From courthouse ambushes to citizen deportations, Trump is weaponizing immigration fear

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Activists protest the agenda of President Donald Trump during a rally near the water tower on the Magnificent Mile on Jan. 25, 2025, in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by)
A day doesn't pass now that someone in America, almost invariably someone who is not white, is getting snatched off the street, jerked off a worksite or out of their home, or sometimes arrested after appearing at what they thought would be a routine immigration hearing.
In Phoenix recently, after learning their court cases were cancelled, multiple immigrants were taken into custody by federal agents lying in wait in the courthouse's hallways and parking lot. The Arizona Mirror reported agents were also detaining people that day after hearings at other immigration courts across the country.
An attorney for one of those arrested this week in Phoenix told a local reporter, 'The majority of them are going to be waking up tomorrow in their own countries.'
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President Donald Trump's mass deportation plan is barreling forward with little regard for due process or long established civil and human rights norms.
The result has been that the lives of thousands of immigrant families are being needlessly disrupted — or outright destroyed — with potentially millions more in danger of falling prey to the president's white nationalist, anti-immigrant crusade.
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of migrants to the U.S. mean us no harm, even if many of them have violated civil laws by entering the country illegally or overstaying their visas.
Do some immigrants commit serious crimes? Yes. But decades of research has shown that immigrants in the U.S., including undocumented immigrants, commit fewer crimes on average than people who were born here.
Most arrive in this country filled with hopes, dreams and a longing to share in the aspirational mission — as flawed as it has been — of the world's richest and oldest democracy. But Trump and his Republican abettors would have us believe that immigration authorities are just trying to protect us from what the president falsely describes as a relentless assault by foreign-born rapists, murderers and child molesters who come here determined to destroy our way of life.
It's Trump's latest Big Lie — the first being his groundless assertion that he won the 2020 election — and the sort of grotesque propaganda the president uses to dredge up popular support for his agenda.
No, Mr. Trump, you lost that election and migrants are not trying to kill us. Rather, it's the opposite: they're largely trying to emulate us. Like most of us, they want to live in a safe, prosperous, law-abiding democratic society, as opposed to the often violent or economically distressed nations they left behind.
What's so dangerous about Trump's endless torrent of lies about immigrants is that it has already had dangerous — and even deadly — consequences.
The lies he told in 2017 in his first term as president about a 'Hispanic invasion' and 'open borders' were amplified in the manifesto of a man who drove from his Dallas suburb to gun down 23 people in El Paso, most of them were U.S.-born Latinos or Mexicans.
The lies he told in 2018 about wealthy Jews financing immigrant caravans from Honduras, which the president also claimed were infiltrated by Middle East terrorists, inspired a racist gunman to slaughter 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
The lies he told last year in his run for reelection about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, most of whom came here to flee violence in their homeland, eating dogs and cats forced that community to cower in fear.
Fast forward to today and Trump's foot soldiers in the Department of Homeland Security are jailing immigrants who've dared to exercise their constitutionally protected right to free speech. They've deported Venezuelans and others without due process and they've begun to defy federal courts to end these abuses.
They've even deported U.S. citizens to countries they've never been to.
Most disturbingly, they're rounding up droves of otherwise law-abiding men, women and children across the country, people who truly help make this nation stronger every day, despite this administration's early pronouncements that it was going to focus its immigration enforcement efforts on expelling 'the worst of the worst.'
There is a maliciousness about the way Trump is executing his immigration policy. The goal isn't just to hunt down and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible, but to instill deep-seated terror in the communities they are targeting.
Why else would you deport a Honduran mother and her U.S.-born, four-year-old child suffering from cancer? Why else would unidentified masked agents scoop an international college student off the streets and toss her in prison for the 'crime' of writing an op-ed criticizing our country's foreign policy, an act that is explicitly protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution?
The very act that I am engaged in now.
Before our Civil War, escaped slaves were tracked and recaptured by their owners and opportunistic bounty hunters. Decades of Jim Crow saw African Americans stalked and lynched by the thousands. And between 1910 and 1920, scholars say the Texas Rangers pursued and summarily executed, often without having ever been charged with a crime, thousands of Mexican Americans and Mexicans to drive them off property their families had inherited under Spanish land grants before the U.S. invasion of Mexico in the mid-1800s.
You see, Brown people — my people — have been hunted before, but our communities have survived to tell the story.
We're being hunted again, and we'll survive to tell this story as well.
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