It didn’t take long for newly installed President Trump to launch his promised war on undocumented immigrants. Three days after his inauguration, federal officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began staging widespread raids and arrests, spreading fear and panic in immigrant communities.
Since the crackdown started, ICE has made 7,400 arrests, according to the agency, including a record 1,179 detentions on Jan. 27. Of those detained that day, just 613 were considered “criminal arrests,” according to NBC News. The remainder appeared to be nonviolent offenders whose only crime was a civil, rather than a criminal violation—crossing the border illegally. Actual deportations have accelerated as well, with U.S. military flights returning migrants with criminal records to Central and South America. Trump even used the threat of tariffs to force Colombia to back down and accept their citizens back into the country.
Of course, the nation’s reality TV chief executive made sure the media came along for the ride. U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Tom Homan—the Starsky & Hutch of the deportation blitz—donned bulletproof vests to accompany officers in the field as news cameras were rolling. The imagery, designed to make America feel safe again, feeds into the Trump anti-immigrant narrative that hit a new low of disinformation during the fall campaign when the GOP nominee falsely claimed that Haitian migrants in an Ohio town were eating the pets of local residents.
It was no accident that the highlighted raids took place in cities with Democratic mayors, like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Nothing like a partisan kick in the ribs to go along with social destabilization.
Despite the xenophobic rhetoric of Trump and his white nationalist cabal, the reality is that the frenzied start of a mass deportation policy will neither help our economy nor address the major social problems linked by Trump to the immigrant community. No leading social science nor business expert supports the president’s blanket deportations approach. Showing some 11 million undocumented immigrants the door will have a devastatingly negative impact on the U.S. economy and cost an estimated $315 billion, according to the American Immigration Council. The human cost is incalculable. About 5.1 million U.S. citizen children live with an undocumented family member and would see their lives completely overturned by the deportation of their parents or other loved ones.
Of course, nobody wants violent criminals to be roaming free. The so-called “criminal aliens” who have committed felonies are the intended targets of these early raids, but the figures show that thousands of what are known as “collaterals” were caught up in the sweeps—immigrants who have committed no crime other than entering the country without papers.
Trump has raised the stakes by illegally declaring an end to birthright citizenship, sending federal troops to the border and rescinding “Temporary Protected Status” to Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, who face economic hardship and political persecution in their homelands. Homan, Trump’s outspoken border czar, who clearly enjoys the politics of intimidation, has backed up his boss’s tough-guy stance by telling uncooperative state and local officials “to get the hell out of the way” and suggesting that the U.S. Justice Department should prosecute them.
To further undermine resistance to the administration’s harsh policies, Trump allies on Capitol Hill have called on our own Boston Mayor Michelle Wu as well as other municipal leaders from “sanctuary cities” to testify in Washington about their commitment to protecting hard-working and law-abiding immigrants.
These theatrics have stoked fears in immigrant communities that ICE agents may show up to arrest them or their children in schools, workplaces, grocery stores or public transit stations. Here in Massachusetts, an estimated 350,000 undocumented immigrants are at risk.
While Trump employs aggressive military tactics to target immigrants, it’s important to remember that during the Biden administration he used his stranglehold on the Republican Party to scuttle bipartisan legislation to achieve a broad, consensus-driven solution to our patchwork immigration policy. The man who began his first campaign for public office by descending the escalator at Trump Tower to dismiss immigrants as criminals and rapists did not want to remove immigration as a bludgeon from his political toolkit by passage of comprehensive immigration reform.
The Trump playbook of divide-and-conquer, scapegoating and otherism is being rolled out at a massive scale before our eyes. We are just a few steps away from American soldiers demanding proof of citizenship from Americans who, in Trumpworld, don’t look like what they think American citizens should look like.
As we move deeper into the Trump 2.0 administration, we can expect that misrepresentations and blatant falsehoods will continue to cascade. It’s more important than ever to resist. The first challenges to Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to unilaterally cancel birthright citizenship came from immigrant rights groups here in Massachusetts. Attorney General Andrea Campbell led state law enforcement chiefs around the country in standing up to court against the Trump directive. And Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, is helping callers with concerns about the Trump administration’s policies and holding online immigration law clinics to answer questions about what to do if ICE comes knocking at your door.
It’s going to be a long four years. Immigration is only one or many issues where we need to resist Trump’s bleak and cynical version of what America stands for. Not all of us come from families who were willing immigrants to these shores. But we all have a stake in making sure the lamp of Lady Liberty continues to shine above America’s golden door.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
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