latinos are sheltering at home rather than reporting to work, or riding buses, or going to church or the supermarket.
Two lawsuits filed last Wednesday in federal court in Los Angeles asked the court to declare ICE’s actions in the Los Angeles area to be illegal due to their warrantless arrests, their failure to provide counsel, and their racial profiling. I doubt the suits pointed out that racial profiling runs counter, at least in theory, to the administration’s ostensible policies on race neutrality embodied in their war on DEI—but does it ever!
ICE’s racial profiling isn’t limited to Los Angeles, of course. In mid-June, ICE agents arrested 84 grooms and stable hands at a Louisiana racetrack, and announced that two of them were convicted felons. As to the others: Well, all we know is that they were at the stables and looked Latino. Surely, some white folks—trainers’ assistants, most probably—were likely at the stables, too, but there’s no record of their having been arrested. They just didn’t look the part.
Such a great share of California’s populace is Latino (40.8 percent, according to a Census Bureau report from last year) that their sudden flight from work, schools, transit, stores, church, and sidewalks has greatly upset most non-Latino Californians, including Republicans. Every Republican legislator or member of Congress has plenty of Latino voters in his or her district, and now that ICE has effectively locked them inside their homes, those Republicans have begun to speak out. Noting that their local businesses (often, their core financial supporters) had told them of their vanishing workforces, six Republican legislators sent a letter last week to President Trump imploring him to refocus the ICE arrests on convicted felons only.
“We have heard from employers in our districts that recent ICE raids are not only targeting undocumented workers, but also creating widespread fear among other employees, including those with legal immigration status,” they wrote. “We urge you to direct ICE and DHS to focus their enforcement operations on criminal immigrants, and when possible to avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.” They also urged Trump to create a legal status for non-criminal undocumented immigrants who have “longstanding ties to our communities.” That request was echoed by a statement last Wednesday from the legislature’s Problem Solvers Caucus, which consists of 13 Democrats and 13 Republicans.
Racial profiling in a state that’s 41 percent Latino, which means they have plurality status in the America’s largest state, was bound to be so disruptive that it might have given pause to Trump’s counselors—particularly those concerned about the electability of California’s Republicans. That, however, is so not a concern of Trump consigliere Stephen Miller that any such doubts probably never reached Trump’s ears.
Miller, it’s clear, not only hates multihued immigrants, but even more the white liberals who defend them, not to mention the entire Los Angeles political ecosystem in which he was raised and which he’s despised since childhood. If there was any doubt about the depth and breadth of his loathing, the lawsuit that the legal group he founded, America First Legal, brought against the L.A. Dodgers last week should dispel any doubts. The suit argues that the Dodgers’ diversity efforts violate our race-neutral civil rights laws, and also adds, gratuitously, that the Dodgers also refused to admit ICE agents to their parking lot when those agents showed up earlier in June. Presumably, the team’s diversity initiatives in question are those that its community relations department has fostered, and those also reflected in its hiring practices for service workers. The suit also attacks Mark Walter, the team’s majority owner, as “a social justice advocate.”
If Walter is to be scorned as a social justice advocate, what does that make Branch Rickey, the team’s majority owner in the 1940s, who went beyond what any other business owner in America ever did by hiring Jackie Robinson to break baseball’s color line? That one action created an enduring Dodger brand, which they’ve continued by hiring 1980s pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, who electrified L.A.’s Latino community with his heroics; by featuring baseball’s most prominent Jewish player, the great Sandy Koufax; by bringing Hideo Nomo to the team—the first Japanese player in the U.S. major leagues; and by now featuring the equally Japanese Shohei Ohtani. Moves like these not only integrated the team; they also integrated the stands, bringing countless thousands of fans to the ballpark to see their particular ethnic favorite. And when the Dodgers reached out to promote minorities and women in jobs and in the community, that was, among other things, a way of doubling down on their very profitable brand.
That’s clearly a brand at which Miller recoils, and which Trump, left to his druthers, isn’t all that enamored of, either. (After all, the only group of immigrants he’s inviting into the country, even as he tries to kick out all others, is South Africa’s white Afrikaners.)
The anti-DEI, we must understand, doesn’t mean race-neutral; far from it. To Trump and his goons, it means whites über alles. And it means that his cops’ modus operandi is racial profiling.