Bad Faith And The Legitimizing Of An Immigration 'Crackdown'

It was a lecture I’ll always remember, not because it injured my ego or hurt my feelings, but because my dumb ass deserved it.

It was summer 2014, my second week working for Rewire.News, a reproductive rights publication that has since been through several iterations, and I had written a headline for a story about the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature’s plans to further restrict poor people’s bodily autonomy with a series of flagrantly unconstitutional anti-abortion measures that they bet would pass muster with the Supreme Court’s radicalized right-wing majority. 

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The exact wording of the headline escapes me today, but I know I used the word “crackdown” to describe the actions of a state legislature controlled by lawmakers who enjoyed one-party rule that would make Putin blush. My headline said Alabama Republicans were laying out plans to crack down on their constituents’ constitutional right to abortion care. 

I was told in no uncertain terms to avoid the term “crackdown” when describing state legislatures’ various efforts to criminalize abortion and make the procedure inaccessible for folks who don’t have the cash to flee to a free state for care. There’s nothing on which to “crack down,” I was told. And that was correct: Americans having the choice to control their fertility without state interference is not a problem to be solved. Using “crackdown” to describe those anti-abortion efforts – so full of political bad faith it’s difficult to fully grasp – reinforced the right-wing framing that says abortion is bad and must be stopped. That this is described as a reasonable and legitimate political viewpoint is a tragedy. 

I had advanced that cause with my headline. It was a good lesson at a publication that refused to comply with the mainstream media’s weapons-grade false equivalence in reporting on abortion rights. 

On Monday morning I turned on the TV to ingest my daily portion of CNN poison and was brought back to that day, when I learned about the use of “crackdown” to advance the right’s bad-faith framing of abortion rights and the unconstitutional restrictions invented by people at think tanks who are paid handsomely to make modern life slightly more miserable. The press – that shiny, supplicant consent manufacturer – was once agin using “crackdown” to legitimize and even normalize the fascist narrative that immigrants – those with and without proper documentation – are imminent dangers to law-abiding, red-white-and-blue-ass American families and the continued existence of the United States. 

As it is with hard-earned reproductive rights, there is nothing about immigration that requires a government crackdown unless you buy into the lurid, fanciful right-wing idea that a good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing campaign is all we need to Make Things Right Again. 

If you, like Vice President JD Vance, purport to believe migrants buying millions of homes in the US is what’s ailing the housing market and keeping Real Americans from buying homes, then yes, a crackdown on immigration is necessary. If you, like Republican officials and the fascist media they consume, pretend to believe immigrant gangs have violently seized entire neighborhoods and sometimes entire towns and cities in the US, then a crackdown sounds like it might be appropriate. If you choose to believe immigrants in the United States are inherently more violent and prone to criminality than the average American citizen, a crackdown might be in order. It's why Elon Musk and his fellow techno-fascists feigning literacy must believe in a shockingly racist interpretation of Lord of the Rings; it justifies their hate of people they want to hate; namely, black and brown immigrants.

The Nourishing Hate Of Stephen Miller

The devourer of hate is now in charge of creating the conditions for a military crackdown on the American public.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Pretending to believe the right’s unreality, so seamlessly generated by the machines in our pockets, is the key to making bad-faith politics work. Nowhere has this been clearer than with immigration, an issue that has been used to make millions of otherwise well-adjusted Americans, sipping lemonade poolside, relaxing at home on a weekend morning somewhere in the middle of the country a thousand miles from the nearest border crossing, fearful of Mexican cartels. The immigration discourse, poisoned by disinformation and racism and bad faith, has created generations of people living normal lives worrying constantly that the richest nation in human history with the biggest military in human history is on the verge of falling to armies of brown folks seeking decent jobs and shelter and maybe a little food if it's not too much trouble for inhabitants of the Land of Plenty. 

You, like me, might be old enough to remember the South and Central American “caravans” that became the fixation of every media outlet in the run-up to the 2012 and 2016 elections. We were told by cable news outlets headed by people having their brains cooked in Elon Musk's fascism hotbox that these were hoards of criminals pouring out of their native countries and headed toward the US to do more crimes, not poor, desperate, hungry people – mostly women and children – trying to stay alive long enough to seek salvation in what they had been told was the Land Of The Free (they were told at the border that we’re fresh out of freedom, sorry). If, upon seeing these so-called caravans making their way north toward Texas, you desired an immigration crackdown, then it is essential these people are merciless criminals bent on destruction and domination and maybe even an overthrow of the U.S. government if you let your imagination run wild. Or maybe they're a threat to the purity of America if you're into blood-and-soil politics like the entire Republican Party.

Follow this entirely invented need for an immigration crackdown to its natural conclusion and you get secret police working directly for the president in the streets of cities that largely oppose his regime. Pull the bad-faith thread long enough – feed the unreality that necessitates a crackdown for long enough – and you get people like Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino cosplaying the gestapo, terrorizing American communities with a vile little grin, ignoring court orders from judges unwilling to enforce their rulings against his brutality and persistent law breaking, and leading the immigration "crackdown" that was so long ago mainstreamed by the newspapers run by rich guys who prioritize Republicans' feelings over all else. Feed this bad-faith machine enough and it'll shit out something shaped like Bovino, a man who takes glamour shots dressed as an SS officer and takes his orders from fascist influencers on the the democracy-incompatible X platform formerly known as Twitter.

Apparently Bovino, who recently moved his masked soldiers from Chicago to Charlotte because the big boys were too cold in the Windy City, is taking orders from loveless gooners sitting behind a keyboard nineteen hours a day, drowning in the kind of nihilism that so easily hardens into fascism, guys who might say they’re married to a Grok AI pornbot. When these guys aren’t pretending to be Ancient Rome buffs because they aspire to have the defined midsection of a Roman soldier, they are giving orders to the country’s lawless secret police. We are living under the tyranny of memes.

Those lawless secret police are logged on and scrolling and hearing the cries of their frothing fanboys and girls desperate for more of the good content: Latino folks being dragged across sidewalks, beaten and arrested as they cry out for mercy, children wailing for their fathers and mothers as masked men drag them toward the meat grinder of an ICE concentration camp. These nightmare images reflect the darkness within them – darkness that they have chosen to indulge – and a guy like Bovino is all too happy to provide more of this content for them.

It feeds their fear, it nourishes their hate, it confirms the priors of their bad-faith unreality.

Deport the workers, deport the kids, deport the babies, deport them all, black-pilled freaks demand from behind their keyboards, knowing Bovino and the enforcers are listening because the X platform is the central hub of 21st century fascism. Bovino is a celebrity for these people with curdled souls. He is Jagger and Bowie and Beyonce and Prince all wrapped into one. Bovino gets to live their dream. He gets to inflict pain on those who they consider subhuman. He gets to instill fear in communities learning to live under authoritarianism while local leaders largely shrug and say there's nothing to be done. He gets to openly defy judges and governors and mayors who he has threatened with arrest if they interrupt his daily ethnic cleansing shifts.

'What's Happening Here Is Evil'

"There is no sanctuary here," Bovino told CNN while he was having a good old time terrorizing Chicago neighborhoods before the weather turned and he fled for a warmer southern location. “Better get used to us now, because this going to be normal very soon."

Bovino's rejection of sanctuary made me think of the American right wing's love and adoration for their perverse version of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The real Jesus, the historical Jesus whose politics were anathema to modern conservatism, was a big fan of sanctuary. He urged his disciples and his followers to provide sanctuary for anyone who needed it, no matter how foreign or how sinful. It was their duty to care for those in need of it.

Protection, care, love disconnected from biases and petty hatreds: This is what Jesus demanded of those who believed he was the son of God. The least of us, Jesus commanded, should be top of mind. It is Bovino's job to terrorize the people Jesus prioritized over all else. He appears to take great pleasure in his job, his agenda, his role in society that is anti-Christ in every way.

If you don't believe me, just ask the priest who was recently bludgeoned by Trump's soldiers outside the ICE concentration camp in Chicago. "What's happening here," the priest said while being mugged by masked men, "is evil." (I'm not a particularly religious guy, as you might know, but I think Jesus had pretty great politics and those politics can and probably should be leveraged by the left in a fanatically religious country like the US)

The legitimization of immigration as a national emergency has given rise to men like Bovino, men who have waited patiently in the shadows for national leaders who will unleash pain and terror upon populations they hate and fear based on a version of reality that makes the unconscionable not just viable, but necessary. A vile man like Bovino would still be seething in the shadows, unknown to you and me, if Americans had not been conditioned to believe an immigration "crackdown" was in order.

“We’re gonna go where that threat is," Bovino said when asked which city his masked goons would descend upon next after they were done indiscriminately arresting people in Chicago based on race because Brett Kavanaugh said that was OK.

That there is no threat plays no factor here. Elected officials in Charlotte were baffled as to why Bovino and his goon squad were fleeing Chicago for their city; they were speechless when asked about videos of Bovino's armed masked men marching down the streets of quiet suburban Charlotte neighborhoods, arresting landscapers putting up Christmas decorations. We do not have a problem with immigration here, the officials said, much less an emergency in need of intervention from anonymous men carrying long guns taking orders from Stephen Miller.

We have been told over and over and over again that crackdowns are a legitimate part of a democracy's immigration policy. When we wriggle out of this fascist hell – and there's every reason to believe we will – we have to say clearly and forcefully that there is no place for a crackdown on immigration because there is nothing on which to crack down. Unless you buy into Greg Bovino's monstrously convenient worldview.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social