Trump's crusade against all immigrants – even legal ones – is unprecedented

The Guardian

a day ago

The Donald Trump administration has billed itself as taking unprecedented steps to crack down on illegal immigration. While the total number of deportations has yet to surge, it may happen soon. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, supports suspending habeas corpus to speed up deportations, and the border czar, Tom Homan, has suggested blatantly ignoring court orders. Private companies are also lining up to cash in on mass deportations.
Nonetheless, Trump's approach so far to immigration deemed illegal has not differed much from what Barack Obama and Joe Biden did. So why does everything feel different?
The answer is that Trump has launched an unprecedented crusade against legal immigrants. And the tactics have been jarringly lawless and cruel.
For example, Trump's administration has almost completely banned refugee resettlement, sought to revoke temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands who have immigrated to flee extreme conditions, eliminated the legal status of thousands of international students, arrested legal asylum seekers at their immigration check-ins, jailed other legal asylum seekers in a maximum security prison in El Salvador, declared an end to birthright citizenship and revoked the legal status of nearly a million humanitarian parolees who had applied for legal entry using the CBP One app.
While the Obama and Biden administrations likewise took aggressive measures to regulate undocumented immigration – thus earning well-founded criticisms from immigration activists who took to calling Obama the 'deporter-in-chief' – both presidents also worked to expand the pathways for legal immigration. Some of their initiatives were blocked by Congress or the courts, but the result was a net expansion of legal immigration under both administrations.
On the other hand, Trump has consistently worked to block as many pathways to legal migration as possible. In Trump's first term, certain aspects of his immigration agenda were similarly constrained by Congress or the courts, but the result was still a major decrease in legal immigration.
In Trump's second term, this assault on legal immigrants has escalated at a furious pace, and while courts have already found many of these actions illegal according to long-established precedent, the administration shows no sign of slowing down. Indeed, Trump officials have become increasingly bold in defying court rulings, and all of this is taking place under the watch of a supreme court so Trump-friendly that last year it granted him sweeping immunity to commit crimes.
As a historian of border policy, I find Tump's attack on the CBP One app especially demoralizing. A longstanding contradiction in our immigration system is that while technically people have the right to apply for asylum once they reach US soil, it is incredibly difficult to arrive in the US to exercise this right. Accordingly, the only legal way to immigrate for the vast majority of people is to first survive a deadly gauntlet of oceans, jungles, deserts and criminal organizations, and only then begin an asylum application, which is still a long shot. David Fitzgerald's 2019 book Refuge Beyond Reach offers a detailed description of this insidious system and its long history.
While it was largely unappreciated at the time, the Biden administration took meaningful steps to address this deadly contradiction by creating a way to legally apply for asylum through the CBP One app while still abroad. This enabled people facing grave humanitarian crises to start applications outside the US, and if approved, they could then buy plane tickets and travel to the US safely with humanitarian parole.
The initiative was successful, legal, and in many ways, historic. Hundreds of thousands of people were able to migrate legally and escape extremely difficult conditions.
This infuriated conservatives, who launched a barrage of vicious lies to demonize the program and the people using it. JD Vance insisted on the debate stage that these immigrants were illegal, and when corrected by debate moderators, whined that fact-checking was against the rules. Ted Cruz used his podcast to accuse Biden of chartering flights to bring in undocumented people who would vote Democrat. And Trump accused them of eating pets.
Just by cancelling the program for future enrollees, Trump is already launching a disturbing assault on legal immigration. Yet in an escalation of cruelty that is difficult to even comprehend, Trump canceled the program retroactively as well, capriciously revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of extremely vulnerable people who simply followed the rules.
If you think that that sounds dystopian and cruel, you're right. And that's exactly the point: cruelty itself is a tactic to scare immigrants away.
The child separation policy from Trump's first term was an early example of this penchant for using visible displays of cruelty as an immigration deterrent and his new administration has worked around the clock to invent creative new horrors: from shipping deportees to Guantánamo Bay, to sending masked agents to disappear students, to indefinitely detaining immigrants with no criminal record in a notoriously dangerous prison in El Salvador (many of whom were arrested while attending legal immigration appointments), and then sending Noem to El Salvador to do a photoshoot with these political prisoners as props. The message to immigrants is clear: leave, or never come in the first place, because this could happen to you, even if you do it 'the right way'.
The takeaway from all of this is that right now, real people – our friends, families, students and neighbors – are suffering at the hands of a cruel and lawless government. And while Republican policymakers are driving these actions, many centrist Democrats, such as Gavin Newsom, are giving tacit approval by writing off these disturbing human rights violations as merely the 'distraction of the day'.
I refuse to ignore this suffering. I hope you refuse as well.
Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College.