Rural Trump voters who voted for the GOP so they would "send all them Mexicans criminals home" and who scoffed at sanctuary city protections as "Democrats covering up for the damn illegals who vote for them" are shocked to discover that the places hardest hit by ICE raids are small towns full of rural Trump voters.
Pacific County, Washington is on the coast just north of Astoria, Oregon and the Columbia River in the bottom western corner of the state, population of about 20,000. There's not much here, with the local fishing industry and canneries ravaged by climate change and cranberry bogs who need migrant workers suffering the downturn of rural America. Since 1952 this has been one of the most Democratic counties in America, but that changed when Trump came along and got 49% of the vote. The 42% that Clinton got in 2016 was the lowest Democratic percentage in the county since Al Smith in the Prohibition era 90 years ago.
They listened to Trump's dog whistle to "Make America Great Again". Now they're realizing too late that the hounds are among them.
Long Beach, Oregon has 1,400 residents. In 2017 ICE arrests and deportations went up here by 400% over 2016. Arrests of people who have lived in the county for a decade or more. They just now understand that places like Pacific County are low-hanging fruit for ICE. Kids vanishing from classrooms. Workers are disappearing from the bogs and canneries.
The economy in Pacific County, already teetering, is going over the cliff into the sea.
And the people of Pacific County have nobody to blame but themselves.
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