There is no such thing as an ‘illegal immigrant'

The Guardian

02-04-2025

On 29 January, the second Trump administration held its first White House press briefing. 'Of the 3,500 arrests Ice has made so far since President Trump came back into office, can you just tell us the numbers?' asked a reporter in the front row. 'How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally?'
'All of them,' responded the new White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, making her debut in the briefing room, 'because they illegally broke our nation's laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes.' She continued: 'I know the last administration didn't see it that way, so it's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal. But that's exactly what they are.'
Leavitt's answer delighted Maga media and went viral in conservative circles, with a fire emoji from a Daily Wire reporter, a bullseye emoji from the Heritage Foundation, and a mic drop emoji from the Republican Study Committee.
It was also completely, utterly, totally, wrong. Factually inaccurate. A brazen lie.
In the eyes of this administration, immigrants who are undocumented are all 'illegal immigrants' and these 'illegal immigrants', ergo, are all 'criminals'.
But, on so many levels, it's just not true. It's a popular myth pushed by the right that needs urgent debunking.
First, people are not, are never, illegal. It was the Nobel laureate and former Auschwitz prisoner Elie Wiesel who pointed out how 'no human being is 'illegal'' because it is 'a contradiction in terms. People can be beautiful or less beautiful, they can be just or unjust, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?'
An act can be illegal; people cannot inherently be illegal.
Second, the anti-immigrant right has not only gotten the language wrong but the law wrong, too. Under the US criminal code, as the ACLU has noted: 'The act of being present in the United States in violation of the immigration laws is not, standing alone, a crime.' Why? Because illegal entry is considered a misdemeanor not a felony, under 8 US Code § 1325, and is subject to civil, and not criminal, penalties. It is the 'reentry of removed aliens', under 8 US Code § 1326, that is considered a felony and subject to criminal punishment.
Meanwhile, almost half of undocumented immigrants in the United States did not even enter the country illegally to begin with; many of them are 'overstays' who arrived with a legal work, student, or travel visa but failed to leave the US, for a multiplicity of reasons, before their visas expired.
The inconvenient truth for the anti-immigrant right is that it is not a crime for immigrants simply to be present in the United States without proper documentation. They are not 'illegals'. Don't take my word for it. Or the ACLU's. Take the word – the 5-3 majority ruling! – of the supreme court of the United States. In 2012, in Arizona v United States, the highest court in the land ruled that 'as a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States'.
Got that? Not. A. Crime.
Third, the anti-immigrant right wants to conflate immigrants, especially of the undocumented variety, with criminals – but the evidence is beyond flimsy. Remember in February when the Trump administration claimed that 'Guantánamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst' migrants? When the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, insisted that 'criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters' were being shipped to Gitmo? It turned out that around one in three of those migrants 'had no criminal records'.
Remember in March when the Trump administration sent nearly 300 immigrants to El Salvador because they were, allegedly, 'illegal foreign terrorists' and 'bad people' who commited the most 'heinous crimes'? Ice officials later admitted in court that 'many' of the people packed off to El Salvador had no criminal records. More and more reports suggest the apparent justification for sending these immigrants to a foreign labor camp was their possession not of criminal records but of … tattoos. On Monday, the Trump administration admitted in a court filing that it had detained a Maryland father with protected legal status and deported him to El Salvador 'because of an administrative error'.
It isn't surprising that this far-right nativist administration, its mendacious press secretary, and its Ice thugs have failed to identify actual criminals, whether violent or otherwise, among the many immigrants they have rounded up, detained, and tried to deport in recent weeks. Despite Maga's obsession with immigrant criminals (Laken Riley's killer!), study after study after study after study confirms that higher immigration does not lead to higher crime rates and, in fact, immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born population. 'Statistically speaking,' the immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has observed, 'you're measurably safer living in a town filled with average undocumented immigrants than a town filled with average native-born citizens.'
So why can't liberals more broadly, and elected Democrats in particular, say this? And say it loudly and repeatedly? Why can't they reject both the butchering of the English language and the misrepresentation of US criminal law by rejecting the entire 'illegal immigrant' framing of the nativist right? And if not now – when a far-right administration is grabbing innocent people off the streets and sending them to be tortured in a foreign gulag – then when? It's past time for liberals and Democrats to make clear to conservatives and Republicans that the facts don't care about their feelings. There is no such thing as an illegal immigrant; undocumented immigrants aren't ipso facto criminals; and higher immigration doesn't lead to higher crime.
Mehdi Hasan is a broadcaster and author, and a former host on MSNBC. He is also a Guardian US columnist and the editor-in-chief of Zeteo