The Deportation Shuffle: Anyone Is A Target In Trump’s America
Trump believes that he has a mandate. I’ve no doubt that he genuinely believes this, because in his narrow world, he is beloved by his masses, and he is always right.
So, he stands before massive crowds of supporters - not a majority, as he always claims - and he tells them what they want to hear: It isn’t that they are ordinary and interchangeable to the oligarchy that is quietly dismantling our constitutional republic. They’re God’s chosen - special. They’re suffering from economic pain, not because the wealthiest 1% begrudgingly share only what they must. No, he pontificates quite deliberately, it’s because immigrants are invading us. They’re taking our jobs, he says. Fraudulently signing up for public assistance and social security - that is, when they’re not out criming it up, selling drugs to our kids, and beating down our walker-dependent elderly for the $5 in their wallets. Murdering us as a side hustle.
There are several problems with this assertion. First, it simply isn’t true. This site, the National Institute of Justice, is under Trump’s executive control. It has taken down its own data, but Google’s search image has captured the title of the article, which is “undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.” But the US Customs and Border Patrol site provides the raw data, which is number of criminal arrests by year. In every fiscal year dating back to 2017, the number of crimes have been less than 20,000. And the vast majority of those crimes have been re-entry. Non violent.
I will never understand how this doesn’t make sense to complicit MAGA voters. People hiding from authority figures are the most likely to be on their best behavior. They would be least likely to risk outing themselves to authorities.
Second, Trump and Co are not targeting all immigrants equally. They are overwhelmingly going after brown and black migrants. White Afrikaners get a concierge pass to refugee status; all other hopefuls are suspended from entry around the world, most who have already spent many years in overcrowded camps. Most of the countries he is deporting back to - for those with the luxury of not being sent to gulags and 3rd nation jungle camps - are war-torn countries, notorious for human right abuses. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which operates globally and with United States partnership, has designated many of these countries to have prima facie (“on its face” or knowable) cause for immediate refugee status. Notably, Afrikaners are not on that list. Venezuelans are. Guatemalans are. Some black South Africans have been.
Yet, even with ICE agents on the streets in record numbers, and the White House directing already understaffed FBI officials to move from investigating serious crimes to Immigration enforcement, we are not seeing anywhere close to the “millions” that Trump pledged to get rid of.
ICE officers are under immense pressure to meet baseline 3,000 deportations per day (just over a million per year) expectations. Department of Homeland Security, under Kristi Noem’s fervent MAGA direction, is skating around and directly across the borders of the law.
They are:
Dismissing pending civil immigration cases so that ICE agents can linger in hallways outside of courthouses and haul them away. Families initially viewed this as good news - pending asylum claims dropped, which they took to mean that the government was backing off on claims that they had no cause for asylum. In fact, it is for opposite purpose: they no longer have legal rights and can be immediately deported. Judges can and should notify immigrants that by agreeing with the government to dismiss charges, they are waiving certain rights. If duly informed, they can seek legal counsel. Some conservative judges are immediately granting the dismissals without notifying the immigrants of these rights.
Seeking to remove the Temporary Protected Status of groups from countries in the midst of civil wars or known for mass-scale human rights violations. They have recently won a challenge to their ability to revoke this status and begin deporting more than 500,000 migrants who were in the United States legally (potentially millions more, as these cases wind through our judicial branch).
Targeting legal immigrants and students for exercising free speech rights. They are no longer even pretending to play coy around the constitutional troubles that this brings up; initially, they claimed only to deport those with known ties to terrorist organizations. Once cases reached courts, and judges ruled time and again that there was no evidence of criminality, they simply began targeting these judges as “RINOS” (when conservative) and “rogue actors either Trump derangement syndrome” (not conservative). Trump rants almost daily about “monster judges” who want to destroy the country. He knows exactly what he is doing - riling the base. If he cannot win in a courtroom, he seeks the court of public opinion, always - and no matter what the cost.
Raiding traditionally protected sensitive places such as schools, hospitals, churches, sanctuary city shelters, and courthouses.
When all else fails, they just break the law with impunity. Today, they illegally deported yet another felon. They aren’t doing this quietly - it is with fanfare. They know that the Trump base hears “felon” and immediately turns off the listening ears. They don’t hear the part about due process still being a constitutionally protected right that our judicial system is duty bound to uphold. DHS knew that only a handful of the men they sent to El Salvador’s maximum security prison - potentially for life and now completely at dictator Bukele’s discretion - had no criminal history anywhere. No matter; they wanted them gone, and had paid for slots at CECOT.
There are several other ways they are illegally deporting those who are lawfully abiding, not technically illegally but morally outrageous, such as offering $1000 to those who self-deport. This is a trap, and a nasty trick: they hint that this may be the best way for some to enter lawfully later - but a deportation record makes this legally dubious and mostly impossible. They don’t even have congressional authority (yet, if ever) to approve these payments - and likely won’t even ask for it. It is highly unlikely that they will shell out multiple millions of dollars to people who accepted this “generous offer” and paid their own way back to countries of origin, and those who voluntarily left have no legal recourse if they don’t receive these payments.
This is creating an environment of extreme hostility and intense fear for most immigrants. My husband has been a lawful Permanent Resident for more than 30 years. He has committed no crimes, and is a highly productive member of society, employed in a profession with notable gaps for well-qualified Americans to fill. We have plans to visit Malaysia this summer, our last time with our college-bound son. We splurged, and paid for first class tickets, for the first time ever. Now, he is expressing concern about what might happen to him upon re-entry.
I wish I could say that his fear is ridiculous, but we both know better. I have amassed a small collection of speeding tickets in other states, caught by cameras. This was 3-5 years ago, when I traveled often to visit family. I use my husband’s car, because it is more reliable than my own. I wasn’t even the driver with one of these tickets, and my husband wasn’t with me at all - but the cameras pick up the owner of the plate number. My husband paid those tickets (against my will, since they weren’t legally enforceable back then, in the states I’d traveled in) but he’s worried now that the speeding charges may be pinned on him, and used as an excuse to detain or deport him. Paid. Traffic. Citations. That he didn’t even incur; he was simply the owner of the car.
Imagine the intense fear that those who have had minor brushes with the law must feel. What Harvard students must be wrestling with - knowing that in this period of intense scrutiny and public hostility, they may lose their F-1 visas at any moment.
And then, imagine the enormous cost to our society, losing Ivy-league students and graduate students. These are future doctors, willing to serve in rural areas and less ideal government-subsidized hospitals. We lose research scientists, engineers, math and computer science experts. In an environment that is already openly hostile to the sciences - Americans in these fields are also leaving the country. The brain drain will cost us dearly.
This bigotry is not sustainable. We rely on immigrant labor in other critically important areas too - agriculture, health care (particularly aides in nursing homes and Medicare-subsidized home care programs). Retail. Fast food. Industries that many Americans will not work within, because we have alternatives. The truth is that undocumented immigrants have never qualified for any government subsidies, and many of them pay tens of millions each year towards social security and Medicare - benefits they will never receive. Our farmers are suffering with the double blow of USAID elimination and a large swath of employees who have either been deported, or are no longer willing to show up and risk an ICE raid.
My biggest fear is that the vocal minority of MAGA Americans will win this battle. Not because the rest of us agree with them - and polls demonstrate that we are in the majority. Most Americans do not agree that this was Trump’s mandate - they believe that his administration is carrying this too far. MAGA voters are in the news daily, expressing regret that lovely Maria with the warm heart and bright smile was detained for imminent deportation. This isn’t what they voted for, they say. They wanted those “other” illegals - the few thousand, not millions, committing crimes removed.
Trump will never admit that he lied to his base. And so, this particular band will play on … DHS and ICE will find their millions - even if they have to deport American children and other lawfully abiding, including permanent residents and naturalized citizens. Only we can put an end to what our fear and bigotry created. Donald Trump didn’t begin this legacy; he is merely exploiting it. I’ve lived long enough to see the ebb and flow of my fellow American’s fear and gullibility. My brown immigrant husband was a young man who “fit the profile” shortly after 9/11. I’ve walked by his side as we entered restaurants and faced down hostile stares and heavy silence while waiters navigated us to our table. I’ve experienced elderly white people say profanely ignorant things to me when I’ve been in public with our young son. These aren’t my direct lived experiences, but in a very real way, they also are: my husband and son are my everything. My entire world. And they are worth protecting, along with the millions of others who call this country home.