Bluesky

Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and the other architects of the anti-immigrant assault constantly tell Americans that the souped-up, AI-powered, multibillion-dollar deportation machine that they have unleashed is taking the “worst of the worst” off of America’s streets. 

During his horrifying blood-and-soil address to the United Nations this week, Trump boasted of locking down the United States and told other countries that they were “going to hell” for following a “globalist” agenda and letting in large numbers of immigrants. Members of Team Trump frequently argue that in sending migrants to detention centers that increasingly resemble concentration camps they are simply doling out the brutal treatment that the bad guys so clearly merit and deterring others who would dare to dream that this is a country in which they could park their hopes. Homan—the ethically challenged border czar alleged to have accepted bags of cash prior to the 2024 election—has cavalierly dismissed claims of overly harsh conditions as “a bunch of crap.”

In reality, we don’t even know the full extent of cruel treatment. Immigrants regularly just disappear off of the government databases, as more than 1,000 have apparently done in the weeks since Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz began shutting down. The ACLU has termed facilities such as Alligator Alcatraz “black holes,” and has alleged that detainees’ family members and lawyers cannot locate them. Many are likely to have been illegally deported. The federal government won’t even pretend to look for them. After all, if they are the worst of the worst, why be bothered if they’ve vanished?

When a sniper shot into the Dallas ICE facility on Wednesday, killing at least one immigrant detainee, the administration’s knee-jerk response was to criticize progressives for demonizing ICE. The FBI’s feckless director, Kash Patel, immediately took to social media to claim there was an ideological motive for the shooting, and Trump and Noem leaped to the conclusion that “Deranged Radical Leftists” with a loathing of ICE were to blame. There was, it goes without saying, not a word of sympathy for the actual victims. Again, if these are the worst of the worst, why waste breath sympathizing with them and their families?

But it turns out that the “worst of the worst” being held in America’s immigrant detention archipelago are mostly just men and women trying to make ends meet, attempting to feed their families, and hoping to avoid deportation back to lands that likely promise poverty, political chaos, ecological degradation, and possibly torture and death.

Take Rodney Taylor. Taylor was born in Liberia in 1978 with extensive disabilities: His left leg had a club foot; he had no kneecap and no tibia; his right foot was missing; his right hand had only a thumb. When he was 2 years old, Shriners children’s hospital brought him to the United States for an extensive series of surgeries. His parents settled in Gwynette County, Georgia, and over next few years, the young boy had both legs amputated and state-of-the-art prosthetics fitted. He also had multiple plastic surgeries on his hand to build up the pinky finger so that he could grasp objects between his thumb and finger.

His family stayed in the United States. After all, a boy with two missing legs and a crippled hand would be in grave danger in then-war-torn Liberia. In recognition of this, when Taylor was 7 years old, the US government gave him an I-130, which is a “petition for an alien relative,” filed by a US citizen or legal permanent relative, that puts the recipient on a path to a green card. The I-130 shielded him from deportation and allowed his family to begin the process of applying for legal status for the child.

Over the coming years, his parents got permanent resident status and then citizenship. But Taylor wasn’t so fortunate. At 17, he was arrested and charged with residential burglary—even though he could barely walk and there’s doubt whether he could have physically committed the crime. On the advice of his attorney, however, he pleaded guilty, and the judge sentenced him to probation.

Because Taylor couldn’t pay the $750 court fees, he was found to be in violation of the terms of his probation, and the teenager ended up serving nine months in jail. The bigger penalty was that it put on hold his quest for permanent legal status. Even as his parents’ status was legalized, he remained in a legal limbo. He would remain unable to claim government benefits and be barred from taking a job. In the following decades, he would work for cash under the table to save money to buy his leg prosthetics.

Taylor trained as a barber, established a successful career, fathered seven children, and became a fixture in his community—the man who would cut hair for free at back-to-school meets, church fundraisers, and breast-cancer awareness walks.

In 2010, needing a pardon to move his immigration case forward, he appealed to the state board of pardons and parole. And on December 2 of that year, after the board found him to be “a law-abiding citizen [who] is fully rehabilitated,” he was given a full pardon. His lawyers told him if he stayed out of trouble for seven years, then he could apply to have his immigration status changed. The paperwork stated, however, that it didn’t “imply innocence,” and ordered that all “civil and political rights, except the right to receive, possess, or transport in commerce a firearm” be restored to him.

More than 14 years later, in the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration, ICE used this language to justify arresting Taylor in front of his fiancée, Mildred Pierre, and her young children. It couldn’t have been a “full pardon,” they reasoned, if he still wasn’t permitted to carry or own a gun, and thus he remained a high-priority target for deportation. “I was devastated,” Taylor, who was far along the process of legalizing his status, told me of the arrest. “I’d just got engaged 10 days before that.”

Taylor has been in the Stewart Detention Facility in Georgia for more than eight months now, killing time by reading the Bible, playing chess, and writing in his journal. He is in constant pain, since his prosthetics rely on battery power for their flexibility. When the power runs down, he feels that his limbs are dragging huge, heavy, rigid objects. His stumps have chafed, since he is terrified of removing the braces, which hold in place his prosthetics, at night, fearful they will either be stolen or broken. He can only walk short distances, but the guards often won’t allow other inmates to go to the cafeteria for him and bring his meals back to his cell. And even when they do, the food, he said, “is horrible. It’s not good for you, and they feed you the same stuff every day.” When he has a medical issue and puts in a request for an appointment, it takes two weeks for the facility to even send him a reply.

Once a month, Mildred and their children get in a minivan and drive the two and a half hours to see Taylor. When they get there, he said that they are allowed to visit through a glass partition for only one hour. Other than that, they communicate via telephone. The couple estimates that they spend more than $100 a week on phone bills. On the phone, he tells her that ICE officers have repeatedly pressured him to sign paperwork agreeing to self-deport.

It’s hard to imagine how this 47-year-old man could be counted among the worst of the worst. He is, his family say, a loving, caring, hard-working breadwinner. “He has a very infectious, contagious laugh, an Eddie Murphy laugh,” his fiancée told me.

Yet the government wants to send him back to Liberia, where he hasn’t been since he was 2 years old. If he is deported, Pierre said, “he will die. They don’t have that type of medical accommodation. There aren’t medical supports. It would be a death sentence. I almost feel like a widow—and he’s not dead.”

Trump and his henchmen rail against the supposed propensity for violence of progressives. But what do you call throwing a double amputee into jail to pressure that man into self-deporting to a country in which he will likely meet a quick death? It seems to me that the worst of the worst aren’t the ones being deported; they are the ones doing the deporting.