In the summer of 2015, following my junior year of college, Donald Trump kicked off his candidacy by referring to Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists.” I was filled with dread.
Each subsequent bigoted claim — that immigrants were to blame for unemployment, poverty, crime, the opioid epidemic and any other problem Trump could name — sounded to me like an alarm bell.
As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I feel there is something eerily familiar about Trump’s scapegoating and dehumanizing rhetoric, which has led to racist policies like the Muslim ban, a dramatic escalation of immigration raids and detention, and the incarceration of children in internment camps.
As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I feel there is something eerily familiar about Trump’s scapegoating and dehumanizing rhetoric.
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