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Angelika Albaladejo| Capital & Main

When Joe Biden ran againstPresident Donald Trump in 2020, he promised to fight back against anti-immigrant policies, including those that punished sanctuary cities and that gave more local authorities power to act as an extra arm of federal immigration enforcement.

More than one year into Bidens presidency, his administration has done little to support so-called sanctuaries cities, counties or states that limit how much they help federal agents to investigate, arrest or detain immigrants.

Biden told voters he would dial back Trumps expansion of cooperation agreements between local police officers and agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instead, the Biden administration has left such collaborations in place and is even trying to convince local governments that refused to cooperate with ICE under Trump to start doing so now, a Capital & Main review of government documents and speeches shows.

While Trump used the presidential pulpit to drive sanctuary cities, and undocumented immigration more broadly, into a kind of culture war, the Biden White House has made it a lower priority, said Benjamin Gonzalez OBrien, a San Diego State University political science professor who co-wrote a 2019 book about thehistory and politicsof sanctuary policies.

In Congress, deep partisan divisions and internal party disagreements endure, and have caused immigration reform efforts tostall out, as Republicans falsely accuse Biden of overseeing open borders and Democrats fail to pass any of the nearly half-dozen immigration bills introduced so far.

But immigration remains a part of daily life in communities across the country, and local and state governments continue to pass laws and elect officials on one or the other side of the issue. These local decisions on whether or not to collaborate with federal enforcement canaffect public safetyand trust in law enforcement, including by diverting resources or encouraging racial profiling.

Were going to see the battle over sanctuary policies play out [in different localities] until we get some kind of national legislation, said OBrien. There are still millions of people living in a legal gray zone who are afraid of leaving the house and interacting with other members of their community because that threat of deportation hangs over their head.

As a presidential candidate, Biden pledged to end Trumpshistoric expansionof local-federal cooperation on immigration enforcement because the partnerships known as 287(g) agreements undermine trust and cooperation between local law enforcement and the communities they are charged to protect.

But under Biden, the federal government is still relying on local police partnerships as the main engine of the deportation system, said Lena Graber, a senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco who studies the role of local police in immigration enforcement.

More than 140 local law enforcement agencies are currently signed up to help ICE, including by sharing information with federal agents when they arrest, detain or intend to release an undocumented immigrant.

A Capital & Main analysis of ICE data shows that under Trump, 111 sheriffs departments began partnering with ICE for the first time through the 287(g) program. Nearly half of all local agencies that did so were in Florida and Texas. Some pro-immigrant advocates, policy analysts and civil rights groups say Trumps aggressive recruitment of local sheriffs facilitateddiscriminatory policing, such as racial profiling, that has separated families and created legal and financial challenges for people otherwise living quietly in the community.

Under Biden, ICE has only ended its collaboration with one sheriffs office, Bristol County in Massachusetts, after guards responded to immigrant detainees protesting conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic byshooting pepper ballsand siccing dogs on them.

The Biden administration has the authority to order ICE to cancel such partnerships at any time, Graber said. Its the easiest policy thing for them to do.

Instead, contrary to campaign promises, the administration intends to expand local cooperation. Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, recently sought toconvince mayorsthat they should resume collaborating with federal immigration authorities because the agency of today, and what it is focused upon, and what it is doing, is not the agency of the past.

But the mayors of several cities including Berkeley, Philadelphia and New York have already said through spokespeople that theydont intendto expand cooperation with ICE.

Prominent immigrant legal services groups called Mayorkas pitch abetrayalof the presidents commitments and warned in a public statement directed to him that such partnerships co-opt local resources into questionable, racially discriminatory purposes, and strip communities of safety and public trust.

Bidens pick to run ICE, Ed Gonzalez, haspromisedto continue such local cooperation if he is confirmed by Congress, despite the fact that as sheriff of Harris County, Texas most populous, hecanceledhis departments 287(g) agreement. During Trumps final year in office, Gonzalezcriticized the tactic, tweeting that Diverting valuable law enforcement resources away from public safety threats would drive undocumented families further into the shadows & damage our community safety.

When it comes to supporting sanctuaries, the Biden administration has taken some steps.

Bidens administration hasrepealeda Trump-era ban thatbarredsanctuary cities like New York from receiving some federal grants. Under Biden, ICE haslimitedthe scope of who its agents should arrest and detain, has committed toending worksite raidsand is now arresting and detainingfewer peoplewithin the United States than under Trump.

But the biggest change so far has been in how the administration talks about undocumented people, said Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez, an Ohio State University law professor who specializes in the intersection of criminal and immigration law.

In contrast with Trump, we dont see the kind of racist, abrasive, offensive language coming from the president, Garcia Hernandez said. But the Biden administration is still struggling to find its footing when it comes to differentiating its actual immigration policies.

Garcia Hernandez said that city, county and state governments still have a good amount of wiggle room when it comes to making life easier or harder for immigrants to live in their communities.

The direction in which local authorities go is not so much a matter of law, but of their politics, he said.

In the years since Trump turned up the pressure on immigrant sanctuaries, some state legislatures across the country have passed laws pushing in opposite directions, with some enacting sanctuary-style policies and others banning them.

Within the last year, states likeIllinoisandNew Jerseypassed laws limiting the ways their police departments and jails can cooperate with immigration enforcement, including by banning them from entering any new contracts to detain immigrants for ICE.

Some states have strengthened long-standing protections for undocumented immigrants. Oregon, the nations oldest sanctuary state, faced pushback from conservative state legislators over such policies during the Trump administration, and responded last summer. The states Democratic lawmakers passed a sanctuary promise law intended to reinforce immigrant access to social services and block local police from sharing information with ICE or detaining immigrants.

Some local agencies have pushed back against such efforts, including the counties of Kankakee and McHenry, outside of Chicago. They sued Illinois, saying the state couldnt stop them from getting paid tens of millions of dollars per year to detain immigrants for ICE. But a federal judge recentlyruledthat the state does have the constitutional power to ban its counties from doing so.

At the same time, some states are going in the opposite direction by requiring their local agencies to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Texas, Florida and South Carolina are among at least 10 states that passed laws during Trumps presidency blocking their cities and counties from engaging in sanctuary practices. A federal judge ruled that Floridas ban isunconstitutionalbecause it was adopted with discriminatory motives. A federal appeals court upheld most ofTexas 2017 law, but legal challenges are pending.

No matter which way states go, immigration enforcement agencies still have the power to investigate, arrest and detain people anywhere in the country, including in sanctuaries.

To do so, ICE relies heavily on its expansive and long-standing partnership networks with local and state authorities. Some are so deeply embedded that they remain in place irrespective of whether or not a community is a so-called sanctuary jurisdiction, said Jorge Loweree, policy director of the American Immigration Council.

For example, California has passedseverallawsover the years intended to stop state and local police from sharing information with ICE or transferring people into ICE custody. But despite these protections, some sheriffs offices haveworked with ICEanyway. At times, these partnerships have led to potentially illegal practices, such as when Californias prison system transferred a U.S. citizen into ICE custody in 2020. The man wasdetainedfor a month by immigration authorities during the pandemic, until a judge finally ordered him released. In Seattle, also a longtime sanctuary, ICE similarly detainedanother U.S. citizenin 2019.

ICE also has access to a wide range of databases created by police agencies and information companies, such as the data mining corporation LexisNexis and the software creator Palantir, which was co-founded by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel. Some immigrant rights advocates told Capital & Main these databases can help immigration officersobtain informationthat local agencies decline to provide.

Nonetheless, since Trump made anti-immigrant policies a centerpiece of his presidency and both campaign runs, some pro-immigrant activists have pushed back through local elections.

Max Rose, who directs the North Carolina-based Sheriffs for Trusting Communities, said his group works with local organizers across the country to elect more progressive sheriffs to replace those who have fueled mass deportation, doubled down on over-policing in communities of color, and built jails that prioritize expansion rather than treatment and reentry.

Rose said the communities he works with are pretty tired of law enforcement demonizing immigrant families, and doing so at the expense of doing their job. As a result, some sheriffs with a history of cooperating with ICE paid an electoral price in 2020, particularly in progressive pockets of the South. Democratic sheriffs ran and won on promises tocut such ties, including in Georgia's populous Gwinnett and Cobb counties, where advocates claim community safety and relations have sinceimproved.

The immigrant-friendly sheriffs showed theres a winning message on immigration, Rose said. Its a line that the Democrats are trying to walk around the country. But I think theres a path that was cleared in 2020.

Some hardline sheriffs who had close relationships with the Trump administration are also expected to face challengers in elections later this year. Among them isSheriff Thomas Hodgsonin Bristol, the only county to have its ICE partnershipterminatedby the Biden administration.

Rose said that because Trump so polarized immigration enforcement and cooperation with local police, its no longer politically palatable for Biden to continue those same policies.

While some sheriffs continue demonizing and scapegoating immigrants in their community, Rose said, we know it should no longer be acceptable for any sheriff to abuse that power, and to play the role of federal immigration enforcement.

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Biden Promised to Protect Sanctuary Cities. So Why is ICE Still Partnering With Local Cops? - VC Star

TOPEKA, Kan. (KSNW) The Kansas Senate passed a measure aimed at addressing immigration laws and sanctuary cities in the state.

The Senate voted 29-10 to pass House Bill 2717 on Wednesday after it recently passed the House last week.

The measure now heads to the governors desk.

The bill was firstintroduced on Feb. 22at the request of Attorney General Derek Schmidt in reaction toWyandotte County passing the Safe and Welcoming ordinanceon Feb. 10. Wyandotte Countys ordinance would make it illegal for the Unified Government to collect immigration data unless required by state or federal law and would issue municipal ID cards to those who were recently in prison, homeless or undocumented.

It was mostly Democrats who voted against the bill in the Senate. Some also spoke out against the plan when brought to the House floor.

Like other lawmakers, Rep. Pam Curtis, D-Kansas City, pointed to the federal government for lack of action on immigration reform.

That leaves municipalities, like KCK, with large immigrant communities to deal with this as best they can, Curtis said.

Curtis also expressed concerns for people with mixed status. In hearings, people testifying against the bill explained that many worry about interactions with law enforcement or going about their daily routine. Curtis said many people take the ability to have an ID for granted, arguing that its hard for people to access services without identification.

From borrowing books to enrolling their child in school to renting an apartment or a home, Curtis said.

HB 2717 would make any municipal identification card used in lieu of state ID to be invalid, including for voter ID purposes. Both the ordinance and the legislation to undo it have sparked discussion across the state regarding immigration laws and haveraised concerns for many immigrants living in Kansas. Other lawmakers argued that the government shouldnt interfere with the states long-held standard of local control.

Were here today considering a bill demanding that our cities and counties enforce the laws of the tyrannical and out-of-control federal government, said Rep. Dennis Highberger, D-Lawrence.

Attorney General Derek Schmidt spoke about the bill at theKansas GOP conventionthis month, voicing his concerns over the ordinance.

That instructs their police officers not to cooperate and communicate with federal enforcement authorities and says theyre going to start issuing local governmental IDs, Schmidt said. Thats a problem, and it ought to be unlawful.

To read HB 2717 in full, click here.

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Kansas Sanctuary City ban passes Senate, heads to governor - KSN-TV

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Editors note:This essay by David Corn first appeared in his newsletter,Our Land.But we wanted to make sure as many readers as possible have a chance to see it.Our Landis written by David twice a week and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a monthbut you can sign up for a free 30-day trial ofOur Landhere. Please check it out.

Imagine a Supreme Court justice influenced by QAnon. Were not there yetas far as we knowbut the recent revelations about Virginia Ginni Thomas, notable far-right agitator, tea partier, and spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas, do render that possibility not too far a stretch.

Last week, theWashington Postand CBS News publishedtext messagesexchanged between Ginni Thomas and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the wake of the November 2020 election, in which Thomas fervently urged Meadows to overturn the results to keep Donald Trump in power. The disclosure of these texts has revived a long-running debate over Justice Thomas potential conflicts of interest related to his wifes political work and his steadfast refusal to recuse himself from cases to which she might possess a connection. One recent example: in January Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent in a case in which the Supreme Court declined to support Donald Trumps effort to block the House committee investigating the January 6 assault from obtaining White House documents related to his attempt to undermine the election. Given his wifes role in the so-called Stop the Steal movement and her communications with the Trump White House about this matter, Justice Thomas might not have been an impartial arbiter in this dispute. Legal ethics experts haveplenty to dissect here. But as serious as that topic is, the texts raise another troubling prospect: Ginni Thomas is absolutely bonkers.

The texts show that she was a true-blue believer in Trumps Big Lie conspiracy theory about the election. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History, she texted Meadows a few days after the election, when there was no proof of any such theft (as there would never be) and when no opinion polls showed most Americans concluding the election had been rigged against Trump. In another text, she claimed the dispute over the election (which Trump and his cult had ginned up) was a a fight of good versus evil. Her texts indicated she believed the nonsense grifter-attorney Sidney Powell was peddling about foreign states (China! Venezuela!) manipulating voting machines to change the vote count.

One Thomas text to Meadows shared a video promoting a QAnonish conspiracy theory claiming watermarks on ballots would show that Biden received millions of fraudulently cast votes. This baseless assertion wasbeing pushedon InfoWars, the conspiracy theory site of blowhard nutter Alex Jones, by a fellow named Steve Pieczenik, a longtime disinformation purveyor who claimed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, was a staged false flag operation. Related to this particular BS, Thomas texted Meadows a quote she had pulled off a right-wing website: Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition. Uh, no.

Ginni Thomas has long been one of the leaders of the right, and it turns out shes a loon. This is not entirely a newsflash. Nine years ago, Irevealed the existenceof a new and secretive conservative outfit that Thomas had helped pull together. Called Groundswell, it assembled a collection of right-wingers in Washington, DC, for weekly meetings to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation, according to a trove of its documents I obtained. The group included a host of far-right extremists, including Frank Gaffney (who had claimed Barack Obama was a secret Muslim); Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; tea party fanatic Allen West, a former member of Congress; Steve Bannon, then the executive chairman of Breitbart News Network; Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who would become a Fox News presence; Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the influential Federalist Society; a handful of conservative journalists; and others. A top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz was a Groundsweller.

Groundswell appeared to be set up as competition to the well-known Wednesday morning gatherings of conservative advocates hosted by Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform. That collective included a broad spectrum of Republicans, including conservatives opposed to gay rights and abortion rights and those who favor them, as well as GOPers on different sides of the immigration reform debate. Groundswell, which met at the same time as Norquists group, was a more ideologically pure and extreme version of the Norquist confab. The group devised strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. On a Google group page, Groundswellers often griped that the GOPs inside-the-Beltway crowd was trying to marginalize the conservative die-hards and recruit, promote, and support political candidates deemed less strident and more electable. Their Number One enemy in this regard was Republican strategist Karl Rove, and Groundswellmounted an effortto discredit him.

The documents indicated that Ginni Thomas was a guiding force for Groundswell, setting agendas for its meetings and actively coordinating messaging among its participants, and that the group had a dark, paranoid, and Manichean view of American politics. One Groundswell memo stated that an active radical left is dedicated to destroy [sic] those who oppose them with vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight. At one meeting a participant claimed that many government agencies (the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, the EPA, and others) were conspiring with far left wing groups to undermine conservatives in the media.

In a post on a Google group page, Ginni Thomas encouraged Groundswell members to watchAgenda: Grinding America Down, a purporteddocumentarythat claims progressives (including Obama) seek a brave new world based on the failed policies and ideologies of communism and that an evil left is purposefully destroying the greatest country in all of world history.This film could have been produced by the John Birch Society. Dredging up the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg atomic spying cases, it compares liberalism to communism and Hitlers Nazism. The film alleges that the left is deliberately seeking to impose communism on the United States and to eradicate the American family. Its that old bugaboo of the subversive foe within: America has an enemy that is getting very close to accomplishing its plan of destroying the greatest country in all world history. Thewebsite for the film features a wire diagram of the leftist conspiracy to exterminate the United States that is worthy of a tinfoil hat award.

Ginni Thomas was endorsing this claptrap. To see this film as an accurate depiction of reality, one would have to be a paranoid nutcase incapable of effectively and somberly evaluating the world. And theres this: a person who believes that such a sinister plot is afoot could likely justify almost anything. As that one Groundswell memo suggests, this is a war, yet only Groundswellers are prepared for this battle.In such circumstancesif you were combatting an evil force bent on annihilating the land you lovewould you really care about such niceties as avoiding judicial conflicts of interest?

In one of her texts to Meadows, Thomas sent a dire message: the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war. That text also said, This war is psychological. PSYOP. That means that the fight is over defining realitysomething to which Ginni Thomas is not strongly tetheredand that in this clash she feels no need to abide by rules or, perhaps, even laws.

Theres much to the Ginni Thomas story. The House 1/6 committee hasrequested she come by for a chat. And for so many years now, she and her husband have created the appearance of a serious conflict of interest. (A decade ago she was lobbying against Obamacarewhen her spouse was clearly going to have to rule on the constitutionality of the healthcare law.) But she has now certainly demonstrated shes a conspiratorial crackpot. What does it say about the tea party and the far right that they have been steered by a zealous lunatic? No doubt, many Stop-the-Stealers do not drink Trumps Kool-Aid. They use the false claims of a fraudulent election as a cudgel against Joe Biden and the libs. Or perhaps they suspect there was some chicanery, but they do not buy the full My Pillow Guy nuttiness. (The CIA used Italian military satellites to swipe votes from Tump!) Ginni Thomas, though, is all in. She is unhinged. Though it may be unfair to judge a judge by his or her spouse, it is hardly reassuring that a Supreme Court justice is literally in bed with a quasi-QAnon conspiracistand ruling on cases related to her passions.

We are living through what feels like the end of America, Thomas texted Meadows. In the Thomas household, its more like the end of rationality.

Originally posted here:
Why You Should Care That Ginni Thomas Is Bonkers Mother Jones - Mother Jones

By TCR Staff | March 14, 2022

Despite promising to overhaul the draconian immigration policies enacted by President Donald J. Trump, President Biden and his lawyers have fought to uphold a Trump-era public health rule allowing the United States to turn away migrants without providing them an opportunity to ask for asylum, sought to defend the Biden administration and former Trump administration officials against lawsuits from parents who were separated from their children at the border, and delay the processing of green cards for winners of a visa lottery, including those increasingly at risk in Ukraine, reports the New York Times.

Democrats in Congress say the administration is not only moving too slowly on promised reforms, but also is far too willing to use and defend Trump-era policies in the meantime. Senior White House officials have raised concerns that unwinding the Trump-era border restrictions would open the United States to an increase in illegal crossings and bolster attacks from Republicans accusing Biden of being too lenient. Biden has taken nearly 300 executive actions on immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute, roughly 90 of which intended to roll back technical rules within Trump administration policies. The president has also rolled back sweeping bans on Muslim-majority countries, a rule allowing officials to deny green cards to immigrants in need of public assistance, and allowed minors to cross the border.

Original post:
Biden 'Moving Too Slowly' on Immigration Reform: Dem Critics - Crime Report

In 1958, in response to an alarming uptick in xenophobic chatter, the Anti-Defamation League asked then-Senator John F. Kennedy to write about Americas melting-pot strengths and the need for immigration reform. The resulting essay, A Nation of Immigrantspublished as a book after JFKs deathpopularized the idealistic phrase thats been touted by politicians ever since.

America still likes to think of itself as a nation of immigrants, but even JFK admitted in print: the truth has always been more complicated. All four of his grandparents were American-born children of Irish immigrants who confronted the hostility of an already established group of Americans, wrote Kennedy. It is not unusual for people to fear and distrust that which they are not familiar with. Every new group coming to America found this fear and suspicion facing them.

The history of immigration in America is in fact the history of its nativist foes. (Not to mention the history of colonialism, the slaughter of Native Americans, and the enslavement of Africans.) Were reluctantly and uncomfortably an inclusive nation; were a nation of immigrants despite a deep, dark history of efforts to keep newcomers outor at least down.

Take the immigrant Kennedys. JFKs paternal great-grandparents, Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy, were the first to leave their respective County Wexford families, sailing in a crowded coffin ship seeking safer shores across the Atlantic. Landing in 1848 at the docks of East Boston, not far from Terminal A at todays Logan Airport (named for the son of an Irish immigrant brewer), they met, married and started a family, but quickly discovered they were unwanted refugees.

Theyd been oppressed in Ireland by their homelands colonizerEngland had banned their religion and their native language; prevented them from voting and holding office; reacted slowly and indifferently when the Potato Famine of the 1840s led to mass starvation (a million dead) and mass migration (upwards of two million fled).

But in America? It turned out that the land George Washington had envisioned as a safe and agreeable asylum for the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions didnt really want them, either.

As part of the first large wave of (mostly poor and rural) Irish newcomers to (mostly urban) America25,000 arrived in Boston in 1848 alone, among the million who came to North Americathe Kennedys experienced many of the 19th-century low points in the nations tolerance for the outsider: voter suppression, anti-immigrant legislation and voting efforts, riots at the polls, plus the mid-1850s rise of the nativist Know Nothing party, its hatred aimed mostly at Irish and Catholics.

In their immigrant-crowded East Boston neighborhood, Bridget and Patrick Kennedy and their children and neighbors witnessed violent protests outside their homes, their church, their businesses. They looked out the window at parades of young men marching with faux-patriotic groups like the Order of Free and Accepted Americans, the Order of the American Star, the American Protestant Society, and the Wide Awakes, threatening the Irish with their angry chants, Wide awake! Wide awake! Backed by their right-wing newspapers and magazinesthe Republican, the Protestant, the Spirit of 76their mantra: Americans must rule America.

Boston had been a hub of anti-slavery activism, but otherwise it was hardly a model of integration or tolerance. Take Boston artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who helped create the telegraph and Morse code. Though he later said his invention aspired to make one neighborhood of the whole country, Morses electromagnetic dots and dashes were originally designed as a secret code that could be used to defeat a rumored plot to make Popery (Catholicism) the law of the land.

A well-known anti-immigrant, pro-slavery activist, Morses 1835 book, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, called for limits on immigration from Catholic countries and for banning Catholics from holding public office. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York as candidate for the Native American Party (later known as the American Party, and generally known through the mid-1800s as the Know Nothingsits members claimed to know nothing about it. John Wilkes Booth was an adherent, as was Ulysses Grants vice president, Henry Wilson.)

Morse and the Know Nothings were among many voices roaring against nineteenth-century immigrants, their words and actions eerily familiar to those of recent years. Xenophobia had become an American tradition, as Erika Lee put it in her 2019 book, America for Americans.

Clearly, not much has changed over the centuries. Weve always tried to prevent immigrants (and minorities) from access to the ballot (and to citizenship, and to power).

Today, the street corners of the Kennedys East Boston neighborhood are anchored by bodegas and Latin markets. Those startup businesses, many run by immigrants from Brazil and Mexico, replaced the Italian delis that in turn had replaced the Irish grocery shops like the one JFKs great-grandmother Bridget ran for twenty years after the Civil Warand the Irish saloons like those that helped launch the late-1800s political career of Bridgets son, P.J..

John F. Kennedy votes in the 1946 Massachusetts democratic primary election in which he ran for congressman. With him are maternal grandparents Mr. and Mrs. John F. Fitzgerald (Honey Fitz). (Photo by CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Corbis-Getty Images

A microcosm of newcomer entrepreneurism, East Boston continued to reflect an increasingly immigrant rich nation. Recent census data shows that while 2021 had the slowest population growth in U.S. history, growth attributed to immigration contributed to an uptick in the percentage of Americans born elsewhere. Immigrants now represent 14.1 percent of the U.S. population, inching closer to the all-time high of 14.8 percent, which was reached in 1890.

Then as now, immigrants came despite the efforts of men like Henry Cabot Lodge, a longtime Massachusetts statesman who through the 1890s called on voters to guard our civilization against an infusion which seems to threaten deterioration. Lodge railed against hyphenism, preferring 100 percent Americanism to Irish-American or Italian-American designations.

When Lodge ran for the U.S. Senate in 1892, his support for strict immigration limits and a proposed federal literacy test for newcomers helped him defeat Irish Congressman Patrick Collins, whom Lodge decried as hard-drinking, idle, quarrelsome, and disorderly. Many of Lodges nativist ideas, including the literacy test, were later incorporated into the Immigration Act of 1917.

On the Fourth of July, 1895, the American Protective Association, an anti-Catholic group, paraded through East Boston ranting about Irish aliens and enemies of the state. Riots ensued and shots were fired and an immigrant longshoreman was killed, dying on the steps of P.J. Kennedys saloon. P.J. invited his friend, the newly elected Congressman John F. Fitzgerald, to come to East Boston and calm things down. At a fundraiser for the murdered longshoreman, Fitzgerald addressed the intense hatred of everything Irish and Roman Catholic that persisted, and blamed radical, secretive mens groups for trying to monopolize all the Americanism in this country.

We are one people and owe the same duty to our country, Fitzgerald told the crowd. Why, then, this desire to set one class of people against another?

Decades later, the grandson of P.J. Kennedy and Honey Fitz Fitzgerald defeated the grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge, and midway through his Senate term JFK penned his hopeful views on the subject of Americanism: There is no part of America that has not been touched by our immigrant background, he wrote. Kennedy also lobbied in A Nation of Immigrants against a quota system that favored the Northern and Western European countries of his ancestors, and discriminated against immigrants from Asia and Africa. (That national origins quota system was ended by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.)

The 35th president clearly had very different views than those of the 45th president, the son, grandson, and spouse of immigrants, who infamously declared his preference for more immigrants from places like Norway and fewer from shithole countries. (And whose influence led to the removal of the words nation of immigrants from the mission statement of the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services.)

Champions of immigration have always faced the build-a-wall fervor of former President Trumps base. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz put it her 2021 book, Not A Nation of Immigrants, the ideology of JFKs nation of immigrants premise is flawedand under constant assault.

The fear-mongering of the Morses, Lodges, and Trumps of America will continue to try to shout down the hopeful words of its Kennedys and Obamas. In no other country is my story even possible, the nations first Black president once said, echoing the optimism of George Washington, who wrote: I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong. Then again, Americas first president was a slaveholder whose ideals on asylum clearly didnt apply to enslaved Africans. Its complicated.

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What the Kennedy's Immigration Story Tells Us About America - TIME