In Trump’s Dragnet

In Berwyn, Illinois, immigration officers arrested Julio Noriega as he was walking down the street and, without explanation, handcuffed him and pushed him into a van. He was held for ten hours, according to court documents, before agents looked into his wallet and realized they had nabbed a United States citizen. On a Texas highway, border agents detained a Mexican couple as they were rushing their ten-year-old daughter, who has brain cancer, to a hospital in Houston for an emergency visit with her doctors. Because her parents did not have papers, the girl, another US citizen, never made it to her appointment but was expelled with them to Mexico. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in unmarked cars went hunting for criminals but instead busted three Guatemalan workers at a car wash, none with criminal records. Their frustrated boss told a local news site that she recognized one of the agents as a customer.

These are some of the people who have been swept up in the early days of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Many Americans who voted for Trump told reporters that they were dismayed by images of crowds of migrants coming across the southwest border and by the soaring costs of sheltering them for some northern cities and states. Those voters often said they expected him to focus on tightening border security and expelling criminals. But that is not what Trump is doing, nor is it what he ever said he planned to do.

Instead he is waging an intricately planned assault on every aspect of the immigration system, the broadest and most systematic government crackdown at least since World War II. Since his return to the White House, Trump has been constructing a nationwide enforcement regime to carry out a purge of millions of immigrants, whether or not they have any criminal history; indeed regardless of whether they have an official legal status or protection, even a permanent resident green card. Rather than prioritizing enforcement at the border, he is expanding border enforcement—with its special provisions that reduce due process—across the country. Places deep in the interior are becoming borderlands where virtually any immigrant is subject to suspicion, identity checks, and possibly swift removal. To increase the population vulnerable to his deportations, Trump is seeking to strip hundreds of thousands of immigrants of lawful protections they were granted under Biden or earlier administrations. He is also launching an effort, based on a little-used immigrant registration statute, to identify and criminalize millions of undocumented immigrants, including the large majority of them who have lived in the country for years and never been convicted of a crime.  

Starting on his first day in office on January 20, Trump has been creating the infrastructure for these deportations with a blitz of executive orders, policy memos, and personnel changes—more than 210 actions to date, according to an archive maintained at Yale Law School. Right away he lifted restrictions on arrests at churches, schools and hospitals; eliminated prosecutorial priorities set by the Biden administration that instructed agents to target criminals and national security threats; ordered more immigrants to be detained during legal proceedings; and cancelled legal aid programs that helped them fight their cases in court, including ones that provide counsel for unaccompanied children. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is suing cities and states to force them to abandon “sanctuary” policies that restrain local police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. On March 14 the Republican-led Congress approved a $9.9 billion budget for immigration enforcement, an increase of about $500 million. 

Trump’s mass deportation drive could separate families on a new scale: about 9.7 million American citizens, including adults and children, live in mixed-status families with at least one undocumented immigrant. In immigrant communities, social life has gone quiet; people hesitate to send kids to school, to attend church and doctor appointments, to shop for groceries. Workers look over their shoulders on the job. “What we are seeing unfold right now is terrifying,” said Ashley DeAzevedo, president of American Families United, an organization representing some of the more than one million Americans who are married to undocumented immigrants. Anguished group members fearing for their spouses were making contingency plans that, DeAzevedo told me, “should never be necessary for American citizens in the land of the free,” including packing getaway kits of vital documents and preparing small children for hasty departures. Some members compared their preparations to an underground railroad. 

In his quest for higher deportation numbers, Trump is testing, if not trampling, the outer boundaries of his already broad executive powers under immigration law. On March 14 he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a statute previously activated only in times of declared war—to speed the deportations of 137 Venezuelans accused, based on no evidence known to the public, of associating with a vicious gang called the Tren de Aragua. The following day the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., James Boasberg, responded to a lawsuit by the ACLU and other groups by ordering a temporary halt to the deportation flights. The administration ignored the order and the planes continued to their destination: a notoriously harsh megaprison in El Salvador, which the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, had offered up to Trump to detain gang members. “Oopsie…Too late,” Bukele tweeted in response to Boasberg’s order, with a laughing-crying emoji. 

In a court filing, Trump officials acknowledged that “many” of the deportees “do not have criminal records in the United States.” Relatives said they had been tagged as gang members based on tattoos representing favorite flowers, the Real Madrid soccer team, and, on one man, an autism acceptance ribbon dedicated to his brother. Now a tense showdown is underway with the judge over the extent of the president’s authorities. On March 26 an appeals court upheld Judge Boasberg’s stay on the deportations. “We’re not stopping,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News as the episode unfolded, summarizing what appeared to be the president’s ongoing position. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

None of this should come as a surprise. During his 2024 campaign Trump repeatedly and unabashedly announced his plans for immigration. In his rallies he described the country in lurid terms as besieged by millions of menacing, homicidal, or mentally deranged immigrants, whom he said Joe Biden had welcomed across an open border. Foreign-born malefactors, he warned, posed a threat to America’s racial stock: they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The solution he insistently promised was “the largest deportation operation in American history” to expel “millions and millions” of immigrants. His supporters evidently agreed. At rallies they cheerfully waved signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.” 

Once Trump was back in the White House, he amplified these nativist themes. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on March 6, he claimed, once again, that “entire towns” had been destroyed by “migrant occupation and corruption.” He reached for a grand phrase to express what he said his mass expulsions would accomplish: “the great liberation of America.”

Of the scores of edicts the president issued on his first day, one executive order revealed their underlying xenophobic principles especially clearly. Titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” it revoked birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented or temporary legal immigrants. The provision, enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in the aftermath of the Civil War, was originally adopted to resolve the citizenship of the children of freed slaves. By now a cornerstone of American democracy, birthright citizenship has long been held by the Supreme Court to include the children of all immigrants, most notably in an 1898 case involving the US-born son of immigrants from China. 

Trump’s order was immediately challenged in several federal courts, and for now it has been stayed as it heads to the Supreme Court. One astonished federal judge in Seattle, John Coughenour, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Its ostensible purpose is to discourage expectant foreign mothers from migrating unlawfully so that their children can become US citizens at birth. Trump’s deeper message, however, is that the US-born children of undocumented or temporary immigrants are not really equal citizens. He seems unconcerned about the chaos the order could unloose: it could potentially expose every pregnant mother to a citizenship check and leave countless newborns with no legal immigration status, ineligible for public neonatal health care services and immediately subject to deportation. 

Other early measures laid the foundations for the deportation campaign by codifying Trump’s dark, bigoted, and largely fictional version of the flows of migration. In another January 20 proclamation he announced that the southern border had been overrun by drug cartels, gangs, and human traffickers who are “terrorizing Americans beyond the control of local law enforcement.” Arguing that the country was facing a foreign invasion, he declared a national emergency. That move allowed him to dispatch military troops to the border (about nine thousand have been mobilized to date); to deputize officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, at the Drug Enforcement Administration, and even at the IRS to enforce immigration law; to rapidly expand immigration detention facilities; to use federal prisons to hold immigration offenders; and to sign up state and local law enforcement authorities to hunt for people to deport. On January 29 Trump ordered the military to prepare the notorious base at Guantánamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 deportees.

To facilitate a sweeping dragnet, the president widened a provision for fast-track deportations, known as expedited removal. Conceived in a 1996 law to hasten the expulsion of unauthorized border crossers, it allows immigration officers to deport people without a hearing in immigration court or any opportunity to appeal. Over the years, expedited removal has generally been applied within a hundred miles of land borders. Trump has expanded it to the entire country, for use against any undocumented immigrants who cannot show they have been present in the US for at least two years. For a range of migrants—such as the thousands who, under Biden, were released from the border under supervision but with no formal status or proceeding—there is no time limit at all. Trump had mixed legal success during his first term trying to extend expedited removal across the country, but this time White House officials have fine-tuned the order to preempt such challenges. Now immigrants far and wide are at risk of arbitrary stops and summary deportation if they cannot instantly produce some proof of citizenship or legal status—and if they don’t happen to be carrying around two years of utility bills. 

Trump has found still other ways to make more immigrants deportable. The administration terminated a Biden-era program that offered a humanitarian permit, known as a parole, to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which allowed them to enter the country and stay for up to two years. After that program’s end date of April 24, about 532,000 immigrants from those countries will be left with no legal protections. Trump also paused a separate parole program for people from war-torn Ukraine; their fate currently remains uncertain. Department of Homeland Security officials, meanwhile, cancelled the grant to a large group of Venezuelans of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which offers formal legal status and work permits to people from countries devastated by natural disasters and violent conflicts who are already in the US. The officials also shortened the TPS term for people from Haiti, even though the conditions of economic collapse and violent mayhem in those two countries have only gotten worse. Unless legal challenges preserve them, TPS protections will expire for about 100,000 Venezuelans on April 7 and for another 242,000 Venezuelans on September 10, and for about 200,000 Haitians on August 3. 

In a program that echoes the criminalizing roundups following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, starting on April 11 Homeland Security, or DHS, will require all undocumented immigrants to register with the federal government or face criminal prosecution. Most of those immigrants are long-settled residents with families and no criminal records; under immigration law, which for the most part is civil code, being present in the US without legal documents is a civil, not a criminal, violation. Now they will face a cruel dilemma: they can report and join a line for deportation, or live in bone-chilling fear of any encounter with law enforcement and risk up to six months in federal prison if they are discovered. Officials have been actively propagating this sort of fear, hoping to scare immigrants into leaving voluntarily. “If you are here illegally, we will find you and deport you. You will never return,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says grimly in an ad campaign, which she explained in a press release was “hyper-targeted” at communities in the interior. 

Immigrants with valid student visas and even green cards—lawful permanent residents on a pathway to citizenship—are not immune. Citing a 1952 immigration law, on March 8 Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a US citizen, who had been a leader of the protests against the war in Gaza at Columbia University while he was a graduate student. Alleging that Khalil was promoting Hamas, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization, Rubio determined that his activities “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” The government made little effort to show that Khalil’s offense was anything other than political speech. But it nonetheless sent him to a detention facility in rural Louisiana, where he remains imprisoned. 

On March 25 agents in black plainclothes, some wearing face masks, showed no warrant when they apprehended Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student in the Department of Child Study and Human Development, on a sidewalk near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. Öztürk, who is Turkish and according to her attorney had a valid student visa, was quickly transferred to a different but no less remote detention facility run by ICE in Louisiana. A DHS official, without presenting any evidence or charges, said that Öztürk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” In court documents, Öztürk’s lawyers said it appeared that she had been detained solely because she had coauthored an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper in March 2024 criticizing the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. A federal judge ordered ICE to keep Öztürk in Massachusetts, but ICE waved the order aside, asserting that she “was detained outside of Massachusetts at the time” it was issued, although no timeline was provided.

If there was any doubt that Trump is also out to decimate legal immigration, on January 20 he suspended the country’s refugee program, stopping the arrival and resettlement of people fleeing from desperate danger who have to pass through a gantlet of rigorous vetting. Federal court decisions have allowed refugees who were already in the pipeline to come, but the program, which admitted about 100,000 refugees in 2024, is not approving any new people. At the immigration courts, which hear asylum and other claims for legal status, some two dozen judges have been fired, even though they were laboring to reduce a backlog in those courts that now exceeds 3.7 million cases. And on March 1, to reinforce his repudiation of ethnic and cultural diversity, Trump declared English the official language of the United States.

Behind this barrage is the handiwork of Stephen Miller, who enjoys dual roles as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor. Prior to joining forces with Trump in the early days of his first campaign, Miller was a staffer for then-Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a perennial opponent of any form of inclusive immigration reform. There Miller honed his pugnacious talking points, steeped himself in policy, and fielded phone calls from American workers ready to blame immigrants after seeing their livelihoods demolished by globalization. More than anyone else in the now-president’s orbit, he recognized from the start that the issue of immigration could have particular potency for building the MAGA movement among white working-class voters. 

Under the first Trump administration, although he largely stayed behind the scenes in the White House, Miller went hand-to-hand in legal battles with the ACLU and immigrant rights groups—often on the losing side. The White House suffered a humiliating rebuke in federal court in 2018, for instance, over its deliberate family separations, a policy that Trump had to abandon; other victories by the opposition hampered Trump’s and Miller’s attempts to eliminate access to asylum at the border. During the interregnum Miller, who is not a lawyer, founded America First Legal, a nonprofit shop that became a gathering point for attorneys who waged lawfare against Biden and prepared, in fine detail, the overwhelming fusillade of Trump’s executive orders.

In Trump’s second term, Miller has emerged as a preeminent MAGA white-nationalist true believer, clearly profoundly convinced that immigration is degrading the country’s essential culture, values and security. He has stepped out as a spokesman for Trump’s view that the migrants who arrived under Biden constitute an invading “alien enemy force” of terrorists and murderers, as he described them during a press conference on March 17, and that undocumented immigrants in general are nothing more than fugitive lawbreakers. 

Miller is the most ardent advocate for the position that Trump has virtually unlimited authority to do whatever he wants to repress immigration. Speaking to the media about the confrontation with Judge Boasberg, Miller raged that legions of Tren de Aragua gang members had been sent to attack the US by Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro—a contention that, according to The New York Times, the US intelligence services have broadly disputed. The deportations were “not something that a district court judge has any authority whatsoever to interfere with, to enjoin, to restrict or to restrain in any way,” Miller shouted, in a heated exchange with Kasie Hunt on CNN. “This judge violated the law, he violated the Constitution. He defied the system of government that we have in this country!”    

Miller and others have by now given Trump’s deportation program a formidable armature. And yet the terrain on which immigration agents are operating has changed since Trump’s first administration, in ways not always conducive to the president’s goals. Unlawful crossings were already sharply reduced last year, after Biden closed down access to asylum along most of the southwest border. Networks of legal aid and immigrant rights groups are better-funded, farther-reaching, and more organized than they were eight years ago. The ACLU, together with law firms working pro bono and newer organizations like Democracy Forward, was ready with lawsuits to file against Trump on day one.  

In the absence of federal reform, immigrant-friendly states and cities have adopted policies to constrain local police from immigration enforcement and to help undocumented people integrate by allowing them to have driver’s licenses, pay lower college tuition rates reserved for state residents, and receive tax credits. By now they are deeply woven into their communities: more than half of some 10.9 million undocumented immigrants have lived here for a decade or more, according to the Center for Migration Studies, a research center linked to the Catholic Church. Many immigrants who arrived more recently are asylum seekers, enmeshed in lengthy legal proceedings that officially delay removal for as long as they take to play out.

As a result, to date the most conspicuous effect of Trump’s return has been a steep drop in unauthorized crossings at the southwest border, to 8,347 in February, a 71 percent decline from January. The lull is similar to a “Trump effect” that was registered at the border in the months after he took office the first time in 2017. It did not last then; it is hard to predict what will happen this time, with a much wider and more visible deployment of military troops along the line.  

But since most removals in recent years have come from the borderlands, the low number of migrants at the border has ironically posed a problem for immigration agents under pressure to show high numbers of deportations. ICE has turned its attention to the interior, but it has been slower going than Trump would like. Agents who tried to conduct neighborhood sweeps or workplace raids in Boston, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles found that alerts were buzzing all over WhatsApp, that activists were tracking them on live video, and the immigrants they were seeking had vanished. Rights groups offer trainings advising immigrants that they do not have to answer questions, or open their doors unless ICE has a warrant signed by a judge. 

According to news reports from around the country, ICE has resorted to arresting people who have been playing by the rules, simply because they know where to find them. These are immigrants who had been complying, often for many years, with regular check-ins; who had dutifully renewed TPS documents and paroles; who have valid work permits and kept their addresses up to date with immigration courts. The Los Angeles Times reported, for example, that Nelson and Gladys Gonzalez, a husband and wife from Laguna Niguel, California, who had lived in the US without legal papers for decades and raised three American citizen daughters, were detained when they went for a routine check-in with ICE on February 21. With no warning they were expelled to Colombia, a deportation that “shattered our family emotionally and financially,” according to the daughters’ GoFundMe page. 

As of mid-March, ICE has reported making about 32,800 arrests since January 20, a relatively small figure compared to the millions Trump is demanding. But the pace is escalating. The arrests included indisputably violent criminals, according to ICE reports, among them a Guatemalan man wanted for rape in his home country, another Guatemalan convicted in Connecticut of sexual assault of a victim under sixteen, and a Mexican man who had served a sentence for manslaughter in Texas, been deported, and reentered illegally in 2024. Yet by ICE’s own account only about four in ten of the people arrested had criminal convictions. Under Trump, DHS has been closing down portals that provide updates about the location and status of detainees and limiting the public release of data on arrests and deportations that could verify the agency’s reports, making an opaque system even harder to monitor.   

As alarm has proliferated, some communities have gotten ready to resist. On a Zoom conference call, a volunteer named Sue Weishar said that the faithful at her Catholic parish in New Orleans, drawing on Biblical guidance to protect human dignity, had created a rapid response team, taken up a collection to pay for a professional hotline to warn of ICE activity, and done drills for what to do if agents came near the church. “Respectful protest,” she said, with rosaries in hand and mobile phone video cameras rolling to bear witness. In Somerville, just hours after news of Öztürk’s arrest became public, more than two thousand people turned out for a noisy rally to demand her release.    

Still more consequential pushback has come from cities and states. On March 5 Michelle Wu, the Democratic mayor of Boston, was summoned before hostile Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, who were threatening to cut off federal funding based on the city’s sanctuary policies. Nursing a newborn baby, Wu did not back down, defiantly touting Boston’s low crime rate and the many immigrants on its winning athletic teams. Boston is “the city of champions,” she said, “not in spite of our immigrants, but because of them.”

Perhaps in Trump’s second term mass deportations will provoke mass popular opposition as more Americans realize that the people he wants to expel are their home team baseball players, their caregivers and nannies, their nurses and doctors, their landscapers and roofers, or the farmworkers collecting their eggs for breakfast and harvesting their vegetables. But for now many immigrants are inclined to retreat and hope they will not be found. In other corners, Trump’s deportations are still viewed favorably. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on March 25 found that 49 percent of Americans in the survey approved of his handling of immigration—his highest rating on any of the voters’ top issues. Movements take time to build, and time is precisely what many immigrant communities can no longer afford.