One can only hide behind optimistic hope and hypothetical fears for so long. Eventually, one has to come to terms with real harms being done in one’s name and challenge the forces propagating those harms. The imagined harms of immigration cannot alone justify what is happening.
The portrayal Trump supporters offer is that he is a no nonsense, law-and-order operator capable of ending border chaos and immigrants’ threat to the homeland. Imbedded within this premise is the assumption that there are threats and that chaos itself can be easily solved without cost. In reality none of this is true.
Beyond an incapability of understanding the issues of immigration, Trump and those in his administration don’t really care about a cost-effective approach. They pretend they are making the tough but right (and obvious) calls necessary to bring order as if orderliness were the highest goal that supersedes all others.
More importantly they embrace the fallout of their policies as good ends in themselves. Not only is hardship on the part of immigrants and deportees not a cost worth considering. It is a benefit.
In Trump’s zero-sum mindset a cost to the other side must be a benefit to his own and presumably America’s—that is, a benefit to current American citizens. In this world immigrants almost always only take just like how in their minds international trade is a win-lose competition.
They believe immigration is good in theory but only when and to the degree it helps America. Any benefit to immigrants must be considered a very likely cost to America. To say they are suspicious of immigration’s benefits is a severe understatement. To say they are opposed to immigrants benefiting is unfortunately getting to the heart of their hearts.
Trump hides under a shroud of being tough for America’s sake. Yet the shroud is coming off, and it is becoming very clear he is not tough—he is simply cruel.
Here I’ll share several links to stories that support this position. Yet I am not just casting aspersions upon Trump himself. I am saying this is a problem for those who have supported him and especially those who continue to do so.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when asked about this over the weekend, called the media coverage "misleading," tellingMeet the Press "you guys make it sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the 2-year-old and threw him on an airplane."
"Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers," Rubio continued. "If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if there's their father or someone here who wants to assume them. But ultimately, who was deported was their mother, their mothers who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers."
The issue, which Rubio did not grapple with, is that the deported mothers not have sufficient access to attorneys or family members to make arrangements for the care of minor children. This runs contra ICE's own policies, "which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers—regardless of immigration status—when deportations are being carried out," per the ACLU.
And all of this contradicts the administration's official line: "If you look at the manifest of these flights of people that are being deported, these are some of the most vile human beings imaginable that we're getting out of our country—sex offenders, rapists, killers," said Rubio. "That's who we're prioritizing being sent out." This is not true. They're sending out the pregnant mother of a 2-year-old and the mother of a child with advanced cancer. It is true that these women are in this country illegally, and thus may well be deportable. But the government hasn't shown us any evidence that these moms are "the most vile human beings imaginable" or Tren de Aragua members or linked to MS-13 or people with criminal records at all.
Rubio and Trump and the rest expect us to be gullible. It would be more honest for them to just say: We will deport as many people as we can, and do it quickly as a show of force, to signal that we're serious.
This wasn’t how Trump’s mass deportations were supposed to begin. He campaigned on the promise to deport hordes of dangerous illegal immigrant criminals. If they’re out there, where are they? Why is his administration targeting Abrego Garcia and Hernández Romero, men with no criminal convictions? Sure, a corrupt police officer who was fired for blackmailing a prostitute claimed Abrego Garcia was MS-13. Another disgraced cop pointed to Hernández Romero’s tattoos. But with no convictions, no hearings, and no trials, these deportations aren’t about justice. They’re about appearances. Why is Trump focusing so much energy on attacking Abrego Garcia and keeping Hernández Romero in El Salvador while ignoring the legions of murderers he and his supporters claim are ravaging our communities?
Those legions of illegal immigrant criminals don’t exist. The overwhelming evidence is that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. Texas has the best data on illegal immigrant criminal convictions of any state. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate in Texas is around half the rate of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants? 58 percent lower. Focusing on homicide, the most serious crime and best one to study here, illegal immigrants are 26 percent less likely to be convicted.
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The Trump administration is trying to deport illegal immigrant criminals who simply aren’t here. Faced with few real threats, it conjures imaginary ones and deports noncriminals to dangerous foreign prisons to keep up the fear. Trump ran further ahead on immigration than on any other issue during the 2024 campaign and is still ahead, even though his approval is falling. Since there aren’t that many illegal immigrant criminals, the administration must focus on removing people who aren’t criminals to keep their deportation promises. That’s why ICE is targeting Japanese students who caught too many fish and graduate students who wrote op-eds, even though illegal immigrant criminals are the easiest to deport because they are already in law enforcement custody.
In many ways this isn't at all distinct from what all prior presidents in the modern era have done. They make promises that sound good about problems that are ill-defined, and then pursue a smoke and mirrors approach to fulfilling the promise.
Where Trump sets himself apart in this case is the grave severity of the matter. This isn't forgiving some loans, pursuing lower taxes, or rooting out Waste, Fraud, and Abuse (TM). This is violently disrupting and perhaps forever altering people's lives—many of them innocent of even the morally problematic charge of illegal immigration.
Noah Smith draws the logical conclusions in this post:
This should scare you, for a number of reasons.
First, there’s the obvious: Trump is going around arresting innocent people, and sending them to foreign torture-dungeons, apparently for the rest of their lives. Bloomberg reports that about 90% of these deportees had no criminal records in the U.S., and most have not been charged with any crime:
It’s not clear why the Trump administration is doing this. Perhaps it’s to scare immigrants into leaving the country by making an example of a few. Perhaps it’s to simply assert power, or to test the boundaries of what they can get away with. Maybe they’ve really convinced themselves that all of the people they arrested are gang members. Who knows. But what’s clear is that this is brutal and lawless behavior — the kind of arbitrary arrest and punishment that’s common in authoritarian regimes.
The second thing that should scare you is the lawlessness. The Trump administration insists it didn’t defy the Supreme Court, arguing that simply removing any barriers to Abrego Garcia’s return means that they’re complying with the court order to “facilitate” that return. Trump’s people have also argued that the courts have no right to interfere in the executive branch’s conduct of foreign policy. And on top of that, they’ve declared that their deal with Bukele is classified.
In practice, the administration is arguing that as soon as they arrest someone and ship them overseas, U.S. courts have no right to order their return — ever. That means that Trump could grab you, or me, or anyone else off the street and put us on a plane to El Salvador, and then argue that no U.S. court has the right to order us back, because once we’re on foreign soil it’s the domain of foreign policy. If so, it means that due process and the rule of law in America are effectively dead; the President can simply do anything to anyone, for any reason.
A more clearly worded SCOTUS ruling would help clarify whether Trump is, in fact, openly defying the Court. The recent ruling did order the lower court to have “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” But this is starting to feel like a constitutional crisis.
The third reason the Abrego Garcia case should worry you is that the Trump administration probably intends to go much further. Kilmar Abrego Garcia isn’t an American citizen, but Trump has stated that he wants to start sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador too.
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Now put all of these things together. Since A) the Trump administration A) argues that anyone being imprisoned in a foreign country is beyond the reach of U.S. courts, B) Trump wants to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador, and C) Trump is arresting people who haven’t been accused of any crime, this means that Trump is asserting the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily send any American citizen to a Salvadoran prison for any reason.
That is the power of a dictator. A few weeks ago I wrote a post asking when, exactly, we could conclude that America had become a dictatorship:
It seems clear that if Trump actually does have the ability to arbitrarily send any American to an overseas prison with zero due process and zero oversight by any court of law, then we do, in fact, live in a dictatorship.
He goes further pointing out the crack down on dissent, which is beyond problematic. In the totality of the evidence, I would have to agree with Noah that we may have already witnessed the crossover to dictatorship. I do not make that charge lightly or flippantly. It is not done for rhetorical flourish or hyperbole. I believe we are witnessing the beginning stages of attempted dictatorship.
Trump doesn’t have to deliberately be pursuing this end for it to still be true. He can be a de facto dictator without becoming one de jure.
To further support this argument I turn to Radley Balko who writes,
One of the more pernicious effects of authoritarianism is to make the everyday participation in civic life we take for granted feel subversive. The goal isn’t to police all behavior at all times. It’s to make us fearful to the point that we police our own behavior.
Last month, Clay Jackson was at the gas station just up the street from his home in a Dallas suburb when one of the attendants asked if he might provide some legal advice to an immigrant family.
“There’s a guy in there who just shoots the shit with you when you come in to pay,” Jackson says. “He’d heard that I had previously given some pro bono legal help to a family who owned a barbecue restaurant. He said there was family in the area where the dad had been caught up in one of the ICE workplace raids and they’re really freaking out. The parents were undocumented, while one of the kids is DACA and the other is a U.S. citizen.”
The man asked Jackson if he would be willing to “just talk to them and make sure they know their rights and where they can some help. I said absolutely. I’m not an immigration lawyer, but they were scared to reach out to anyone, so I said I’d go there and try to just give them the basics.”
Later that afternoon, March 4, Jackson visited the family in their home. “It was a little difficult to communicate because everything had to be translated through the 10-year-old kid.” He met with them for less than an hour and told them their rights if they’re detained by ICE. “I said I’d help find them pro bono counsel who specialized in immigration.”
“A couple days later, on March 6, I was working from home at around 11:30 when I got a notice that my VPN had gone down,” he says. “I didn’t think much about it. It can cut out from time to time. About 10 minutes later, I got a knock at the door.”
Two men were outside Jackson’s door, dressed in slacks and polos. They were not wearing badges.
“I first thought they were going to try to sell me something. But as soon as I opened the door they said, ‘Are you Clayton Jackson?’ I think I shook my head or said ‘yeah,’ and then I heard, ‘We have information that you are obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation.’”
Jackson says alarms went off in his head. “My first instinct was to want to know what this was about. That it must be a misunderstanding. So I started to tell them about how I’ve been involved in some pro bono work. Then this voice in my head kicked in and just said, you need to shut the fuck up — don’t say anything.”
The officers never identified themselves. They did ask if they could come inside.
“I said absolutely not,” Jackson says. “I asked for their names and badge numbers. They said they didn’t have to provide that information at this time. So I told them I’d be calling my lawyer and I shut the door behind me.”
Jackson says his mind started racing. “I needed to know who they were, what agency they were with. Then I remembered that I have the Ring camera. Maybe I could watch the video of the incident and figure out who they were from that.”
There was no video. “That’s when I learned why my VPN had gone down. It wasn’t the VPN. Someone had shut off my Wifi.”
About 15 minutes after the interaction at his front door, Jackson’s Wifi was up and running again.
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The attorney’s college-aged son had taken an interest in all of this.
“My son asked if what we were doing was illegal. I told him it was all perfectly legal. Then he asked me a question I really couldn’t answer: Why did we feel like we had to take these steps to hide legal work that was perfectly legal? And all I could think to say was that this is the kind of country we live in now.”
Like I said, we are living in the beginnings of a dictatorship. We are ruled by people who have invented a boogie man in the form of immigrants. They call this an invasion. They stand on a foundation of loose sand with no moral righteousness. The fact that this is economically sophistry is deeply regrettable. The fact that this is gravely evil is disastrously sad.
I’ll give Cato’s Walter Olson the last link in this unfortunately necessarily long post (that only scratches the surface). Addressing the test case of Garcia, Olson writes,
The most immediate right at stake is the right of habeas corpus, which now cannot be enforced in pursuit of Abrego Garcia’s liberty or his return to a place of detention in the United States. But he has practically lost all constitutional rights, not just the one. The Eighth Amendment, for example, would ordinarily protect him from the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments. But Bukele and Trump smilingly assure us that its coverage stops at the water’s edge.
Trump has been loudly talking for weeks about sending native-born American citizens to the El Salvador prisons too; his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt confirmed this the other day. Trump did so again yesterday, telling Bukele that he would need to build several more prisons because the “home-grown” prisoners were coming next.
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Trump says he’s waiting to go ahead on sending US citizen prisoners until Attorney General Pam Bondi reports back as to whether it’s legal, but Bondi’s subservience is beyond doubt, so if he wants a “yes,” a “yes” he will get. He also talks of starting with the most violent prisoners, the sort who push innocents in front of subway trains—in practice, criminals of that sort usually are convicted under state law and aren’t in federal custody anyway—but we all know Trump’s definition of “violent” is elastic. An Axios Mar. 21 headline: “Trump suggests sending Tesla vandals to El Salvador prisons.”
We know where this is headed. Many who have not yet spoken up know too, if they’re honest.
We are a nation of laws, which the Trump administration and its supports love to chant. Some of these are codified in written text and rulings. The chief among these is the U.S. Constitution. Others are even more foundational. They are the common law founding principles, the ethical and moral wisdom from our human heritage, and the social norms that have emerged. An elected official who thwarts these is acting illegally. That is itself a tragedy and a threat to everyone’s wellbeing.
More important than the technical illegality of the actions discussed in this post is the impact they ultimately have. At the most human level, these are cruel harms for mythical causes.
If you voted for him, you voted for cruelty. You may not have realized it, but I think you should have. I think a reasonable person would have.
If you support him today, you support cruelty.
If you are in his administration and not fighting against these cruel policies and behaviors, you are supporting them.
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