Trump's Mass Deportation Campaign Is Aimed at a Phantom Threat
He's purging peaceful, hardworking immigrants—not 'criminal aliens'
President Trump is determined to carry out his promised “mass deportation” campaign. That necessarily entails targeting peaceful people. But he is not bragging about deporting workers and parents. He smears all immigrants he wants to target—including many in the country legally—as “criminals.” Border czar Tom Homan defends this fiction by pretending that deportations are focused on “public safety threats.” But that was Biden’s policy, not Trump’s. Trump is out for everyone—threat or no threat.
In the short time he’s been in office, Trump has rescinded his predecessor’s example of focusing on serious criminals. He has reassigned criminal investigators fighting actual crimes to help with mass deportations. Moreover, the increasing arrest rate on his watch has mainly come from individuals who pose no public safety threats whatsoever. But that doesn’t stop him from deceiving and riling the public by highlighting a few egregious crimes—ignoring the fact that Biden prioritized those as well.
The Fiction of ‘Millions’ of Threats
In his inaugural address, Trump asserted that he was initiating “the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens.” This is fantasy. There are fewer than half a million (425,431) removable noncitizens with criminal convictions in the United States by the government’s own estimates. Likely, many are dead, since the list includes crimes as far back as the 1970s, or out of the country, since there is no way for the government to even track non-deportation departures. About 100,000 are incarcerated in state and federal prisons and jails and can’t be removed until they have finished serving their sentences.
At most, there are a few hundred thousand noncitizens with criminal convictions who are not currently incarcerated. About a third on the list of offenders (129,007) are those whose only conviction was for illegally entering the United States or traffic offenses—not serious public safety threats. Many others committed other minor offenses, like drug possession, sometimes decades ago. There are some serious public safety threats out there, but not “millions”—let alone “millions and millions”—of them.
Trump’s “criminal” label is nothing if not slippery. When he talks about “criminal aliens,” he means anyone who is here without proper papers. But under current law, crossing the border illegally is a crime that can be prosecuted within a five-year statute of limitations period. However, being in the country without proper authorization is not a crime. The best estimates suggest that a good portion of the 11 million-strong undocumented population are visa overstays who have literally committed no crimes, just violations.
To treat visa overstays as criminals—and also get over the statute of limitations for prosecuting illegal border crossers—Trump’s first executive order was to require “registration” of all noncitizens. Failure to register—which, obviously, no one in the U.S. without authorization is going to do—would automatically become grounds for a criminal prosecution and deportation. The executive order adds teeth to Trump’s ability to target those he has already been calling “criminal,” giving his administration more powers to wield against the immigrant population. Republican states will create their own laws that mirror the federal criminal law, manufacturing ever more “criminal aliens.”
In other words, there is an all-out campaign to treat people who pose no threat to anyone—and are simply trying to make a living by keeping the U.S. economy humming—as criminals. This makes as much moral—or legal—sense as slamming unlicensed lemonade stands as “criminal enterprises in our communities.”
Population Purge Does Not Enhance Public Safety
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave away the whole rhetorical game last week when she was asked how many noncitizens that the administration had arrested actually had “a criminal record.” Leavitt absurdly asserted: “All of them. Because they illegally broke our nation’s laws and therefore they are criminals.” Of course, this isn’t true. Violating a law and having a criminal record are not the same thing. All Americans violate all kinds of laws on a daily basis, but we are not all criminals.
More importantly, her response exposes that her boss’ mass deportation is about a population purge—not enhancing public safety. If public safety were the true goal, then the administration would still have to rate the threat posed by these alleged criminals and prioritize resources accordingly. But “they’re all criminals” who are “violating the law” doesn’t tell us why actual resources are being deployed to these violations rather than a gazillion others.
Removing even the couple hundred thousand who do pose a genuine public safety threat is no small task. It takes significant manpower to track, surveil, and detain a violent felon because true “public safety threats” won’t voluntarily comply with any “registration” order. Moreover, ICE says arresting someone on the streets is “unpredictable and can be dangerous to the public, aliens, and federal law enforcement officers.”
But Trump doesn’t care. He wants to indiscriminately arrest and remove as many people as possible. That’s why one of Trump’s first actions in office was to remove the requirement that agents focus exclusively on public safety threats so that ICE officers no longer have to put in the extra work to arrest those who have victimized someone. In fact, officers are now under a mandate to fill a quota of arrests, and there’s no requirement that those arrests are of criminals.
Mass deportation schemes with hard numeric targets will inevitably involve prioritizing the peaceful, because they are easy to capture, over the violent who are more difficult to detain.
Trump’s Arresting Lies
There is evidence that this is exactly what is happening. NBC News confirmed that only half of the recent arrests have been of people with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Even many of those “criminal arrests” are for minor traffic or immigration misdemeanors. Among the 200 people recently deported to Colombia after all the drama with that government, none were criminals. Trump is just deceiving the American public by suggesting otherwise.
There’s another perverse result of hard numeric deportation goals beyond just targeting the vulnerable and law-abiding immigrants: ICE agents, desperate to meet their quotas, are going after asylum seekers who are in fact complying with the terms of their release into the country.
Consider the case of Wilson Rogelio Velasquez Cruz, a Honduran asylum applicant with a work permit. He was in church when agents started beeping his ankle bracelet. He left the church and was immediately arrested outside, even though he had no criminal record and was trying to do everything by the book. Similarly, despite no evidence of criminality, Walter Valladares—another asylum applicant who had applied for a work permit—was arrested in front of his family and four children at their home in Georgia.
This is a script very similar to the one that the administration used last time.
In 2018, Perla Morales-Luna, who had been living in the United States for 21 years after having come here as a 15 year-old, was walking with her three children, all U.S. citizens, when ICE agents jumped from a van and pulled her inside, leaving her kids screaming on the sidewalk. The incident was recorded and posted online, generating outrage. The Trump administration asserted that she was targeted because she was a “human smuggling facilitator.” But days later, the government quietly released her without any smuggling charges or an apology for the smear. Instead, she was given an order to appear in deportation court.
Likewise, a year before this incident, agents arrested Rosenda Perez-Pelcastre and Francisco Duarte-Tineo, the media reported it, and the Trump administration again claimed these parents of four, with no prior criminal record, were operating a “stash house for human smuggling.” No charges were ever filed, no evidence was ever provided, and Rosenda was immediately released.
Mass Deportation Is the Real Threat
Trump’s mass deportation agenda is harming public safety not only by diverting immigration enforcement resources away from serious threats but other federal law enforcement resources as well. He is deputizing thousands of federal agents to assist in mass deportations. He is requiring the Justice Department to prioritize and prosecute misdemeanor immigration crimes over other, far more serious ones just to get dazzling photo ops. He is reassigning Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) agents who investigate terrorism and human and sex trafficking to waste their time on low-level immigration offenders.
Even if the Trump administration could magically will away all the undocumented immigrants in the United States with no opportunity cost, it would still harm U.S. security. Undocumented immigrants are about half as likely to commit offenses serious enough for them to be incarcerated in the United States. Data from Texas show that unauthorized immigrants are 26% less likely to be convicted of homicides as native-born Americans. Similarly, in Georgia, illegal immigrants are 32% less likely to be incarcerated for homicide as other Georgia residents.
This means that removing the illegal population would mathematically increase the crime and victimization rates for Americans, refuting the notion that if a single undocumented immigrant commits a single crime, deporting all of them would make us safer. If fewer undocumented immigrants live in your neighborhood, your likelihood of being a victim of crime would go up.
Undocumented Good Samaritans
Mass deportation proponents play up every instance of immigrants who commit crimes, even naming bills after their victims—but never those who stop crimes. A few examples: An undocumented immigrant working as a convenience store nightwatchman stopped a burglary in Texas. Another unauthorized immigrant chased down a child abductor in New Mexico, returning a six-year-old girl to her parents. Two undocumented immigrants were recognized by the NYPD for saving a woman from being stabbed to death. On his way to work in Miami, a Colombian immigrant drovehis van between a shooter and a cop. Bolivian immigrant Patricio Salazar stopped a rape in Virginia.
Mass deportationists are also seeking to remove immigrant victims and witnesses to crimes who work with police to bring criminals to justice. Contrary to the perception, immigrants are more likely to report crimes to the police because they have more trust in U.S. institutions. There are nearly 400,000 immigrants who have pending requests to gain legal status based on their cooperation with law enforcement. About 100,000 have received legal status on this basis in the last decade alone. We even see the population purgers cite crimes committed by noncitizens against other noncitizensas a reason for mass deportation. How would deporting victims with the perpetrator protect anyone?
Moreover, even as Trump and his fellow deporters publicize crimes committed by immigrants against natives, they ignore those committed by natives against immigrants.
Immigrants—like people generally—are good for their communities. Indeed, people are the foundation of those communities. Immigrants have revitalized communities, reversing population declines and contributing to stronger, wealthier, and safer neighborhoods. The real threat to Americans is from Donald Trump by ejecting hardworking, peaceful people.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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@David J Bier
This is another balanced essay that addresses lies and actions by government folks regarding a concern that residents have about outsiders.
Thank you for writing this essay.
If people are in a country illegally then they are, by definition, criminals. No way to sugarcoat that brute fact.
What Trump wants to do with them -- some 10 million at last count -- may well be extreme, impractical, and counterproductive. But hard to deny that they constitute a serious problem that the Democrats have dropped the ball on -- something that even many leftists are belatedly recognizing. Like Freddie de Boer:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-have-to-take-some-kind-of-an-l?utm_medium=reader2&triedRedirect=true