Immigration cruelty may be hurting Trump — but he can’t stop

The Trump administration has sought to implement its racist ideology without democratic consensus, a process that has increased with alarming haste this summer. Seemingly every week brings a new barrage of coordinated attacks of cruelty against immigrants, both documented and undocumented. From holding children in crowded detention facilities with no deadline for release to deporting 30-year residents who were brought to the U.S. as six-month-old children to jailing U.S. citizens suspected of appearing Hispanic, summer has brought an unprecedented crackdown on whole communities.

Whether such displays of cruelty are the cause of Trump’s plummeting polling on his signature issue — Trump is now deeply underwater on immigration, with even non-college-educated white voters, a large portion of his base, evenly divided at 47-48 on the issue — or its effect is still up for debate. But the brutality is no longer in question.

Already this week, Trump has followed up on his anti-immigrant campaign with attacks on U.S. service members, children receiving cancer treatments and congressional staffers attempting to engage in oversight. He’s also diverted disaster preparedness funds ahead of hurricane season to his pet project and dangled the possibility of a presidential pardon to incentivize lawlessness in fulfilling his campaign promise of building a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

View the complete August 29 article by Sophia Tesfaye from Salon on the AlterNet website here.