Some might call Trump’s comments racially coded, or “racially tinged,” as I heard them called yesterday, but the truth is that these statements are overt, transparent, undisguised, unbridled racism. (Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who was in the room, said as much on Friday morning.)

And they’re not just comments: they’re the basis for Trump’s mass deportation policy.

That racism underlies this administration's thinking on immigration is thoroughly unsurprising. Donald Trump’s legacy is not simply speckled with incidents of racism; it itself is racist. Donald Trump entered the business world as a racist, he entered the 2016 election as a racist, and he entered the White House as a racist.

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While Republicans in Congress feign outrage over Trump’s latest astounding racist comment, they continue to step in line to help propel his racist policies. And not surprisingly: these policies, such as overthrowing DACA, ending TPS and attempts to limit the number of immigrants arriving from non-European countries, are ones many Republicans in Congress have supported for years.

The only thing that differentiates Trump from many of his Republican allies is that he is willing to name the source of his motivations aloud, and often in public, whereas many Republicans in Congress would rather pander to the white supremacist anti-immigrant movement while pretending that’s not what their policy positions are about.

Today, we find ourselves in a moment of reckoning. “There comes a time,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “where silence is betrayal.” We are in that time.

Every person who stays silent on Donald Trump’s racism, regardless of their own race or party, is betraying not just America’s communities of color, but the very ideals on which this country was founded. We were founded on the idea that all people are created equal, and while that notion of who counts as a person — who deserves equality — has evolved over time, the point remains: America was founded as bastion of freedom, and equality. That is the America I know. That is the America of which my Haitian parents wanted to be a part. That is the America for which we must all speak up.