Trump’s Mass Deportation Campaign Is Draconian and Lawless
Its breathtaking scope goes far beyond targeting criminal aliens and seeks to instill fear among all immigrants
Donald Trump has professed that “tariff” is his favorite word, but “deport” can’t be far behind. Since he took office on Jan. 20, his administration has made a gaudy spectacle of finding, detaining, and removing foreigners whose presence he deems intolerable. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has even been given quotas: Each of its 25 field offices is expected to arrest at least 75 people every day, come hell or high water.
The president and ICE portray these enforcement actions as a vigorous effort to protect Americans from dangerous criminals who have invaded our country—murderers, rapists, gang members, fentanyl traffickers. But the crackdown has hit the harmless as well as the dangerous, and those who lack legal status and also, most alarmingly, those who have it.
Trumpism is synonymous with draconianism. Even then, the deportation campaign manages to stand out: It is indiscriminate, malicious, secretive, and disdainful of the law. Its entire purpose is to rid huge numbers of foreigners living here and instilling fear in all the rest.
Trump Gives the Undocumented the Terrorist Treatment
Among the most conspicuous illustrations of its ruthlessness is the shipment of 178 Venezuelans to the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, notorious as a prison for suspects in the war on terrorism. According to The Washington Post, three of the Venezuelans sent there “said they were denied calls to lawyers or loved ones after repeated pleas. They said they were subjected to humiliating and invasive strip searches. They described prolonged periods in isolation, with only two one-hour opportunities to go outside over two weeks.” The White House gleefully posted a video of men being handcuffed, shackled, and loaded onto a plane. The post, which was approvingly amplified by Elon Musk, read: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a category of viral video intended to elicit soothing and relaxing sensations. So, cruelty is intended to be “soothing and relaxing.”
The Post could find no criminal record for any of the three, who were treated like al-Qaeda operatives. “These detainees now have less access to counsel than the military detainees who have been held under the laws of war in the aftermath of Sept. 11,” said the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit. Reported The New York Times, “A range of immigration law specialists said they had been scouring federal law for any clear source of governmental authority to detain noncitizens outside the United States for immigration purposes and could not find any.”
But respect for the law is not a hallmark of this White House. It found a way to evade judicial review of the Guantánamo detentions by putting most of those it had moved to that facility on a plane to Honduras, where they were forced to board another flight to Venezuela. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that those sent to Gitmo were “mainly child pedophiles” who “were out there trafficking children, trafficking drugs,” offering zero evidence for her assertion.
This apparently will be just the first shipment of unauthorized foreigners to be cast into the island’s legal black hole: The administration plans to warehouse some 30,000 detainees there. “By hurrying immigrants off to a remote island cut off from lawyers, family, and the rest of the world,” said the ACLU, “the Trump administration is sending its clearest signal yet that the rule of law means nothing to it.”
Trump Is Coming For Legal Immigrants, Too
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. That objective became blindingly apparent during the 2024 campaign, when he spread the abominable falsehood that Haitians had overwhelmed Springfield, Ohio, eating residents’ pets and “destroying their way of life.” The Haitians, however, were not illegal immigrants. They were given permission to be here under a federal program known as Temporary Protected Status, created under President George H.W. Bush for people from countries designated unsafe. By the end of the Biden administration, it covered close to 1.2 million people from 22 countries, including Ukraine, Honduras, Afghanistan, and Venezuela.
But no matter. Given that those in Springfield were from Haiti—which Trump has called a “shithole”—and Black, he treated them as a vile infestation rather than as what they are: an unfortunate group of human beings who sought a safe haven from the violence of their homelands and became contributing members of society. In response to Trump’s claims, Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine pleaded that the once-depressed city “is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation. Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs. They are there legally. They are there to work.”
No one ever produced evidence that the Haitians were eating local pets. But Trump’s DHS revoked Joe Biden’s decision extending their TPS coverage, which means they could be exposed to deportation as soon as August. Venezuelans, who now number some 600,000, will lose their protected status in April. Desperate people who hiked thousands of miles fleeing poverty, violence, and oppression will be summarily returned to what Secretary of State Marco Rubio once described as “a very real death sentence.” Suffering is not a byproduct of this decision; it is the product.
Trump is also reportedly planning to strip 240,000 Ukrainians of their temporary legal status, paving the way for forcibly returning them to their war-ravaged country if they do not return voluntarily. Apparently, humiliating the Ukrainian president after calling him a dictator, cutting off military aid, and suspending intelligence sharing was not enough. Trump actually wants to send Ukrainians back to face Putin’s missiles and bombs.
Numeric Lawlessness
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan says the priority is catching undocumented migrants who are criminals and terrorists, but finding 75 of those every day is not so easy. As David Bier has pointed out, “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.” That’s exactly what has played out: Thus far, many of the foreigners who have been caught in the ICE dragnet pose no discernible threat. When it made 1,179 arrests on Jan. 26, officials admitted, 566 of the detainees had no criminal records. In the first two weeks of February, NBC News reported, 41% of the 1,800 arrested were non-criminals.
But the administration doesn’t care about such distinctions. “I know the last administration didn't see it that way, so it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that’s exactly what they are,” sneered White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. In fact, being in the United States without authorization is not a crime but a civil offense. Many of the undocumented entered the country on valid visas and then stayed after their visas expired or they violated their visa restrictions. (Elon Musk apparently falls in the latter category, starting a company while here on a student visa that didn’t allow such work.) Many others showed up requesting asylum, as they are entitled to do under U.S. and international law, and remain here awaiting adjudication of their cases.
Noem wants to simplify the enforcement effort by requiring the undocumented to turn themselves in for removal. She unveiled a plan to require all unauthorized migrants aged 14 or older to register with the federal government. Failure to do so would incur fines of up to $1,000 and up to six months in jail—followed, no doubt, by deportation. If Noem has her way, middle schoolers and their parents will be put behind bars for not facilitating their own expulsions. But if she expects mass compliance with a regime so bent on terrorizing these unfortunate souls, she’s deluding herself.
The undocumented are not the only people at risk from the administration’s scattershot attacks. Even citizens born here can end up as collateral damage. Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said he’s heard from tribal members who have suffered “negative and sometimes traumatizing encounters” with federal agents who mistake them for unauthorized foreigners. “Despite possessing Certificates of Indian Blood (CIBs) and state-issued IDs, several individuals have been detained or questioned by ICE agents who do not recognize these documents as valid proof of citizenship,” said the Navajo Nation Council. One woman reportedly was held for nine hours. In Newark, New Jersey, ICE agents detained a manager of a restaurant warehouse—who is Puerto Rican and a U.S. citizen, as well as a military veteran. More of these mistakes are sure to happen on a daily basis.
American Citizenship Is No Guarantee Against Deportation
Worse ones are also inevitable. In 2020, Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens, founder of the Deportation Research Clinic, told The Intercept that about one-half of 1% of people deported from the U.S. are American citizens, which amounts to thousands of innocent victims every year. The rate of citizen deportations is only going to rise in the second Trump administration given that it exercises little care in its rushed removals.
Indeed, Politico reports that the White House has obtained a proposal from a group including Erik Prince, the former CEO of the private security firm Blackwater, which is infamous for killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding 20 in what became known as the Nisour Square massacre. The document argues that the federal government lacks the resources to carry out a deportation campaign on the scale Trump wants and offers the group’s services, in Politico’s words, “to carry out mass deportations through a network of ‘processing camps’ on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a ‘small army’ of private citizens empowered to make arrests.” It would be human rights disaster in the making.
Trump’s punitive campaign is just the beginning. Eager to please him, the GOP-controlled Senate approved a budget blueprint that includes $175 billion in funding for immigration and border enforcement—which amounts to nearly six times what ICE and Customs and Border Protection spend each year. For all Elon Musk’s talk about cutting federal outlays, when it comes to deportations, price is no object. Awash in money, Homan wants a network of camps with room for 100,000 detainees—approaching the number the U.S. held in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
It would be an extravagant outlay and a humanitarian tragedy. Each of those victims he plans on holding and deporting is a human being, and the vast majority want nothing from us but the chance at a better life—or even mere life itself. Among the migrants shipped to a jungle facility in Panama is a 27-year-old Iranian woman, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, who risked execution by converting from Islam to Christianity. She and her brother, The New York Times reported, travelled to Abu Dhabi, South Korea, and Mexico City on their way to Tijuana, where they paid a smuggler $3,000 each to get across the U.S. border. They were detained by border agents, and Ghasemzadeh says she told them she wanted asylum, fearing religious persecution in Iran. But she says she was never interviewed about her claim before being shackled and flown to Panama on a military transport. “I wanted to live freely, to live without fear, to live without someone wanting to kill me,” she told the Times. Instead, she may be returned to a country where her religious beliefs could mean the grimmest of fates.
But humanitarian considerations count for nothing with Trump, who declared last year that foreign migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” For Ghasemzadeh, the other deportees, and millions of other foreigners who now face the threat of expulsion, the administration has a simple message: There is no safe place for you—not your country and not America.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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I am still unsure if these mass deportations are actually happening or will ever actually happen. So far it looks like the expulsion rate isn't much higher than it ever has been. All Trump really wants is for people to THINK they are happening. As far as I know the meat packing plants in Nebraska with a significant number of undocumented workers have remained untouched.
Time will tell.
It is beginning to look like "mass deportation" is as real as "The Wall paid for by Mexico."
This is a very important article, and I am sharing it via my Sustack. An important question for the future is why there is a term illegal migration and illegal (im)migrant from the start. When are all humans going to be recognised as equal global citizens?