The Infernal Triangle: The Neighborliness Option

The sharpest illustration of the Republican Party’s slide into fascism came during a presidential primary debate in late 2023. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held up a map he claimed documented every time someone defecated in the streets of San Francisco. Practically the entire city was blotted out by brown. Here, in graphic form, was a central argument of Donald Trump’s party: Democratic governance has drowned the nation’s cities in shit.

As with so many right-wing arguments, its greatest vulnerability is contact with reality. As startled NASCAR fans from conservative areas kept telling reporters two summers running when visiting Chicago for the races on the downtown streets: Wow, this place is really nice! But not content to merely lie about reality in order to dehumanize their enemies, fascists will create a reality if it helps them more effectively demonize their enemies—flooding the zone with shit, as it were, to borrow Steve Bannon’s metaphor for his work to befoul the public’s trust in the media.

For over two years now, the most striking right-wing project to invent a dystopian reality while claiming only to describe it has been practiced by Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas.

In April 2022, President Biden announced that he was ending Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that restricted the entrance of asylum seekers in the interests of the public health. Abbott promptly addressed the press in Austin. “They’ve been dumping large numbers of migrants in cities up and down the border.” Texas state troopers would help the administration to “more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border” by intercepting and shuttling them to Washington, D.C.—“We are sending them to the United States Capitol,” he pledged.

To students of American right-wing authoritarianism, this recalled one of the most vicious, racist schemes of the early 1960s. Brave white and Black civil rights activists tested the enforcement of the federal ban on racial segregation in interstate transport by riding together on Greyhound buses throughout the South. A White Citizens’ Council leader responded: Given how Northern liberals were “sending down busloads of people here with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion, trying to destroy 100 years of workable tradition and good relations between the races,” the South would respond in kind by rounding up welfare recipients and ex-convicts for free bus rides to places like the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. As one “Reverse Freedom Ride” organizer said: “We’re going to find out if … the Kennedys really do have a love for the Negro.”

Abbott, however, expanded this epic troll more than a thousandfold, shipping some 120,000 migrants, most of them desperate refugees from Venezuela, to Democratic-run cities including L.A., Denver, and New York.

Within the logic of his political tribe, Gov. Abbott could congratulate himself for a brilliant accomplishment. He was demonstrating to his constituents his valor fighting the scourge he’d convinced them was an “invasion.” He was washing his hands of responsibility for their care. He was owning the libs, demonstrating the phoniness of their supposed concern for the world’s huddled masses, yearning to breathe free (“to find out if the Kennedys really do have a love for the Negro”).

Last but not least, he could sow political chaos in Democratic cities, and perhaps the entire Democratic Party. Which is why it’s so goddamn important to review this story now.

The enforced destination for over a third of these migrants is Chicago, where on Monday the Democratic National Convention kicks off. In Abbott’s speech at the Republican convention, which came the same day delegates were issued preprinted “Mass Deportations Now” signs, he promised that “those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.” Quite explicitly, the governor of the second-biggest state in the country plans to turn some of the most vulnerable people in the world into political weapons to sabotage the Democratic Party.

For months, Chicago officials have been passing on intelligence that Abbott might be saving his true masterpiece for convention week. The fear in City Hall—extrapolated from the peak influx, 2,000 people a week—is that, if conditions at the border proved propitious, Abbott could conceivably send tens of thousands of migrants.

All summer, attendees at Chicago street festivals and public concerts have experienced the poignant spectacle of scruffy children as young as toddlers, like something out of a latter-day Dickens novel, screwing up their faces, surely in all sincerity, into the perfect image of pitiful misery, trying to sell candy. Those would be the scenes Gov. Abbott hopes to reproduce starting Monday: to make all of Chicago look like a Kolkata slum, at a time when the whole world is watching. To destroy the smooth functioning of an entire municipal government, at a time when all its resources are otherwise occupied making the convention work. To make his Florida colleague Ron DeSantis’s shit map real.

Mainstream media has been perfectly obsessed about protests from the left over issues like the Gaza war. This is a story they’ve almost entirely missed. If any reporter has asked Abbott about it, I haven’t been able to find the proof.

Can it come off? Spoiler alert: for complicated reasons, probably not. Still, the very possibility deserves our closest attention. It adds up to an extraordinary allegory of our times—their darkness, but also our potential to overcome.

“TO BE FAIR, I UNDERSTAND THE PRESSURE he might feel as a governor.”

I’m speaking to Alderperson Andre Vasquez at his ward office, about a quarter-mile from my house. He’s my alder, and in the interests of full disclosure, my friend. The son of Guatemalan migrants, an avowed socialist whose first political activity was knocking on doors in 2016 for Bernie Sanders, he is also a former junior executive at AT&T specializing in customer service—a specialty he carried into his job as alderman, which he won in 2019. It’s a reason why the latter-day sewer socialist received the highest approval rating from constituents of all 50 members of the city council, and why, as chairman of the council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, he’s thrived as point person for monitoring and improving the city’s migrant busing response, and coordinating volunteer efforts to supplement it.

His office walls display a roll call of heroes: Sanders, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a young FDR, Jake and Elwood Blues, and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was assembling a remarkable, insurgent cross-ethnic coalition of whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, unprecedented in Chicago, until city police deliberately assassinated him in coordination with the FBI.

First among equals on the wall is Harold Washington, who completed the delicate work of aligning Chicago’s legendarily disputatious progressive political blocs, reform-minded whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, into a governing coalition before dying of a tragic heart attack only weeks after re-election in 1987. My friend’s eyes twinkled at the words “To be fair,” knowing I would get the reference to Harold Washington’s slogan, upon taking office, to assuage constituents fearful that Chicago’s first African American mayor had racial payback in mind: “No one, but no one, in this city, no matter where they live or how they live, is free from the fairness of our administration. We’ll find you and be fair to you wherever you are!”

In the case of Gov. Abbott, Vasquez points out that fairness demands understanding that it’s not Texas’s fault that it makes up most of the southern border of the United States, and it should not be forced to deal on its own with an inherently national problem. It’s just that … if a governor were actually interested in solving the problem, the response would look radically different. It would start by leveraging the resources of America’s federal system.

“But I think the fact that he uses it to weaponize it, to be partisan about it … that clearly shows someone who doesn’t think about other people, and who’s very bigoted.”

We share a laugh imagining if Minnesota were situated along the Rio Grande instead. WWCWD? Coach Walz might start by saying, “Wowza, all those people are coming, let’s have a conference call right away with all 50 governors to share the burden. Leverage the advantages of the federal system, dontcha know?”

Then imaginary Tim Walz gives way to real-world pragmatic socialist Andre Vazquez. He knows there’s no hope that Texas, Minnesota, Illinois et al. would partner to petition the federal government for funding resources, even though, as he says, “Lord knows when the banks needed to get bailed out, that money just prints itself, right?”

Given the impossibility that Republicans in Congress might contribute to a legislative solution, a White House task force might have made sense—but Vasquez is not so pleased about the Biden administration’s response either. He summarizes their attitude: “Um, ah, do we really have to? I don’t know, it’s kind of tricky if we do anything. What do the polls say? What’s somebody going to think?”

The big issue was work permits. The president’s half-a-loaf solution made it harder for a migrant to get one—you have to be the spouse of a citizen married for more than ten years—than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. He compares this to federal Democrats’ openness to Ukrainian war refugees—whose presence he cherishes, too, but Democrats in Washington “pick and choose who they want to be champions of, how it affects their polling and what will lead to more longevity in Congress.”

And though this is not the place to litigate the ins and outs of intra-progressive political fights in Chicago, Vasquez points out how exquisitely Abbott’s ratfuck served to exacerbate those same tensions Fred Hampton and Harold Washington struggled so mightily against.

Chicagoans all know the story, which has dominated political news for the entire term of Chicago’s new progressive mayor Brandon Johnson, whose inauguration coincided almost exactly with the arrival of the first buses. Underresourced Black wards naturally resented all the attention and resources directed at the newcomers, especially when some abandoned schools in impoverished West and South Side neighborhoods that had been cruelly and heedlessly closed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013 were repurposed as migrant shelters—but never, in all those years, as shelters for the tens of thousands of the city’s largely Black unhoused population.

Twice, rage over the situation led to physical altercations between Black and Hispanic activists and officials. The tension came to a head when two African American councilmembers unsuccessfully sought to schedule a referendum on whether to keep Chicago’s “Welcoming City” ordinance. Like other such laws, the sanctuary it offers is extremely limited: It merely prevents cities from sharing information with federal agencies that might lead to deportation of undocumented immigrants, with no requirement to devote resources to taking care of anyone.

Had it passed, it would have legally changed nothing about the present crisis. It might only have encouraged Gov. Abbott to double down. It would mean that his plan for municipal sabotage was working, importing a little bit of Texas to the Upper Midwest: a Fox News–style political hysteria over “invaders” making a diverse political community a little bit less willing to trust each other—and thus take care of one another.

But slowly, Abbott’s ratfuck has stopped working as much. Largely, Chicago just called his bluff.

THE RANK SADISM OF ABBOTT IS SPELLBINDING. He makes buses roll from Texas towns whose emergency managers sometimes give officials at their intended destinations 24-hour warnings, but sometimes not. Migrants are dropped off in the middle of the night in random spots; they arrive soiled, in wet clothes, shivering from disease. Once, a little girl died along the way. Twice, buses dumped off not only migrants, but also the accumulated solid waste from their toilet—in the exact same place.

After the city council passed a law mandating safety protocols to prevent this sort of thing, one bus company sued Chicago for violating the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause (the same constitutional provision that the Freedom Riders were testing in 1961). Abbott responded by having the buses stop in Chicago suburbs instead, giving migrants the additional burden of finding their way to the city, where there are resources and people ready to help them.

For by then, people were more ready to help them: The city government, albeit stretched terribly thin when it came to resources, political capital, and experience; but more so, the people of Chicago, shouting back at the moral monster in Texas that the city’s welcoming ethic isn’t actually “virtue signaling” at all.

Vasquez keeps another image on his wall, on a T-shirt, a kind of inside joke for constituents who cherish one of the 40th Ward’s most beloved works of art: the legendary neon sign at the corner of Ridge, Peterson, and Paulina advertising the Heart O’ Chicago Motel. It reads:

STFU
‘❤’
ABOUT CHICAGO
YOU DON’T LIVE HERE
THANKS

It’s a rebuke to a thousand Fox News segments that depict the city as a thoroughgoing hellhole, something every Chicago resident now suffers whenever they visit any Republican area. For Vasquez, and for me—we’re both sappy political sentimentalists, which is how we bond—the important part is the heart. (Awwwwww.)

“What was interesting about my whole run in government,” he says, “is that there were two moments when we feared that the city and the community weren’t going to be able to handle things. When COVID hit, and people didn’t have masks—or anything—we watched neighbors come together and say, ‘We’re going to make masks’ or ‘We’re going to drop off food’… it showed people exercising the mechanics and logistics of solving these problems.”

The second time is now. The problem, of course, hasn’t been solved; the grubby urchins begging for coins at every supermarket parking lot exit attest to that. But, Vasquez explains, “there was a time when 10,000 people were living in police stations all across the city. And you would watch these mutual aid folks rally. Organize. Zero money from the government, for more than a year, bringing services, providing resources helping with legal paperwork, providing child care, bringing food on a regular basis, doing coat drives.” He singles out a drug treatment center where migrants tromped from the 20th District police station to take showers, day in and day out: “They just knew, ‘We’ve got to put people first.’”

I note—to be fair—that heroes surely stepped up equally in border towns in Texas, and the other put-upon sanctuary cities, too. But Vasquez also notes that Denver and New York were sending buses to Chicago, too. “We didn’t send people elsewhere,” he said. “We were like, ‘We’re going to figure this out’ … Even though you’ve got this mental and physical attack from this governor trying to break a city’s spirit, what it actually did is show what Chicago does when things get challenging.”

But that only makes Chicago a perfect target for someone like Abbott—and the Democratic National Convention a perfect time for a seek-and-destroy mission.

THERE ARRIVED, HOWEVER, KINKS IN THE PLAN. This past June, President Biden made the controversial announcement that, to “gain control” of the border, he was taking unilateral action to limit entries to 2,500 people a day, down from a peak approaching 10,000 last December. The agenda-setters of the mainstream media recited one part of the political calculation behind the action: stanching an alleged “political liability ahead of the November elections.” They missed another motive: Chicago officials I spoke with and aid workers down in Texas expect that, because of those restrictions—and also temperatures expected to be over 100 degrees at the border for the rest of the week—Abbott won’t be able to send more than a trickle.

What’s more, whatever sabotage plans he might have coordinated with Trump and the national party have surely been thrown into a cocked hat by, well, events: “Biden’s no longer the target. The Republican Party is on defense,” Vasquez observes. So they can’t really think offensively, as far as sending buses.”

So the national Democratic Party and its presidential ticket may have lucked out. But what about Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, D.C., Los Angeles, the destinations for over 119,000 desperate people? Not hardly.

How, I finally ask Vasquez before he has to take his next meeting, can we make sense of the level of disruption these cities have been absorbing?

“I don’t believe we’ll be able to properly understand it,” he replied. “We’re just going to see it.”

Like a snake swallowing a pig, the consequences will slowly work their way through the system over years, even decades. It means elevated homelessness, black markets, trafficking—public-safety cataclysms, but precisely the opposite way that Republicans think of them, with migrants overwhelmingly the victims.

“These folks are going to be exploited,” Vasquez says. “Because you didn’t proactively handle the housing part. Because again, out of the people that we have here, only 10 percent can get legal work authorization.”

Listen up, Vice President Harris.

“And because of that, we’re going to find out how undeveloped our systems are, in a way we’re not going to be able to properly catalogue … We could learn from this, and actually work to have the systems in place, because climate change is real. But my concern is that the city is actually going to say, ‘Phew, we survived the DNC! Let’s save some money.’”

The Democratic Party could also use this flashing red warning signal to do the right thing, shift the political script, and start talking once more about making America a welcoming nation again—and not to apologize about it, either. That, surely, will take some doing. But do we have any choice?

Maybe the people who fear it will learn about these latest new Americans, who had the guts to traverse the most treacherous path imaginable just to become neighbors of you and me, and realize something like what those startled NASCAR fans learned in Chicago: They’re not so scary after all. Maybe they’re the best people we could possibly welcome.

It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.