George Floyd and Immigrants

Think these things are unrelated? Wrong. What we witnessed during the BLM protests, and what we're seeing today in the maligning of hard-working immigrants, follow the same patterns.

When George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, I often said that he was unjustly killed. The responses I got from people who disagreed with that assessment often followed a specific line of reasoning that, as a half-black man in this country, I knew all too well. I’m going to outline this, which amounts to a list of posits about George Floyd, such as:

1. He had a criminal record.

2. He was high on drugs at the time. That’s what killed him, not the officer.

3. He should have listened and done what the police told him to do.

It didn’t seem to matter, to a lot of people, that George Floyd had experienced no due process at all for whatever crime he was alleged to have committed. And I could see in the course of these conversations that the person was grasping, looking for anything that would malign George Floyd enough to justify killing him without a trial.

Of course, none of these points justify his murder. So, making them didn’t change anything with regard to my reasoning on this, but I could see their own morals shifting as they struggled to make the arguments slip. Because, of course, having a criminal record isn’t enough to warrant being murdered in cold blood. Independent of George Floyd, most of the people I know would have said the exact same thing. I could see the rationalization take root in their minds, though. I could see them nodding along and shifting their mentality to justify.

In their minds, many were ready to deny George Floyd his constitutionally guaranteed due process of law. You might find yourself in a similar mindset. If your first thought about Daunte Wright, shot and killed by policemen in Minneapolis in 2021, should have been following police instruction and that would have saved him, and that the police were in the right, then you’re making the same argument. If you think Andre Hill should not have presented himself as a threat (he was killed while walking out of his garage with a cell phone in one hand), then you’re making the same argument.

This is called blaming the victim. And it’s the same thing that’s happening to undocumented humans in the United States right now. The same old tired excuses are being trotted out again when the ‘due process’ talk starts picking up:

1. Immigrants commit crimes.

2. Immigrants bring fentanyl into this country.

3. Immigrants should have done it the right way.

And therefore, the conclusion goes, they should not be afforded due process of law. This is the argument the administration makes, and the supporters make. You may find yourself nodding along to the above, but remember:

Due process is how we discover whether any of these are true about a particular person. Without that, you (reader) could be accused and deported, and if you are, how do you fix that? You can’t. And yet, we’re building inhospitable shelters to detain people who, again, have not had their day in court, which is what ‘due process’ means.

What’s next for those people?

We’ve seen it before. There are only two ways this goes: the federal government releases them along with a formal apology (as happened, eventually, during WW2 with the Japanese internment camps). The alternative is they suffer and then die. Let’s be honest, there are people celebrating, literally celebrating, the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz,” where they literally plan to put immigrants in cages. We know that very few of these immigrants committed any real crime, and that these are not the drug dealers. We also know that many of them were “doing it the right way,” until Trump pulled the rug.

My point in all of the above is that the maligning of immigrants follows the same trajectory as the maligning of black people, and people will die from this. Ask Andre Hill. As long as we ship people effectively out of sight, they are out of sight/out of mind. And when they are out of sight and silenced in their cages, who speaks for them? At that point, we only get one narrative, and that is “they do crimes, they bring in drugs, they didn’t follow the process.” Over and over again, a massive machine is working to label them, and even if they weren’t rendered invisible in the public eye, they would never be able to match the disinformation machine created on the right.

This is why we speak up. We must continue to speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves. In doing so, whether we realize it or not, we speak for ourselves too.