Special Edition: What Comes Next

There’s a dark, powerful storm brewing over America’s immigrant communities, a hurricane of raging hatred that will claim hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of victims. A deportation force was been waiting in the wings for years to be activated nationally. There’s no sugar coating it — lot of migrants are going to get disappeared.

Sadly, the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris will be mostly predictable. The sycophants of Joe Biden’s presidency who laid the policy groundwork for the coming deportation apocalypse will disappear for a time, retreating into their safe spaces, hoping to emerge pundits, academics, consultants, and every form of thought leader.

Meanwhile, the good folks fighting for migrant rights will be overwhelmed by a tsunami of casework as innocent people, including many citizens, get caught up in the dragnet of Trump’s deportation force.

In terms of timeline, the hard times will start as early as February, within a month of Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States. Nicole Glazer has a long thread on Twitter that lists some of the gory policies we expect to be quickly rolled out in the new term.

Culturally, mainstream America, including the Washington press, will at first be willfully ignorant of the suffering in migrant communities which they have never properly covered or care enough to heed. Then there will be movements of outcry – an audio leak of a mother be separated from her child, a video of an innocent man slain by immigration agents, an acquittal of a private contractor caught dead to rights.

Will it be enough to stop or even slow the new administration’s prime directive to deport millions? Only time will tell – but Migrant Insider will be here to cover it from the corridors of power in Washington. To this end, we have launched a two-tiered paid subscription to our newsletter. Our hope is that there are enough people out there who care about migrants to make our news source sustainable. 

Like I said, there’s no sense sugarcoating it: good news on the immigration beat will be increasingly sparse in the weeks and months ahead. But with no one else covering in Washington covering the beat from a migrant perspective, we intend to fill the void. So subscribe if you’re able. We can’t do this without you. Thank you for your support.

As always, more to follow …