Sulma Arias: How Corporate Greed Fuels Trump’s Assault on Immigrants and Medicaid
By Sulma Arias
Those who scapegoat immigrants want you to believe falsehoods about our loved ones and neighbors who have been detained and deported. They also want you to believe we can rip families apart and raid schools, hospitals, and churches without undermining the fabric of our society. These are lies. And, in addition to the pain caused by these lies, the time we’ve spent disputing them has made us miss the big picture: The attack on immigrants – like the attack on safety-net programs like Medicaid – is a means to an end.
Donald Trump’s tyrannical treatment of immigrants is the tip of the spear of an overall agenda to enrich the greedy few at everyone else’s expense. His regime of billionaire-backed bullies doesn’t just work to advance the interests of corporations that put profits over people – they champion the ones that profit off of our pain. In this way, mass detention, often in privately-owned prisons, and deportation are one more way to pickpocket public dollars that should go to our families and communities, so CEOs can buy new yachts.
We are so overwhelmed by the sheer cruelty of actions that have gone viral on social media – like the brazen arrest of a pregnant mother and teenage girl whose face was shoved into the ground while ICE agents were swarmed by two-dozen onlookers demanding a warrant – that we fail to realize that these abductions are part of a massive money making scheme. ICE Director Ted Lyons said (unironically) that he was building an “Amazon-Prime” system of mass detention and deportation. And again, this is done for the benefit of megacorporations and their ultra-wealthy CEOs, not working families.
Our 401ks are taking a beating, but the stock prices of private prison contractors like GeoGroup are way up, because there is big money to be made in building and supplying a detention and deportation machine capable of disappearing at least 11 million people. The nightmare budget reconciliation bill that passed in the House of Representatives and is currently in front of the Senate transfers hundreds of billions of our public dollars to corporations in the name of “enforcement.”
In addition to this, Trump is directing Congress to strip over $1 trillion away from health care, food aid, and housing, to fund a tax scam giveaway to billionaires and corporations. One in five Americans relies on Medicaid for their health coverage, for instance. If we take it away, or underfund it, so that it can’t function, hospitals and clinics – especially in rural areas – will be forced to close. This means less health care and higher costs for you. And it means a boon for private insurance corporations, who can charge higher premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses while systematically denying and delaying care to bolster their profit margins.
No American is an island. Not the undocumented worker who files taxes with an Individual Tax Identification Number rather than a Social Security Number – as these workers do, contributing billions to our social safety net every year. Not the disabled person who is treated with contempt by Secretary of Health & Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Not the caregiver who will be forced to watch their loved ones die once Congressional cuts to Medicaid and Medicare kick in. Not the four-year-old U.S. citizen with cancer who was just deported to a country they have never known, to die without adequate medical care. We need to start seeing and understanding how these seemingly separate attacks on Americans are all part of one big scheme.
Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio claim removing immigrants from our communities, workforce, and schools will supercharge our economy. The opposite is true. We’ll lose Social Security funds, local tax revenue, and many of the critical workers who grow and prepare our food, and care for our children and elders. These same people contribute at least $26 billion every year to Social Security, without ever getting a penny in return. So if we take immigrants out of the economy, we put your grandmother’s monthly check, as well as the survival of Social Security, at risk.
We are living in a Jenga tower, and one by one, the Trump regime is pulling out the pieces that hold every one of us up.
We cannot, and will not, allow Trump or anyone else to play games like this with our families and our lives. American workers made ours the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. There is more than enough for us all to thrive if the crooks don’t steal it, which is what they’re trying to do, right before our eyes.
What can you do? Call your elected officials – today, tomorrow, and every day – and demand they do their jobs and stop this madness now. Then find a community-based organization where you live so you can lift your voice with others who, like you, understand that denying the rights of immigrants and stripping health care away from millions of adults and children harms us all.
Sulma Arias is the Executive Director of the People’s Action Institute.
