U.S. Border Patrol agents at a processing center on the U.S.-Mexico border. Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (public domain)
Trump’s first month as president represented an aggressive and destructive assault on the immigrant community. Since the start of his second term, Trump and his regime unleashed a barrage of executive orders and policies that followed through on all of his past racist rhetoric and promises of mass deportations.
Ending birthright citizenship
On his first day in office on Jan. 20, Trump’s opening salvo involved attacking the very definition and nature of U.S. citizenship itself. In an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Trump directed an end to birthright citizenship, which is a constitutional right to automatic citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. The order was challenged by multiple lawsuits and between Feb. 5 and 13, four federal judges issued nationwide preliminary injunctions to temporarily halt it. The litigation is ongoing and the legal results remain to be seen.
Regardless, this order was a brazen right-wing assault on settled constitutional law for over 125 years since the 1898 landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. In this case, Wong Kim Ark was a Chinese American born in San Francisco who sued the U.S. government and made the argument that his birth in the country made him rightfully a U.S. citizen even though his parents were both Chinese citizens. Wong brought the suit after the U.S. government imposed its racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 on him, preventing him from re-entering the U.S. after a trip abroad by arresting and detaining him for five months. Empowered by the activism and legal assistance of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in California, Wong won a crucial constitutional and civil rights victory that set a precedent for the families of all immigrants and defined citizenship to this day. The order therefore should be viewed as a resentful white supremacist strike against not only the immigrant communities of today, but also the civil rights legacy of immigrants and people of color that shaped the fabric of American society.
Launching mass raids, arrests, detention, and deportations
Trump and his administration took immediate action to activate and strengthen the U.S.’s deportation machine and put undocumented people and immigrants in the most disadvantageous and vulnerable position possible.
To enact the cornerstone of his plan of mass raids and deportations, Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up its raids and arrests and they have been occurring in various cities including Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and New York. He has also pushed for more cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement to carry out arrests and deportations. Other federal agencies, including the FBI, IRS, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Bureau of Prisons, and U.S. Marshals Service, are being deputized and enlisted to coordinate in the immigration dragnet. Aggressive quotas were set for local ICE offices to detain at least 75 immigrants per day, which amounts to 1,800 immigrants per day nationwide. Under Trump’s first month in office, over 8,000 immigrants have been arrested and over 37,000 people have been deported.
On the first day of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded the existing policy memo that limited ICE and Customs and Border Protection (both DHS agencies) from conducting raids and arrests at sensitive areas including schools, hospitals, places of worship, and demonstrations and rallies. With the rescission of the memo, immigrants, children, and community members will all be put at risk of harm in the course of raids and arrests conducted in these sensitive locations, reducing everyone’s safety and security. ICE also issued a policy asserting its ability to conduct enforcement and arrests in or near courthouses such as criminal and family courts. This exposes immigrants to the risk of arrest and deportation even when they are tending to other unrelated legal matters and obligations in court.
The first bill that Trump signed into law for his second term was the Laken Riley Act, a bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress that criminalizes immigrants and tightens the pipeline from the criminal justice system to the deportation machine. The unsettling and aggressive law expands on the government’s mandatory detention powers and requires the detention of certain immigrants who are merely arrested for certain crimes such as shoplifting, burglary, and theft, even if they haven’t been convicted. In theory this could lead to a heinous mandatory detention of someone who jumped a subway turnstile or stole a candy bar from a store.
Lastly, in a disturbing move to bolster the government’s immigrant detention system, Trump has ordered the expanded usage of none other than Guantánamo Bay. This U.S. military base and prison notorious for human rights violations against post-9/11 detainees of the “War on Terror” will no doubt continue its sinister record as a site for holding immigrant detainees. Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel condemned the expansion and called it “an act of brutality.”
Expanding expedited removal
Expedited removal is a hastened deportation process carried out by a low-level immigration officer that does not allow for a chance to have a hearing before an immigration judge. This more aggressive process with fewer due process rights was previously reserved for certain immigrants arrested within 100 miles of the U.S.’s borders, but under Trump’s new policy regime, expedited removals can now be carried out anywhere within the U.S. against immigrants who did not lawfully enter the country and who have been here for less than two years. Trump’s expansion of expedited removal, while not necessarily illegal, is a push of this enforcement mechanism to the maximum extent in order to create the most hostile and vulnerable environment possible for immigrants.
Militarizing and shutting down the U.S.-Mexico border
Against the backdrop of declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and under the framing of the migration of people to the U.S. with the militaristic term of an “invasion,” Trump has justified and ordered the further militarization of the southern border. He deployed 1,500 active duty troops to add to the existing military presence at the border and directed branches including the Ready Reserve and National Guard to assist in stopping migrant entries and constructing additions to the border wall. This disturbing surge of force along with other border policy changes not only serve to repel migrants and increase the difficulty of applying for asylum, but also raise the risk that migrants arriving at the border will be met with violent and deadly force if they encounter officers and servicemembers.
Ending relief for immigrants fleeing hardship
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a form of humanitarian immigration relief that can be granted to certain immigrants from countries designated by the U.S. government and DHS. Typically the countries that are designated for TPS are undergoing significant hardship in the form of natural disasters, civil wars, epidemics, or other extraordinary crises. TPS enables people from those countries to lawfully stay and work in the U.S. temporarily while those crises transpire so that they are not subjected to being deported into danger. TPS designation has to be extended by the government for each period, and while it is not a pathway to citizenship or even a green card, many TPS recipients have lived and worked in the U.S. for many years, forming families and communities.
Although the countries designated for TPS continue to experience strife and hardship, Trump and his administration have attacked it nonetheless. Notably the most cruel assault is the premature and permanent ending of TPS for Haiti, a move that will negatively impact half a million Haitian immigrants in the U.S. and expose them to deportation once the most recent extension ends on Aug. 3 of this year. Originally designated for TPS in 2010 due to the earthquake that devastated the country, TPS for Haiti has been extended ever since for 15 years. During his first term, Trump referred to Haiti as a “shithole country” and was quoted as saying, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.” He also spread false smears against immigrants from Haiti at the presidential debates last year, claiming that they were eating pet dogs and cats. We must make no mistake that this is a direct and racist attack on Haitian immigrants that aims to decimate and uproot their communities across the country.
The fightback: They say mass deport, we say mass protest!
Trump’s blitz of anti-immigrant actions was designed to overwhelm and strike fear into the immigrant community and immigrant rights movement. In the face of mass deportations, raids, and attacks, however, immigrants and communities across the U.S. are responding with mass protests and fearlessly fighting back to make a showing of their strength and their rightful place in the U.S. Since January, tens of thousands have taken to the streets to stand for immigrant rights in states including Alabama, California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. As Trump and his administration mobilize the enforcement and deportation apparatus of the U.S. government, we too must organize networks and systems of resistance and support in defense of our communities, neighbors, and families. As immigration lawyers and advocates find themselves flooded and overwhelmed in the legal arena, it is up to people’s movements to exert their power to fight the unjust and inhumane immigration system.
