Gene Wu is the elected minority leader in the Texas House of Representatives, and he is living in fear of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign.
The lawyer turned legislator was born in China but immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was a child. He is a naturalized and legal citizen of the United States.
But he is under constant attack from anti-immigrant Republicans, he told participants in the “Together for Democracy” conference in Washington, D.C., Jan. 29. The symposium was sponsored by Democracy Forward.
The deportation fever spawned by the Trump administration is “no joke” for his family, Wu said. “People are publicly calling for me to be denaturalized on Twitter. I have a senator, a member of the Senate in Texas, who openly calls me a Chinese communist spy, knowing what that will do to my personal safety and making those kinds of accusations in a very pointed way.
“People are publicly calling for me to be denaturalized on Twitter.”
“I have had discussions with my wife, very serious discussions that basically say between now and the end of the Trump presidency, I expect to be arrested, put into jail.”
His wife asked if they should move to California. He replied, “No, get out of the country. If I get locked up, get yourself, my parents and the kids out of the country.”
Some people hear this and believe he’s overreacting, Wu said. “I’m like, no. I mean the right is starting all the same anti-Asian stuff they ran before World War II, before the Japanese incarceration, all the same laws, all the same ideas. If you just replace the emperor with the CCP, you can use the same quotes and it’s happening again.”
Sadly, he said, the Asian American community is asleep and “nobody else really cares. And we’re just marching down that pathway one last time.”
This is made possible by the erroneous belief of Americans that even when leaders make bad decisions, things will magically correct themselves, Wu explained. “Everyone believes you can do anything you want and somebody will clean up the mess. You want to elect a joker president, go ahead. What’s the worst that could happen? Somebody will come and fix it. And over and over again we do these things and we take these positions and people say, ‘Hey, that’s really [a] bad idea’ — climate change, health care, education. You just go down the line and say we’re doing things literally the entire rest of the world says not to do.
“And we act like, yeah, but that’s because we’re Americans. We do things differently.”
The truth, he countered, is “there’s consequences for that.”
Raha Wala
Wu was among several high-profile leaders who told the conference they and their family members and friends are living in fear.
Raha Wala, vice president for strategy and partnerships with National Immigration Law Center, said Trump’s America is not merely on the road to authoritarianism but has arrived.
“I’ve been a human rights lawyer for nearly 20 years, and I’ve fought authoritarianism abroad and here at home. And I’ve got to say what I’m seeing today is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in this country before,” said Wala, who is from Minnesota and whose mother is Iranian.
Based on the Trump administration’s actions in Minneapolis, his mother sees a clear parallel with the reign of terror in his homeland, he reported. “What she told me is that what the regime of Iran is doing right now to its people — killing, murdering them in the streets — is no different than what this regime is doing to our people here in the United States. And that couldn’t be more true.”
Dolores Huerta, Labor Leader, Civil Rights Activist, and Co-Founder of United Farm Workers speaks onstage during Together For Democracy January 29 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Democracy Forward)
The answer to these threats is people power, according to the fieriest speaker of the first day — 95-year-old Dolores Huerta, a labor leader and co-founder of United Farm Workers. She helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965, managing boycott campaigns on the East Coast and negotiating with the grape companies to end the strike.
For Hispanics and Asians and Blacks, the threats of the Trump administration are nothing new, she said, even if more extreme. But history also proves people power can change things, she advised.
In 1965, “we had millions of millions of people in the United States and in Europe and in other countries not buying grapes. And this is, of course, what we have to do again. And I think we have to kind of look behind the curtain. We know that right now, we have the administration as authoritarian, but we have to see who is holding up that administration. … It is not so much about who are the people in power, but who put them in power. … We have to look behind the curtain and see who is holding up this fascist regime.”
The loss of life in Minneapolis is tragic, she said, “but families are suffering because they decided to come in with a jackhammer and slice the jobs of people in government that we need to help us and deserve us. … Think of the farm workers who have been put in detention centers. Think of the immigrants who are right now in these horrible camps. How many of them have died?”
The problem in America isn’t a lack of education, she said, but a willingness to be ignorant.
She urged the crowd to their feet and engaged them in a call-and-response exercise where everyone shouted “People power” repeatedly.