AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

As President Trump threatens to send the National Guard to Chicago and a federal judge rules against their deployment to quell ICE protests in Los Angeles, we turn now to Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. Her new essay is headlined “The Border Is Invading America.” She writes, quote, “The U.S.-Mexico border is no longer just a line on a map; it is a roaming force, drifting through our cities and ravaging schools, courthouses and workplaces. It has become unmoored from geography, dragging its violence and impunity into the heart of American life.”

Jean Guerrero is author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda and a visiting professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, joining us from Los Angeles.

Jean, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you elaborate again on your piece, “The Border Is Invading America”?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah, of course. Thank you, Amy.

So, what we’re seeing across the U.S. is that the Border Patrol is now operating deep inside the country alongside ICE, and it’s bringing its Wild West mentality. You know, they’re wearing cowboy hats, and they’re treating Los Angeles and places across the United States like lawless outposts on a hostile frontier. They’ve been deputized to carry the border with them and to enforce its racialized logic wherever they go.

As we know, the administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow it to continue to use racial profiling in immigration enforcement. And in Southern California, we are routinely seeing people targeted based on their skin color, which is why I wrote that the border is no longer something that only divides countries; it also snakes between white and Brown, between families and neighbors, between citizens and the rights that they once thought were inviolate.

And the brute force that the border once unleashed out of sight, in the desert or behind the locked doors of detention centers, is now erupting on our streets. For example, in Southern California, we’re seeing fathers killed while fleeing immigration raids. We recently saw a family shot at in their car while trying to get away from agents. We are seeing people violently tackled and disappeared into unmarked vans. And too many Americans continue to believe that the border is meant to stop a, quote-unquote, “invasion.” But the reality is that the border is invading us, and it’s coming not only for the rights of immigrants and for immigrants themselves, but for the rights of all of us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jean, in your piece, you basically also charge that Democratic leaders have been complicit now for decades in the stoking of anti-immigrant xenophobia in the U.S. You write at one point, quote, “I have repeatedly asked Trump voters about his immigration policies, such as his first term’s family separation. They tend to reply by shrugging their shoulders and pointing at similar actions by Democratic leaders, saying, 'Obama put kids in cages' or 'Obama separated families, too.'” Could you talk about that?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah, I think it’s important to talk about that, because what happened is that the Democratic Party normalized anti-immigrant cruelty alongside Republican administrations. And until we reckon with that bipartisan nature of our racialized immigration system, then we’re not going to be able to restrain it, because we need to hold our elected officials accountable in both parties for what they have created together.

So, as I wrote in my piece, it was the Clinton administration that oversaw the initial militarization of the border in the 1990s, after which we have seen as many as 80,000 people who have died trying to cross the border. That’s a stadium of human beings who have died of dehydration in the desert, who have died of broken backs falling off of the border barriers, or even from Border Patrol agents’ bullets.

And after Clinton’s border militarization, we saw President Obama deport 3 million people, more than any previous president. Oftentimes these are individuals who were deported to their deaths. And the Obama administration also oversaw — or, decided against removing exceptions for racial profiling in immigration enforcement. This is a decision that the Biden administration made, as well, and so both of these administrations affirmed a two-tiered system of justice, one in which immigrants and people who merely look like immigrants have fewer rights.

However, when Trump came along, many Democrats treated his cruel policies as if they were shocking new horrors unique to Republicans. And this is a moral inconsistency and hypocrisy that Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller knew to exploit, which I can talk about in a moment. But the point is that Democratic leaders’ selective outrage on the immigration issue helped fuel the crisis that we’re living today, and we need to reckon with that, because right now too many Democratic Party leaders wrongly believe that we are where we are today because they were too nice to immigrants.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you particularly, again, about the role of Stephen Miller. There’s been really no one quite like him at the high echelons of federal government in terms of the emphasis on naked mass deportations. Can you talk about him, as well, as the architect of the Trump policies?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yes, yeah, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies. So, as I wrote in my book Hatemonger, Stephen Miller is a student of liberal hypocrisy. He grew up in Santa Monica, California, where he saw the performative nature of many Democratic leaders’ compassion for immigrants. Santa Monica is a place where many working-class immigrant residents have been pushed into overcrowded apartments or out of the city altogether because of rising rents. So, as Trump’s speechwriter, it was not hard for Stephen Miller to make the case that Democratic Party leaders defend immigrants only as a source of cheap labor or because they want their votes, even though immigrants don’t vote, unless they’re citizens. But essentially, Miller knew that, in practice, if not in proclamation, Democratic Party leaders had normalized indifference and cruelty toward immigrants. And this long-standing indifference toward immigrants that the Democratic Party has, except when they’re wielding this issue as a cudgel against Trump, is something that has worked symbiotically with the racism of Republican leaders to enable the border’s violent encroachment on our lives, which we are now seeing.

And unfortunately, Democratic leaders are now largely silent on immigration. They are convinced that to win back voters and to win back Americans’ trust, they have to either sidestep the immigration issue or they have to channel the right’s hostility toward immigrants. For example, we were seeing California Governor Newsom approve cutting back on healthcare benefits for the undocumented. He’s really had a more muted tone on sanctuary laws in California. I actually reached out to his office for comment on the deaths of immigrants that we saw this summer, and haven’t heard back. But as Democrats like him appear to see it, the party’s failure is not inhumanity or incoherence on the immigration issue, but rather an overabundance of compassion for the foreign-born. And this delusion would be comical if it wasn’t so costly. It’s a gift for restrictionists like Stephen Miller, who use the disconnectedness of Democratic Party elites to stoke resentment toward all liberals and to bolster the false perception that immigrants are to blame for everything.

So, really, what I’m arguing for in the piece is that we need — we desperately need a reckoning with the structural abuses embedded in our immigration system and with how both parties have played a role in sustaining them, because, otherwise, the border is going to continue to coil inward and to destroy our collective rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, we want to thank you so much for being with us, New York Times contributing opinion writer. We’ll link to your piece, “The Border Is Invading America.” Jean is also author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda and visiting professor at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Coming up, we look at the case of a military veteran charged with conspiracy for joining an ICE protest. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: A rendition of “Wade in the Water” by Rutha Mae Harris, one of the SNCC Freedom Singers, performing for the memorial service of Mary Travers in 2009 at the Riverside Church here in New York.