BALTIMORE—For Service Employees President April Verrett, Donald Trump is a modern equivalent of some of the worst right-wing rulers the world has ever seen.
Including Adolf Hitler.
And Trump’s also “in part, a puppet” of the white supremacist forces he’s let loose, adds Verrett, the first African-American woman to head SEIU, one of the nation’s largest unions. Those forces, like Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, are “unleashing a reign of terror” reminiscent of that of the Ku Klux Klan, she said.
In her unscheduled address at the AFL-CIO’s Martin Luther King conference on January 17, Verrett compared Trump to Hitler, former Brazilian far-right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, whose armed forces overthrew a democratically elected civilian progressive government in 1939, in a prelude to World War II.
Franco ruled repressively for 36 years, until his death in 1975, with the aid and coaching of the GOP Nixon administration and the CIA. Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces commander, who overthrew and killed the elected Marxist president Salvador Allende in 1973, ruled until 1991. Both Franco and Pinochet were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of opponents, and both were known for so-called “neoliberal” free-market economics and massive repression. So was Bolsonaro.
During his four-year term, 2019-23, Bolsonaro downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, instituted for-corporate “free market” economics, and was anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-indigenous people.
Bolsonaro lost a 2022 re-election bid and—like Trump—prompted his supporters to stage a January 2023 coup attempt in the capital of Brasilia. Unlike Trump, he was tried, convicted, and sent to jail. He’s serving a 27-year sentence.
This history prompted Verrett’s comments.
“We are witnessing a campaign of terror,” Verrett told the crowd at the King conference, held in downtown Baltimore. “Immigrants, protesters, union leaders, anyone bold enough to stand up” is targeted. “This isn’t about national security,” or about immigration. “It’s about fear.”
“This is not normal, this is not American, this is not democratic, and this is damn not about survival. We’ve seen this playbook before,” from the four rulers Verrett named and from the Klan.
Verrett singled out in particular ICE’s “mass detentions and militarized cities,” which together “uphold a white Christian reign of terror…under federal control.” The terror particularly slammed her current home, Los Angeles, and her native city, Chicago, along with D.C., and now the Twin Cities.
To counteract it, she declared, “We must rise. We are a working class, and we must rise because if they”—Trump and his troops—“come for one of us, they come for all of us. We damn sure must better show up, fight back and fight back hard.”
One analyst at the conference compared Trump to the slave-catchers of the pre-Civil War South. Northerners who hated Black people would grab them off the streets. Judges would rule that Black people were escaped slaves, then turn them over to federal officials for shipment to the South. The slave-catchers received federal bounties. Free Black people were often caught in such roundups.
In a January 15 statement in his federal court in Boston, U.S. District Judge William Young, whom GOP President Ronald Reagan named to the bench in 1985, also compared ICE to the slave-catchers. But in the case the judge discussed, ICE’s targets were pro-Palestinian supporters exercising their constitutional right to free speech.
The judge’s comparison justifies his forthcoming ruling imposing sanctions on ICE for kidnapping pro-Palestinian supporters Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Madhawi of Columbia University, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University Ph.D. candidate, and Georgetown University scholar Balar Khan Suri.
In a hearing to gather evidence he’ll use for detailed sanctions, Judge Young laid the blame not just on Trump, but on two of his Cabinet members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem’s department includes ICE and the Border Patrol.
“There was no policy here,” Judge Young said. “What happened is an unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people.
“I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find [that] the conduct of such high-level officers of our government—Cabinet secretaries—conspired to infringe the 1st Amendment rights of people here in the United States,” Judge Young said. “These Cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”
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