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THREAD: As I teach my students at UCLA, you can't really blame Trump for the criminalization of immigrants bc the assumption-- immigrant=criminal--has been in the law since 1996, when Clinton started us on the path to what scholars call "crimmigration." The pattern continued &
expanded in the early 2000s, when Dems & Republicans introduced "comprehensive immigration reform" (CIR) proposals that were & still r about 10% legalization proposals & 90% punitive proposals that, again, assume immigrant criminality. Bush & 9-11 started US on the path to what
I called the "Alqaeda-ization of immigrants & immigration policy in this @thenation piece documenting how the Homeland Security state created after 9-11 added a terrorist frame to what, after 9/11, had become the immigrant=criminal trope: bit.ly/2DQHB2H
As a result, you have Democrats and Republicans taking what were ideas of the KKK, white supremacists & other fringe groups & putting the ideas at the center of policy debates. By this time, many in the media had already created the "immigration debate" that excluded those of us
who either wrote about or were critical of the bipartisan consensus of CIR & pushed us into the fringe of a "rational immigration debate" that, after 2006, had already brought ononce extremist ideas into the center of the immigration debate. 
Once we get to Obama in 2008, the foundation was already there to take the neofascist turn that caged & separated 1000s of refugee children, pushed 1000s more to horrific desert deaths, jailed 100s of 1000s more, enabled @CBP to kill migrants w impunity, massively militarized
militarized the border & othr formerly extremist fringe policies promoted & implemented undr cover of "Si se puede!"The Obama legacy is nothing if not Trumpism w/o the racist discourse.Just racist-- deadly racist--policy @ the level of the immigrant body. bit.ly/2UMOo53
In sum, Trump took the deadly racist assumption -- immigrant=criminal=terrorist-- that was already codified by law and amplified w Republican rhetoric & enabling Democratic silence & distraction, and is now making obvious for all too see. This is why any truly rational
presidential debate on immigration requires those who really want new policies on the Democratic side to turn the Clinton and Obama legacies on immigration into a litmus test. Any serious Dem candidate must publicly repudiate the immigration policies of Clinton & Obama. Failure
to do so guarantees that the Democrat's will continue to the practice of pushing & normalizing formerly fringe neofascist ideas and policies. So, just say NO to neofascist policies promoted under cover of sombreros, speaking spanish & "Si Se Puede!"$.
