“The largest domestic deportation operation in American history!” Donald Trump called out at a rally in Pennsylvania, and his promise was met with cheers from those who viewed that statement as something to celebrate.
One of the most popular justifications for mass deportations that motivates large crowds of people to cast their cheers and their votes towards a promise like that is the generalization that immigrants are violent criminals. This notion gained a lot of traction after the murder of the white American Laken Riley at the hands of a Venezuelan man in 2024. While tragic, the case of Laken Riley is a rare one.
According to a 2024 study, by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), ‘undocumented’ immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime and violent felony crime compared to other groups. U.S.-born citizens had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types. Therefore, attempting to address violent crime by increasing the persecution of undocumented immigrants is- if nothing else- a waste of time.
Given that those who possess US citizenship are statistically the most likely to commit violent crime, to choose a crackdown on immigration as a solution to violent crime is to fail to catch the majority of violent criminals by focusing energy on the wrong group.
Another common catchphrase of those who support mass deportations is, “Just come here legally.” When immigrants aren’t able to gain legal status, it is often not for lack of trying. For instance, immigrants who have demonstrated their intention to gain legal status by submitting their application for ‘asylum’ (the right to live here permanently) are allowed to live in the United States while their application is pending.
If the court ends up denying that application years later, the person who submitted it becomes undocumented, regardless of how many years they have spent living in our country, contributing to our economy, and following legal protocol to gain citizenship.
A person can also be labeled undocumented if their visa or green card expires. Worse, the children of parents whose visas or green cards have expired automatically become undocumented. Under the Obama administration, these children were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a federal program that prevented the deportation of the children of undocumented people and gave them the right to work.
According to United We Dream, The first Trump administration ended DACA in 2017. Although the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s termination of DACA was unlawful in 2020, lawsuits against the program have since succeeded in preventing it from returning.
A person might also be undocumented because they had been legally allowed to live in the U.S. as part of temporary protected status (TPS) for refugees fleeing the active crises in Ukraine, Haiti, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Ecuador, but lost their protected status when Trump ended the programs which provided it.
Finally, Trump’s termination of birthright citizenship means that countless people who were automatically counted as legal citizens under birthright citizenship can now be considered undocumented. Birthright citizenship means that anyone born in the U.S. automatically becomes a citizen, including U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. It is based on the Fourteenth Amendment, which was added after the Civil War to expand citizenship rights to include African Americans.
Trump’s recent executive order uses an alternate interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude any American born to parents who were undocumented at the time of their birth or whose parents were here under a temporary citizenship program from citizenship, effectively ending birthright citizenship.
Immigrants who were previously granted legal status under the above federal citizenship programs are considered “illegal” as soon as those programs end. Combine this technicality with Trump’s destruction of those same citizenship programs, and it becomes clear that Trump is effectively creating more of what he claims is the country’s enemy: undocumented immigrants.
Any good-faith attempt to reduce the number of undocumented Americans would surely maintain those programs to achieve their goal without unnecessary incarceration and cruelty.
The true goal of the termination of these programs, and in turn, the creation of more undocumented people to be punished, seems to be more cruel. In addition to robbing people of their legal status and then calling them “illegal,” Trump’s crackdown on immigration has expanded to target people of color who never immigrated in the first place and have always been citizens of the country.
All persons born in Puerto Rico are automatically U.S. citizens under the Nationality Act of 1940, given that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. Yet, this January, ICE officers captured a Puerto Rican U.S. military veteran at a business in Newark, New Jersey, and harassed the owners of Puerto Rican restaurant Boricua 2 – located just thirty minutes from AFS – without a proper warrant.
According to The City of Newark, Newark mayor Ras Baraka addressed the raid by saying, “One of the detainees is a U.S. military veteran who suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned…Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized.”
Speaking to ABC News, Robert Acevedo, co-owner of Boricua 2 and retired police officer, said, “They came in here and thought that we were undocumented because it’s a Puerto Rican restaurant. Just because they come in with badges doesn’t mean you’re obligated to let them go in the back and see anything,” referencing the officers’ lack of a judicial warrant, which is the only warrant that allows Philadelphia police forces to enter a property, according to a 2016 law.
Attacking those who have been automatic U.S. citizens since 1940 is not enough for Trump’s crusade. It has been ironically expanded to target the only Americans who have zero foreign ancestral roots, who are “more American than being American,” in the words of Navajo nation president Dr. Buu Nygren: Native Americans.
According to AZ Mirror, despite the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924’s guarantee of citizenship for Native Americans, the Department of Justice recently claimed that Native Americans were valid targets of Trump’s mass deportations because of an 1884 Supreme Court case which ruled that Native Americans’ right to citizenship should be impaired by their alleged “immediate allegiance to their tribes.”
In an interview with CNN, Arizona senator Theresa Hatathlie said that she received a report from a Navajo woman that several Indigenous people had been detained at a worksite in Scottsdale, Arizona, and interrogated for hours without access to their cell phones or any way of contacting family or authorities. The story of the detainees of Scottsdale is, in of itself, a frightening one, but it pales in comparison to the scale of cruelty and inhumane conditions that have already proved to be a part of Trump’s crackdown are a central part of his public plans to continue it in the future.
The Laken Riley Act, a bill named after a woman whose murder at the hands of a Venezuelan immigrant was used as a basis to exaggerate the number of dangerous immigrants, allocates at least $26.9 billion of the federal budget to expanding immigrant detention centers to fit 110,000 more people. Trump has promised to capture eleven million undocumented immigrants. The conditions that the eleven million targeted humans will face if Trump’s mission is successful are grim.
For example, four immigrant women were taken by ICE to Krome North processing center in Miami despite a lack of criminal records across the board. Wishing to remain anonymous for fear of consequences, they told USA Today that ICE had held them “like sardines in a jar” without access to food or a bathroom, and that they were instructed to urinate on the floor.
In a letter to her fiancé, which was submitted to the press, one of those same women wrote, “We couldn’t wait to get to Krome, we thought it was the place from where we could get out faster. That’s what our lawyers said. They checked us out and put chains on us. Hands to waist, legs are connected.”
“The chain on my chest was so tight, I couldn’t breathe properly. I got so scared I won’t be able to breathe, I cried and begged them to loosen it up. They said ‘you’re fine.’ Luckily, another woman heard me and helped. But the fear of how your life can be treated increased. Nobody cares.”
In an official response to a lengthy list of allegations, including these, ICE stated, “ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously. These allegations are not in keeping with ICE policies, practices, and standards of care.”
Yet, a report by the office inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which analyzed conditions at seventeen immigration detention centers via unannounced inspections between 2020 and 2023 revealed that 71% of detention centers did not provide “required care” for detainees, 59% denied detainees required medical care, and it “could not be confirmed” whether detainees were provided with three meals a day.
The conditions of ICE detention centers are one of the most damning elements of Trump’s mass deportation plans. As is proven above, those who are captured by ICE do not merely undergo humane transportation “back to Mexico”, as many supporters of mass deportations seem to think.
Instead, they are incarcerated and subjected to treatment and conditions that are unacceptable – so unacceptable, in fact, that the very department that runs ICE itself admits that they are problematic. To subject our fellow humans to this treatment is wrong, and in the context of Trump’s crackdown, it is also blatantly racist.
Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner explicitly compared the rapid ICE raids to the mass deportations of Jews which were the first step in Hitler’s holocaust, saying, “Local law enforcement can volunteer to do Nazi stuff, I’m sure I stand with all my colleagues up here when I say ‘Nope. N-O-P-E. No.’ Maybe there are some local law enforcement officials who want to put on jackboots and gray uniforms and march behind this, but not us. “
Although the comparison to Nazism may seem extreme, it is not baseless. After all, Trump has repeatedly stated that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, echoing Hitler’s use of the term “blood poisoning” in reference to the ethnic groups he targeted in Mein Kampf.
Furthermore, both Trump and Hitler justified their attack on certain ethnic groups by scapegoating those groups for economic decline, and both initiated their reign of terror through mass deportations, which were facilitated by government officials knocking down the doors of homes and businesses.
A comparison can also be drawn between the federal justification made for the ICE attacks on Native Americans and that which was made for the Japanese Internment camps, which facilitated the racially motivated incarceration and disenfranchisement of 117,000 Japanese American adults and children between 1942 and 1946.
The part of the Elk v. Wilkins case which is being used to justify ICE’s arrest of Native Americans – that Native Americans are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because their alleged “immediate allegiance to their tribe” comes first – mirrors the justification used for the Japanese Internment Camps of the 1940s, which consisted of the ignorant claim that Japanese Americans – by virtue of their ethnicity – were inherently more loyal to Axis Japan than they were to the United States government. Both of these efforts to incarcerate members of a particular ethnic group are rationalized through racially based assumptions about which government those ethnic groups’ loyalties lie with.
In her interview with CNN about the ICE attacks on Native Americans, Navajo Council Speaker Crystalee Curley stated, “I think there’s a confusion with other races, maybe just because having brown skin, automatically being profiled or stereotyped.”
That quote summarizes what defines this iteration of ICE terror as a purely racist campaign – the fact that it has strayed from its purported purpose of preventing immigration fraud and begun targeting people of color who are not even immigrants in the first place, “just because of having brown skin.”
If ICE is allowed to bang down the door of anyone who looks a certain way, whether they have their documents or not, then its purpose is no longer to enforce immigration laws, but to enforce racism. If history has taught us anything, it is that racially motivated militarized roundups of innocent people, whether because they are Japanese, Jewish, or purely because, in Curley’s words, they “have brown skin” – are wrong.
Our country is just as capable as any other of becoming the kind of monster that commits these atrocities. Whether we write that chapter into our history is up to us.
If you would like to be remembered as the kind of person who defies an atrocity rather than who cooperates with it, I recommend that you research and volunteer with local immigrant rights organizations such as Juntos, and – if you are 18 – vote against the racially motivated mass incarceration of our neighbors and their children.
