Don’t Be Fooled by Trump’s Loudmouth Immigration Policy
As a candidate he promised a “massive” crackdown. But since taking office his actions, though designed to be as frightening as possible, have fallen far short of that.
AWisconsin county judge is arrested by the FBI and accused of helping an illegal immigrant evade capture… The president invokes a rarely used, 227-year-old law—the Alien Enemies Act—to declare undocumented people enemies of American security… Plainclothes officers bundle a graduate student into a vehicle and hustle her away…
A desperate family, rushing their sick child to a Texas hospital, is forced back into Mexico… And a young Salvadoran, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, becomes one of the best known of millions of migrants, receiving his Maryland senator while remaining imprisoned—uncharged, untried in the US or in his homeland.
The Trump administration has shown it is willing to test both public tolerance and long-established legal principle. It has repeatedly labeled millions of undocumented residents of the United States “terrorists” and “criminals.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and “border czar” Tom Homan use exaggerated threats to create a country where an almost entirely law-abiding population—of construction workers, hotel cleaners, home healthcare workers—can be treated with brutality and summary justice.
Throughout his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised a swift and enormous federal effort to round up and deport millions of people living long-term in America. Signs calling for “Mass Deportation” were held up in cheering crowds at Trump rallies all over the country. Meeting almost no resistance or reply from Democratic candidates for high office, Republicans were able to define the battlefield, equating millions of workers, students, and homemakers scattered across American communities with cartel drug mules, rapists, and members of the notorious MS-13 gang.
It is a very old American habit to have everything we want without confronting, or resolving, the contradictions embedded in our desire. President Trump will continue to perform a rhetorical three-card-monte trick here: He’ll say we must deport criminals, will assert that everyone who is in the country illegally is a criminal, and then will deport people who have not sold illegal drugs, not committed violent crimes, have never seen the inside of a jail, but who fit the bill simply by being here. The mere act of immigration automatically makes them eligible for our disdain—and to be hunted even when their work achieves socially desirable ends.
Every country on earth has a right to know who lives within its borders. Every country on earth has a right to maintain its frontiers and ask questions of those who’d like to cross. Every country on earth has the right to establish rules of entry and requirements for long-term residence. The fact that there are somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people who arrived here outside of legal channels isn’t something Joe Biden did. It isn’t something Kamala Harris or Barack Obama “allowed” to happen. It is a long-term failure of our system for legal immigration, quietly encouraged in some quarters, studiously ignored in others. The numbers grew steadily, decade after decade, regardless of who was in the White House.
During all the years of bipartisan failure, the economy simply went ahead and “assumed” high levels of immigration—legal and illegal—in the same way the “givens” define a geometry proof. Undocumented workers underpin key industries like hospitality, food service, and construction, making businesses more profitable and productive, and keeping whole categories of goods affordable and plentiful.
Even now, despite the white-hot rhetoric pouring from the White House and from Trump’s willing partners in the new right-wing-media ecosystem, enforcement has been far short of what the president promised. A small group of plainclothes officers quickly cuff a migrant and hustle them away over here; a van speeds off with a man lured by the promise of an immigration interview over there. The administration has turned up the heat slowly, hoping public tolerance for apprehensions can be maintained without a full-on show of force involving true mass arrests.
Border commerce was already holding its breath over threatened tariffs, as the Rio Grande Valley tries to build economic progress for some of the poorest counties in America around cross-border commerce. Legal crossings continue unabated, as Mexican shoppers stream north to H-E-B, Ross, and Walmart, and American consumers walk south for more affordable Botox, Adderall, lip fillers, and dentistry.
So when red-state legislators make their way to Washington to plead for a little “give” in immigration enforcement, they will get it. When homebuilders, hotel chains, and farm organizations send their lobbyists to the White House, they will likely get what they need too. The new administration is trying to thread the needle: demonstrate enough pitiless cruelty to show “strength” to voters while keeping big economic interests on the president’s side. The tough talk is meant to signal to those in the shadows that it is time to go, while sparing our new secret policemen from having to make more appearances on shaky smartphone videos on the evening news. Stay tuned.
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