The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization. The American Immigration Council’s new special report, Mass Deportation: Analyzing the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Immigrants, Democracy, and America, is a guide to the first six months of the second Trump administration, what might be coming, and who is being harmed. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts lifting up the cross-cutting themes identified in the report, each of which is a way to understand the administration’s immigration policy.
There are far more deportable immigrants in the United States than there were when President Trump took office on January 20.
This isn’t because new people have arrived – border crossings remain quite low, as they were in the first months of Trump’s first term, as people take a “wait and see” approach to new border policies. It’s because over 1 million people who were in the United States under some form of legal protection – whether they were parolees allowed into the U.S. for a certain reason and period of time, or holders of Temporary Protected Status while their home countries were unsafe to return to – have been stripped of those protections in the first six months of this administration. Far fewer have been picked up, much less deported, by ICE.
You could argue that the federal government is further away from achieving a “mass deportation” goal than it was at the beginning. But that would miss the point. The point is that, under this administration, the federal government is using its powers to bring reality in line with its dystopian propaganda, in which the U.S. is inundated with countless millions of unauthorized immigrants.
The story that Donald Trump and his allies tell about immigrants – that most of them are criminals who pose a public safety threat to American families – has never changed, and it’s never been anywhere near true. But when they have the reins of federal policymaking, they can take actions to reinforce that story.
To take just one example, they don’t have to merely assert that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 – they can bring federal criminal charges against him that accuse him of gang-related crimes. At least in a properly independent federal court, the judge doesn’t have to take the prosecution’s claims at face value. When it comes to immigration policy, though, the government has a great deal more discretion – to label someone a public charge or a public safety threat, to revoke discretionary protection and make someone “illegal.”
The administration can’t make all immigrants into rapists and murderers. But they can try to make them into federal criminals, by enforcing a long-dormant provision of immigration law that requires all immigrants to register with the government – and therefore means that those who haven’t registered are violating federal criminal law.
These aren’t the sort of criminals that government ads and TikTok videos want you to think about, of course. That’s where the optics come in: the insistence on treating immigrants as a threat and meeting them with aggression and violence accordingly. From smashing someone’s car window to pull them from their car to posting videos of Venezuelan men getting their heads forcibly shaved in CECOT, the administration has dealt with immigrants as if they pose an imminent threat to the safety of officers, communities, and the nation.
These tactics make confrontation more likely. Sending the National Guard to Los Angeles practically dared protesters to get more aggressive in response. Wearing masks out of fear of getting doxxed invites hostility from neighbors and bystanders.
Trump’s first inaugural address spoke of “American carnage.” Now, it’s arrived – and they’re the perpetrators.
For more on the administration’s efforts to bend reality to match propaganda, see our report Mass Deportation: Analyzing the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Immigrants, Democracy, and America.
