SAN DIEGO, CMC – The San Diego, California-based Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) on Wednesday expressed “grave concern” over the Trump administration’s choice to deploy the Nationwide Guard to the nation’s capital, warning that elevated militarization can have devastating penalties for Caribbean and different immigrants, refugees and others who already reside underneath heightened surveillance and concern of regulation enforcement.
“Washington, D.C. is dwelling to vibrant immigrant communities who contribute to each a part of our metropolis’s life,” HBA Co-Founder and Govt Director Guerline Jozef informed the Caribbean Media Company (CMC). “By sending within the Nationwide Guard, the federal government is sending a transparent message: that our communities are to be monitored, managed, and feared.
“This is identical playbook that has led to mass deportations, household separations, and police brutality throughout the nation,” she added. “We reject it.
“Our neighborhoods want elevated congressional funding for housing, healthcare, and humane immigration insurance policies—not troops within the streets,” continued Jozef, stating that Caribbean and different immigrant communities in D.C. already face intersecting crises: “An absence of entry to inexpensive authorized illustration, language obstacles, wage theft, and the specter of ICE enforcement.”
She mentioned the presence of the Nationwide Guard will solely compound these challenges by creating an environment of intimidation that daunts residents from searching for assist or collaborating in civic life.
“This isn’t about security—it’s about energy,” Jozef mentioned. “Now we have seen repeatedly that, when regulation enforcement is militarized, it’s our Black, Brown, and immigrant neighbors who are suffering essentially the most.
“President Trump speaks of poor and homeless folks as if they’re particles to be swept away, not human beings with dignity and desires,” Jozef added.
“Transferring folks and not using a actual plan will not be management—it’s cruelty dressed up as coverage.
“That is the form of dehumanization that turns poverty into a criminal offense and erases the humanity of our most weak neighbors,” she continued. “We name on all folks of conscience to face with us in resisting this harmful normalization of army drive towards our communities.”
On Tuesday, Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Chair Yvette D. Clarke, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, and CBC members additionally strongly condemned President Trump’s seizure of management of the D.C. Police and the deployment of the Nationwide Guard.
Clarke represents the ninth Congressional District in Brooklyn, New York.
“President Trump doesn’t care about protecting Washington, D.C., or any of our communities protected,” mentioned Clarke and CBC members in a press release. “His claims about crime within the District — the place violent crime is now at a 30-year low — are obviously false.”
They famous that on his first day in workplace, Trump granted pardons to almost 1,500 people convicted of or charged in reference to the lethal Jan. 6 Capitol assault, “eliminating any credibility he has on the problem of public security.”
By taking on native management of the D.C. Metropolitan Police and deploying the Nationwide Guard underneath the guise of public security, “put residents at risk,” Clarke and CBC members mentioned.
“This unprecedented assault on D.C. dwelling rule is a blatantly racist and despicable energy seize, and it gained’t cease in Washington, D.C.,” they mentioned. “Whereas we don’t but know the total impression this choice can have on D.C. and the Black and minority communities Trump has prompt he might goal subsequent, we do know this: militarized over-policing will inevitably result in elevated concern and distrust amongst communities which have too typically been handled as occupied populations, relatively than as residents who need to be served and guarded.
“President Trump will do something to distract from the crises plaguing his administration — from the Epstein information to the disastrous jobs report — together with placing the residents of D.C. and the American folks in hurt’s method,” they added. “Any failures that outcome from this harmful overreach of energy will fall squarely on his shoulders.”
Clarke and the CBC mentioned they’ll proceed combating to guard D.C.’s proper to self-governance, urging all Individuals to “acknowledge this for what it’s: a take a look at run for broader authoritarian overreach.
“The stakes are excessive not only for Washington, D.C., however for the way forward for democracy in each nook of this nation,” they warned.
