The War on Immigration (Legal and Otherwise)

A centerpiece of Donald Trump’s campaign, along with tackling inflation, was mass deportations. The inflation fight went by the wayside pretty quickly in favor of firing the first shots of a new trade war, but Trump voters are getting what they paid for when it comes to deportations. In fact, they might be getting more than they paid for.

The campaign promise was to deport violent criminal illegals, but as it turns out, there weren’t that many of those and the ones that exist are notoriously hard to find. The strategy quickly shifted from rounding up violent gang members to picking the low-hanging fruit, which was basically almost any immigrant that Trump and his ICE agents could find. Trump reportedly wants to set a record by deporting a million people (Obama holds the current record for deporting 432,201 people in 2013), and you don’t get numbers like that by being selective.

It was obvious pretty quickly that ICE was starting to pick up immigrants who were not dangerous or violent. For example, the case of Kilmar Abregro Garcia has gotten a lot of attention for his deportation to El Salvador’s brutal Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), but Garcia is not the only one who has been wrongfully deported and imprisoned. For example, Merwil Gutierrez, a Bronx teenager from Venezuela who had a pending asylum hearing with his father (who has not been deported), was also deported to CECOT confinement even though the arresting ICE agents reportedly knew that he was not the target of their warrant.

Newsweek reported that the arresting agents detained Gutierrez at the entrance to his buildin. One agent allegedly said, “No, he’s not the one” [that they were looking for], but another agent reportedly said, “Take him anyway.”

Gutierrez had no known gang affiliation or criminal history, but DHS released a statement weeks later in mid-May that said Gutierrez had been arrested in February on charges of possession of a firearm on school property and possession of stolen goods. He was never tried on these charges.

Remember that it is legal to ask for asylum, even if you cross the border illegally.

The government has also persecuted people who are legally in the US on student visas. Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil are two of the best-known examples. Both were arrested for exercising free speech rights, Ozturk having authored a pro-Palestinian op-ed in a student newspaper, and Khalil having taken part in a pro-Palestinian protest. Ozturk was released after weeks in confinement, but Khalil is still in jail even though there have been no criminal charges. It is notable that their position on Middle Eastern politics is shared by about a third of Americans.

The pair of activists is not the only students whose legal status is threatened. The New York Times reported that more than 1,500 student visas had been canceled, although many have since been restored. This may be temporary. A DHS spokesman said, “We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation,” but the agency only restored records to a student exchange database while cases were examined. Some students had traffic violations, but many had no record of problems with the law at all.

As we speak, notices are apparently going out ordering immigrants to self-deport. Carlos Trujillo, an immigration lawyer, received a threatening email that ordered him to self-deport, reports Newsweek.

“It is time for you to leave the United States,” the email said, adding, “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole. Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate seven days from the date of this notice.”

Trujillo has been a US citizen for more than a decade.

A Massachusetts immigration lawyer who is a natural-born citizen received another such notice.

“At first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine,” said Nicole Micheroni in The Guardian. “Probably, hopefully, [it was] sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.”

And then there is the birthright citizenship case. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments on Trump’s Executive Order eliminating birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. If implemented, Trump’s Order would strip the citizenship of millions of natural-born American citizens. It is highly likely that Trump’s government would deport many of these Americans and, quite possibly, lock some of these US citizens away in CECOT indefinitely with no criminal charges or due process.

Trump is already deporting US citizens. There have been several documented cases of American-born US citizens who are minors being deported with their noncitizen parents. Return can be difficult because ICE often confiscates identification documents, and children who have never left the US may not have US passports, which are required to re-enter the country.

The mother in one case told NBC News that her family was lured to an asylum interview where they were told they would get work authorization papers. She was told to bring the children. When they arrived, they were told they would be deported and were not allowed to contact family members who were legal residents and could have kept the children.

And then there are people caught in the middle, like Ximena Arias-Cristobal, a 19-year-old Georgia college student who was detained after her truck was mistakenly stopped by police looking for a different vehicle. Ximena illegally came to the US when she was four and knows no other country. She was too young to qualify for President Obama’s DACA program (and it isn’t clear if the Trump Administration will honor those deferrals), and now faces deportation even though she did not consciously cross the border illegally.

Among the first signs that something was badly wrong was the story of Becky Burke, a 28-year-old Welsh tourist, who was detained in February. Per Snopes’ collection of background material, Burke was backpacking in Washington State when she was denied entry into Canada due to a visa problem. She was refused reentry into the US, classified as an illegal alien, and detained at an ICE facility in Tacoma. The BBC reports that she was held for 19 days in what her parents say were conditions suitable for Hannibal Lecter that included “leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs,” no change of prison uniform, lights on 24 hours per day, and a “diet of cold rice, potatoes, and beans (she is vegan).”

Becky’s crime was apparently “helping around the house” when she stayed with host families, but nobody seems to know for sure. The Department of Homeland Security only said in a statement that her detention was “related to the violation of the terms and conditions of her admission” to the US.

Such stories of abusive behavior towards tourists are mounting and will undoubtedly contribute to a drop in tourism. In April, two German teenage girls were arrested and detained and spent the night in a Hawaiian jail before being deported the next day. Their crime? Not having hotel reservations for their planned five-week stay.

JD Vance even openly threatened visitors to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be hosted jointly by the US, Mexico, and Canada.

“Everybody is welcome to come and see this incredible event, I know we’ll have visitors probably from close to 100 countries,” Vance “joked,” adding, “We want them to come, we want them to celebrate, we want them to watch the game, but when the time is up, they’ll have to go home, otherwise they’ll have to talk to [Homeland Security] Secretary Noem.”

Friends, that is called “kidding on the square,” and it was calculated not to make visitors feel welcome.

All of this is having a chilling effect on immigration. That is by design.

But the chill goes beyond day laborers and hotel maids. The World Travel and Tourism Council reports that US tourism is projected to decline 22 percent this year, costing the economy more than $12 billion. In a tariff-stricken country, that shortfall will be sorely missed.

The US is already starting to experience a brain drain as well. A Russian-born Harvard research scientist is among those awaiting deportation. Her visa was canceled after she failed to declare biological samples when coming through Customs. Kseniia Petrova left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and fears political persecution if she is returned. (I do mean actual political persecution based on her beliefs rather than the political persecution claimed by January 6 insurrectionists who engaged in violent criminal behavior that was politically motivated.)

Other scientists are voting with their feet and choosing to do their research somewhere other than here. A poll of scientists in Nature magazine found that 75 percent were considering seeking greener pastures in Canada and Europe. The Trump Administration’s research funding cuts, as well as an anti-intellectual and anti-science atmosphere, have contributed to scientists emigrating from the US or thinking about doing so.

The loss of scientists, researchers, and engineers may be fine with most of Trump’s MAGA supporters, but stifling research and innovation won’t be good for either the economy or national security in the long run. For decades or centuries, the US has benefited from immigrant scientists seeking freedom from persecution as well as an environment where new ideas were welcome. That may be coming to an end.

“I think that there is a wrong perception that foreign scientists are somehow privileged to be in the United States. I feel it’s the opposite,” Leon Peshkin, a principal research scientist at Harvard’s Department of Systems Biology, told CNN. “Foreign scientists come here with gifts… they are highly skilled experts who are in demand. They enrich the American scientific community.”

Hardline Trump nativists may be happy with these developments, but more moderate Americans are not. Polling already shows Trump in the negative on immigration, once his strongest issue. A large segment of the electorate seems to favor a crackdown on illegal immigration while simultaneously holding the view that Trump has already gone too far.

That may be because a lot of Americans already know someone who has been detained or deported. That is the case with Martin Verdi and Debora Rey, two Argentine Americans who voted for Trump, only to see their son, a 31-year-old green card holder, detained in a South Georgia ICE facility due to a misdemeanor conviction for infliction of injury in California in 2020. The family arrived in the US in the mid-90s when their son was a toddler.

Why would friends of immigrants, especially those with criminal records, vote for Trump? Verdi and Rey told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that they supported Trump’s promise of border security, but Rey adds, “But he didn’t say he was going to do this, that he was going to go after people who have been here for a long time. He said he was going to go after all the criminals who came illegally.”

“We feel betrayed, tricked.”

I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way at this point.

And then there are the people who are welcomed by the Trump Administration. The resettlement of South African Afrikaner refugees is well known. Trump has claimed that the Afrikaners face genocide in South Africa, a claim not made by their representatives back home, even as the Trump Administration rejects asylum claims by people from countries like Afghanistan and Venezuela who face a real possibility of death or torture if they return.

Not so well known is Trump’s deal to admit members of the notorious Mexican cartel leader El Chapo’s family into the US. Last week, at least 17 members of El Chapo’s family were met by US agents, this time apparently with open arms, when they crossed from Tijuana. Under the current administration, it definitely seems that Mexico is not sending its best.

I have to wonder if the Mexican crime family’s immigration might not be related to Trump’s plan to sell immigration “gold cards” for $5 million. While I haven’t seen evidence of this, it does seem very likely that the resettlement is part of a deal with the Trump Administration that would involve some sort of quid pro quo.

The Statue of Liberty famously welcomed the world’s “tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” America has often failed to live up to that invitation.

This is not the first time that we’ve had an anti-immigrant backlash. The Know-Nothing Party was a prominent nativist movement in the 1800s, and at various times, we’ve seen movements that attacked (sometimes literally) Chinese, Japanese, Catholic, Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Jewish, and Muslim immigrants (among others). Most of those movements are remembered with shame today after their ethnic targets joined the melting pot and became a part of what Bill Murray famously called the American “mutt.”

It is fashionable to attack diversity on the right, but America is a diverse nation, and we are stronger for it. The wretched refuse of the world helped us win two world wars, the Cold War, and the space race at the level of the Nisei grunt on the front line to the Tuskegee Airmen, all the way up to the recently-Nazi scientists of Operation Paperclip, and a Jewish refugee who became Secretary of State.

I’ll agree that we need to control immigration and secure our borders, but that is not what the Trump Administration is doing. The Trump Administration is targeting legal immigration from refugees to students to tourists with what seems to be a particular focus on immigrants with darker skin tones.

For decades, America was the “shining city on the hill,” but Trump and MAGA are hiding that light under a bushel. One day soon, we, as a nation, will look back on this period in shame. We will be a poorer country for the immigrants that we have rejected, and our image in the world will be much tarnished, but as much as this period will hurt America, it is nothing compared to how it will hurt the people that we are shipping off to third-world countries and prisons.

May God forgive us for we know not what we do.

No, we do know. That makes it worse.