Trump's Cruel and Lawless Deportations: Our Video Roundup
The crackdown is busting the Constitution along with immigrants
Dear Readers:
At The UnPopulist, we understand that a resurgent liberal movement requires matching the “flooding the zone” strategy of its authoritarian adversaries. That’s why we’ve been busy expanding our presence on platforms beyond the written word and into podcasts and videos.
To that end, we are debuting a new section on the homepage of The UnPopulist this week that is dedicated to the videos—both long and short—that we’ve been releasing on our YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram pages. It will be your convenient, one-stop shop for all our video content.
Every other week, we will send out a sampling of our videos to your inbox. Today, we’re sharing a few of our most recent ones that draw attention to Trump’s draconian and indiscriminate deportations. The real purpose of these deportations is not to make the country safe from alleged foreign gangs, as Trump claims, but to induce fear in the immigrant population and silence ideological dissent.
Give these three videos, presented in chronological order of release date, a watch.
Landry Ayres
Senior Producer
Bukele Butters Up Trump with Cheap Offshore Gulags
The U.S. president cares not that the Salvadoran president's proposal is inhumane and almost certainly unconstitutional.
Feb. 7, 2025
In a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele proposed taking convicted criminals from the United States—including U.S. citizens—into his newly built megaprison, a facility notorious for its brutal conditions. (As Joel Looper explained in an essay for The UnPopulist, Bukele is an authoritarian who is not qualitatively different from the gangs he seeks to eradicate. He tramples on innocents and wages violence against anyone who gets in his way.) Trump has vowed to deport 15–25 million people. But mass deportation is legally complicated. Bukele’s offer thus provides Trump with a chilling workaround.
In this short video, I explain the danger that such a proposal poses.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
Trump Is Detaining Foreign Students for Wrong Speech
The White House is using national security as a pretext for suppressing ideological dissidents.
March 25, 2025
The Trump administration is using immigration laws as a weapon against dissent. In a shocking move, it detained Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holding graduate student at Columbia University, without filing any formal charges against him and invoking vague “national security” considerations. Mere days later, Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University scholar and Indian citizen here in the U.S. legally—on an academic visa—was literally abducted by the Department of Homeland Security outside his home on similarly dubious grounds.
To see how these detentions are part of a larger pattern—one that threatens not just immigrants, but all of us—watch my latest video below or on TikTok or Instagram.
Trump Is Nabbing and Deporting Innocent Immigrants
Many sent to El Salvador's hellish prison camps have no criminal record and were in America legally.
March 27, 2025
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently released an offensive propaganda video to justify the administration’s draconian effort to deport immigrants suspected of gang ties to El Salvador’s gulag. Despite Noem’s warning that they “will be prosecuted,” Donald Trump has actually bypassed the courts to expel these men without hearings or due process by using the John Adams-era Alien Enemies Act. (Ilya Somin had warned about exactly this in The UnPopulist.) All it took to brand some of those nabbed and deported as gang members was that they were sporting tattoos.
Remember when “innocent until proven guilty” was a core American value—like on Jan. 19? That is no longer the case when it comes to immigrants, as my video below shows. But if Trump can overturn a bedrock American principle when it comes to these folks, are we sure he’ll be stopped when he turns on other groups, including Americans?
Watch the video here or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
One last thing…
Earlier this month, we published Steve Chapman’s vividly informative report on the breathtaking scope of Trump’s mass deportation scheme.
As Chapman detailed, Trump’s plan goes far beyond targeting undocumented criminals and seeks to instill fear among all immigrants. “Trump’s goal is to get rid of as many foreigners as possible and to prevent as many as possible from coming, illegally or not,” noted Chapman. Read his full report here.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Webster says: mass----adjective
a: of or relating to the mass of the people
b: participated in by or affecting a large number of individuals
c: having a large-scale character
At 60 days the promised "mass deportations" have not occurred.
What has occurred has been symbolic and shambolic deportations of: 1.) men with tattoos, 2.) random pro-Palestinian activists, 3.) and random others reentering the US at border crossings.
Governors in some red states have signaled that they are ready and able to assist federal agencies with locating and detaining immigrants for deportation. And yet in two states with which I am familiar nothing has happened yet. Florida with 1.2 million informal immigrants the houses get built and roofed, the guest facilities and offices get cleaned, the lawns are mowed, and field work continues to be done. In Nebraska with 78,000 informal immigrants the beef packing goes on and farms and ranches are operating.
It seems to me that if this is an emergency not much is actually happening on the ground.
There's plenty of footage of things happening but that looks more like propaganda designed to make people think something is happening.
BUT the most telling thing to me is that the investigation of employers isn't happening. There are plenty of statutes making the hiring of informal workers either a civil or criminal offense. Reality is that if employers stopped hiring informal immigrant workers the number of them would quickly dissipate. It is the magnate drawing those workers here. BUT that would be a cataclysmic event for the businesses who are actually dependent on those workers and for the economies where they live.
Instead the feds and states are choosing cruelty signalling and performative actions to make the appearance of a serious effort while in the main just accepting the economic reality that we can't live without them.
It reminds me so much of the "Beautiful wall---paid for by Mexico."