An initiative from the progressive group Accountable.US is targeting the architects of the Trump administration’s immigration policies to ensure their actions will have consequences as they pivot to the private sector.
Called Hate for Hire, the program is focusing on those behind the administration’s family separation policy that tore children and parents apart at the border in a calculated act of deterrence.
“Objectively, that policy is anti-American and goes against everything we stand for,” Lizzy Price, Accountable.US’s director of strategic partnerships, told Blue Tent. “So we really were concerned about the idea that, after the Trump administration left office, how do we make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again?”
False start
Hate for Hire is not the first effort to hold Trump officials accountable for their actions during the past four years.
In November, a group called the Trump Accountability Project announced it would be keeping tabs on the administration’s worst actors after they left office. But backlash, notably led by CNN anchor Jake Tapper, resulted in the group backing down and closing shop.
The Trump Accountability Project, in its note to supporters announcing it was ending its efforts before they began, cited comments from President-elect Joe Biden about reconciliation and unity as the determining factor in closing.
“The goal of the project was to play a part in restoring the soul of the nation, and we’ll follow President-elect Biden’s lead to get us there,” the group said in a statement on the now-defunct site. “Accordingly, in the spirit of the President-elect’s call to build a more united country, this project will no longer be active.”
A moral battle
The Trump Accountability Project’s hesitation is not shared by Hate for Hire, which has no such compunction over its mission. “We have to make sure that the child separation policy isn’t seen as a political disagreement,” said Price. “It’s a policy that goes beyond politics. And it’s a policy that was cruel, that ripped children away from their families.”
Because of these abuses, the campaign “aims to ensure that these officials are not able to take refuge in the nation’s leading universities and boardrooms, whitewashing their reputations and landing cushy jobs after their horrific actions.”
Kyle Herrig, Accountable’s president, said in a statement in December that the moral atrocities of the Trump border policies were so abhorrent that they cannot be forgotten or swept under the rug.
“On the Trump administration’s watch, immigrant children were ripped from their parents and abused,” said Herrig. “Hundreds of families still haven’t been reunited. We cannot allow the officials responsible for these heinous practices to be normalized in cushy corporate boardrooms and university lecture halls.”
An eye on corporations
Accountable.US, with American Oversight, has also launched the Campaign Against Corporate Complicity, an initiative that goes beyond immigration, aiming to hold Trump administration officials responsible for their actions while in the White House.
“Over the course of four years, Donald Trump amassed a record of cruelty, ineptitude and unprecedented harm to public health and national security, but he did not do it alone,” Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement. “Trump’s abuses were aided and implemented by scores of individuals who leave behind them a paper trail of complicity.”
Price noted the administration’s involvement in sparking the Capitol riots as a factor in how the campaign will target companies—as well as the administration’s commitment to the principles they claim to prioritize.
“A lot of corporations have a diversity, equity, inclusion and justice mission as a part of their brand,” said Price. “And if they hire somebody who was a high-level person who was involved in some of these other horrifying actions, then we’ll certainly hold that corporation accountable for that.”
