Articles About Human Rights and Assaults on Minority Groups in Era of Trump: "ICE Has Been Targeting Those Weakest, According to Reports"

Articles about matters of human rights and assaults on minority groups in the era of Trump that I've read this week and want to pass on to you: 

Mark Potok of Southern Poverty Law Center, "The Year in Hate and Extremism" 

Trump's run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man's country. . . . 

By far the most dramatic change [due to Trump's campaign and election] was the enormous leap in anti-Muslim hate groups, from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year — a 197% increase. But that explosion was not unexpected. Anti-Muslim hate has been expanding rapidly for more than two years now, driven by radical Islamist attacks including the June mass murder of 49 people at an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub, the unrelenting propaganda of a growing circle of well-paid ideologues, and the incendiary rhetoric of Trump — his threats to ban Muslim immigration, mandate a registry of Muslims in America, and more.

Steven Rosenfeld, "A United States of Hate Has Exploded Under Trump": 

"I think what has happened is that the Trump campaign, in many ways, has kind of ripped the lid off Pandora's Box, and all of these different kinds of hatreds have escaped, and it's pretty damn near impossible to get them back into the box," he [Mark Potok] said. "One of the things that was most remarkable about the hate crime, the bias incidents we saw immediately after the election, was they targeted virtually every minority out there—Jewish people, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT people, Latinos, and also a non-minority, women. That was quite specific to Trump and his attitudes towards women and the kinds of ideas that he promoted."

Alex Hannaford, "Her Son Was Lynched for Being Gay. Now the Fight for Justice Is at Risk from Trump": 

Some days, she [Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew Shepard] says, it feels like a hundred years since her son's death; others like it was yesterday. "I'm not really much for introspection but I miss him like crazy. We all do. And we still talk of the things about him that pissed us off, too, which I think is healthy. It does seem strange though that our life is now devoted to the memory of our son. You never really picture that to be your future."

I ask if she still has the fight in her. She smiles. 

"I think I'm angrier now than I ever was. People still don’t get it, after all the accomplishments we have made and the exposure and discussion and people coming out and telling their stories. The violence and the discrimination that we still hear about makes me very angry."

Matthew Rosza, "ICE Has Been Rounding Up Domestic Abuse Victims, Hypothermia Shelter Tenants Because They're Undocumented": 

ICE has been targeting those weakest, according to reports.

Always. It's always the weakest, those with the least power to resist, that are targeted first in witch-hunts and red scares and scapegoat raids.

This is what makes the so-called white Christian support for Donald Trump so obscene, because this runs directly counter to everything we read about Jesus in the gospels — his words about how he is to be found in the least among us, for instance. And it runs against everything we read in the Jewish prophets about how God stands with the poor, the weak, the widow, the orphan, the stranger in the land.

White U.S. Christians have brought tremendous disgrace on their heads and disrepute to the Christian brand by voting for and continuing to support Mr. Trump.

Rebecca Traister, "Identity Issues Are Economic Issues": 

The postelection period has seen an enormous amount of pushback against so-called identity politics — specifically the campaigns for social justice and representation for women and people of color — as a frustrating distraction from the serious economic concerns that affect a broad swath of Americans. If only we could get away from divisive “social issues,” goes this line of thinking, Democrats could win elections and be able to enact progressive economic policies that would help far more people. But the idea that fights over reproductive freedom, sexual assault and harassment, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, criminal-justice reform, and gender and racial bias can be somehow separated from larger progressive economic stances is a fiction. As most people engaged in this argument know perfectly well, economic inequality is deeply wrapped up with gender and racial bias. The impending rollback of social progress in a Trump administration will have a staggering economic impact on this country’s women, especially women of color, and regressive economic policies will take a disproportionate toll on those same populations. 

It's worth remembering that two-thirds of all minimum-wage workers are women, along with 67 percent of all tipped workers — a fact that makes them vulnerable to sexual harassment by customers as well as employers. Women also dominate the home-health-care and child-care industries, in which wages are low, benefits anemic or nonexistent, and job insecurity, poor working conditions, and wage theft endemic. And women are especially reliant on government protections to keep them working safely and fairly.