Trump is reframing Palestine as an immigration issue

03 Apr, 2025

by Sam Husseini, originally published as part of a longer article with links on his substack. Republished with the author's permission.

Trump seems to have backed a ceasefire as he came into office to wind down the Gaza genocide in the public mind. Now, Trump has green-lighted imperial Israel ramping up its genocide and starvation tactics by using ICE to go after Palestine activists.

The use of ICE has several effects. One obvious one is to intimidate people into silence, and I’m not suggesting that shouldn’t be countered.

But a more subtle one is to deceive Trump’s electoral base who believe in “America First” that somehow Palestine is an immigration issue and these crazed Palestine activists lied on their visa applications to get into the US and are now tearing down the US.

This helps Trump and Israel in rebranding the issue. It’s not about genocide, it’s about immigration.

It’s all a big lie. Rubio, Trump and company are obviously attacking the First Amendment in service of Israeli genocide, but their strategy is politically effective: Cast Palestine as another immigration issue, so they can pretend to be America First and not — as even some rightwinger critics are charging — Israel First.

Biden’s “ceasefire” narrative was a similar manipulation — also under-appreciated by intelligent people — which helped sabotage international law and kept Israel’s genocide going for over half a year.

Jeremy Scahill writes in the otherwise insightful piece “How Israel Ceased Negotiations and Resumed Firing on Gaza” that:

The agreement signed January 17 was effectively same deal on the table going back to May 2024 when then-President Joe Biden announced it as a breakthrough. In early June, the UN Security Council endorsed the deal…

What’s critical to understand is that Biden announced it in late May 2024 clearly because the International Court of Justice had just issued orders for Israel to stop its attack on Rafah.

The Biden announcement’s main purpose was to prevent a vote at the UN on the ICJ orders. The Algerian government was proposing a resolution to implement the ICJ orders. The US attacked the resolution. Biden made his phony announcement and got the UNSC — including the Algerians!! — to vote for his farce of a resolution, instead of the one the Algerians were reportedly proposing. The farcical US government resolution made no mention of the ICJ orders and instead blessed the “negotiation” process that would obviously be manipulated by the US on behalf of imperial Israel.

This could have been combated if activists were alert and organized and pressed the Algerians into forcing a vote on their resolution.

Thus, looking at this trajectory we see how the US government:

1. Hinders international law with phony talk of “ceasefire” that many unfortunately get sucked into;
2. Pretends to the general public that the crisis in Gaza is over with a shortlived and phony “ceasefire”;
3. Allows the resumption of the genocide under conditions in which tons of Democratic party operatives are focusing on other nefarious Trump actions (some real, some exaggerated).

The net result is a dwindling of the fight against the genocide just as it is ramping up.

Hey, The Kentuckian is an independent publication. It doesn't represent the opinion of the Kentucky Party or any of its committees.