Donald Trump seems to have a thing for making others suffer. In his first administration, he made a big show of separating children – including nursing babies – from their migrant parents. This was supposedly done to discourage desperate people attempting to enter the United States illegally. We saw the grim photos of children sobbing by police vehicles in the middle of the night, or young ones crowded into cages wrapped in thin foil blankets. The process was haphazard and cruel, and thousands of children ultimately went missing in the system.
While our immigration system is in need of an overhaul, Trump is not interested in any real solutions. If he was, he would never have pressured his followers in Congress to tank a carefully crafted bipartisan bill that offered smart, much-needed fixes from the Biden administration. It was an election year after all, and he wanted to keep his preferred boogeyman.
Now, in his second term, he’s making good on his promise to deport pretty much anyone who even faintly resembles his fever dream of a Marauding Invader. But as it was with the chaos of his first term, this one isn’t any better. It’s much worse.
There have been numerous reports of ICE grabbing random people off the streets, like a graduate student from Tufts who’d written a pro-Palestine op-ed. A Canadian woman was trying to work through her visa issues. Instead, she was snatched up and held for two weeks in a detention facility. A German green card holder was held for hours upon returning to the US from Europe, stripped naked and thrown in a cold shower. A 10-year old girl born in this country to undocumented parents had her treatment for brain cancer cruelly ended as she and her entire family were deported.
What’s most egregious, though, is the complete lack of any due process or serious check on status for those rounded up. Story after story has emerged about those with no criminal record whatsoever, but they “look the part,” so they’re shipped to a grim prison in El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, mistakes have been made but there seems to be no rush to either admit it or fix it.
A gay Venezuelan makeup artist was grabbed up because he supposedly had “gang” tattoos (they were religious). A Maryland father here in the country under protected status was mistakenly snatched, but while the Justice Department admits the goof, there’s no hurry to free him and return him home to his family.
Despite a judge’s order to slow down and give detainees the legal process they’re entitled to, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele snarkily tweeted, “Oopsie…too late.” Oh, and the kicker? We’re paying that country $6 million for housing these detainees.
Aside from the legality (or lack thereof) of these raids, there are the conditions in the detention facilities themselves. The aforementioned Canadian woman noted that during her 2-week detention, she shared a crowded space with many other women. There were no toilets, little food or water, and no beds. This bleak description echoes what fellow women detainees have noted about other ICE facilities.
For all of his bleating about how violent undocumented migrants are, the statistics show something different. Immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Further research shows that the undocumented commit less crime than their citizen counterparts.
For Trump and his administration, the fable of the Scary Immigrant is a useful canard, one that stretches back decades. Every ethnic group – Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Muslims, and more – have been the target at some point. But not only are his haphazard deportation efforts ineffective, they’re just plain cruel.
This is not who we are as a country. At least, it shouldn’t be.
Cindy Grogan is a writer, lover of history and "Star Trek" (TOS), and hardcore politics junkie. There was that one time she campaigned for Gerald Ford (yikes), but ever since, she's been devoted to Democratic and progressive policies.