\n<\/p>\n
Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. \u201cPretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,\u201d the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by the state of Florida on a disused airport runway. The detention center features tents that contain chain-link cages crammed with bunk beds, surrounded by miles of barbed wire. By the end of August, it may have the capacity to hold 4,000 people waiting to hear whether they\u2019ll be deported.<\/p>\n
On Fox News that night, Stephen Miller, the White House\u2019s deputy chief of staff for policy, argued that there was nothing dehumanizing about an immigrant-detention center built in a hot, humid, mosquito-infested, subtropical wetland. \u201cWhat is dehumanizing is when Democrats let illegal alien rapists into the country to attack our children,\u201d Miller said. Laura Loomer, a Trump adviser, expressed the hope that alligators would eat the immigrants detained in the Everglades. \u201cAlligator lives matter,\u201d she posted on X, along with an implied threat to the Latino population of the United States: \u201cThe good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Everglades detention center, the nationwide roundups of immigrants, the massive increase in spending for ICE, and the Trump administration\u2019s harsh rhetoric were foreshadowed during the 2024 presidential campaign. \u201cThis is country changing; it\u2019s country threatening; and it\u2019s country wrecking,\u201d Trump said about undocumented immigration at one campaign rally. At another he said, \u201cIt\u2019s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.\u201d Trump called immigrants \u201canimals,\u201d accused them of stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and claimed that they were \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country.\u201d These claims helped ensure Trump\u2019s election. Last year, an opinion poll commissioned by CBS News found that almost half of all adults in the United States agreed that undocumented immigrants are \u201cpoisoning the blood\u201d of the country. More than three-quarters of Republican adults agreed.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been writing about<\/span> the role of undocumented immigrants in the American economy for 30 years. They are the bedrock of our food, construction, and hospitality industries. They are also some of the nation\u2019s poorest, most vulnerable, most devout, most family-oriented workers in the U.S. They routinely suffer wage theft, minimum-wage violations, sexual harassment on the job, and workplace injuries that go unreported and uncompensated. Most of them have lived here for more than a decade. The lies now being spread about them are too numerous to mention. But one that must be addressed is the falsehood at the heart of Trump\u2019s immigration policy: that undocumented immigrants are likely to be murderers, rapists, and violent criminals who wreak havoc upon law-abiding citizens.<\/p>\n [Stephanie McCrummen: The message is \u2018we can take your children\u2019]<\/p>\n A recent study of 150 years of American incarceration data, from 1870 to 2020, found that immigrant men were far less likely to be sent to prison than men born in the U.S. Since 1990, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has roughly tripled\u2014yet the homicide rate has fallen by almost 50 percent. A 2020 study published in the journal PNAS<\/em> compared the crime rates of undocumented immigrants in Texas with the crime rates of U.S.-born citizens there. \u201cRelative to undocumented immigrants,\u201d the study found, U.S.-born citizens \u201care over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.\u201d That helps explain why crackdowns on undocumented immigration aren\u2019t the most effective way to improve public safety. Texas would be a much safer place if everyone born in Texas got deported.<\/p>\n \u201cUnder President Trump\u2019s leadership, we are targeting eight terrorist organizations, including six Mexican drug cartels that threaten the foreign policy, the public safety, the national security of the United States,\u201d Miller said during his Fox News appearance, stressing the urgent need to build more ICE detention centers. But ICE isn\u2019t part of the criminal-justice system. The apprehension and deportation of immigrants is conducted under civil law by the executive branch of the federal government. The phrase criminal alien, widely used by the Trump administration, is misleading. It conjures images of a dangerous, perhaps homicidal, stranger. Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, likes to issue grave warnings about the threat posed by \u201cillegal criminal aliens\u201d and \u201ccriminal illegal aliens.\u201d That threat is greatly overstated.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A criminal alien is an immigrant who has already been convicted of a crime. Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol arrested about 17,000 criminal aliens. Among the convictions recorded for that group, 29 were for homicide or manslaughter, 221 were for sex offenses\u2014and 10,935 were for unlawful entry or reentry to the U.S. The Trump administration\u2019s harsh, fearmongering rhetoric is contradicted by a simple fact: The overwhelming majority of criminal aliens become criminals by violating immigration laws. And almost three-quarters of the people now being held in ICE detention centers aren\u2019t even criminal aliens.<\/p>\n The federal agencies actually devoted to hunting down terrorists and members of Mexican drug cartels\u2014-the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)\u2014all face major cuts in Trump\u2019s 2026 budget. The FBI\u2019s budget will be reduced by $545 million; the ATF\u2019s by $418 million; the DEA\u2019s by $112 million. The Justice Department\u2019s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Forces program, created to \u201cdisrupt and dismantle transnational criminal networks,\u201d will lose its entire $547 million in funding. The program is being completely shut down. Meanwhile, the omnibus bill that Trump signed on July 4 triples the size of ICE\u2019s budget and allocates about $170 billion to immigration enforcement. Roughly $45 billion will be spent during the next four years to build new ICE detention centers, which will hold mainly people who have never been convicted of any crime.<\/p>\n Unauthorized entry to the U.S.<\/span> wasn\u2019t a criminal offense until 1929, almost a century and a half after the nation\u2019s founding. The Undesirable Aliens Act had two sections outlining the first federal immigration crimes. Section 1325 made it unlawful to enter the U.S. without proper inspection, and Section 1326 made it unlawful to reenter the U.S. after being deported. As Eric S. Fish, a law professor at UC Davis, reveals in a 2022 Iowa Law Review<\/em> article, \u201cRace, History, and Immigration Crimes,\u201d the Undesirable Aliens Act was designed to keep people from Latin America, especially Mexicans, out of the U.S. Its principal sponsors were advocates of eugenics, a pseudoscience that claims that races have innate characteristics and that the white race is superior to every other.<\/p>\n [From the September 2022 issue: An American catastrophe]<\/p>\n Harry Hamilton Laughlin served as the \u201cexpert eugenics agent\u201d for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization when the bill was written. Laughlin had a biology degree from Princeton. He called for laws against interracial marriage. He called for laws requiring the forced sterilization of criminals; people suffering from alcoholism or epilepsy; deaf people; blind people; people deemed mentally or physically impaired; and poor people, including \u201corphans, n\u2019er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps, and paupers.\u201d The Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was directly inspired by Laughlin\u2019s model law on forced sterilization. He believed that Mexicans were innately criminal and feeble-minded as well as carriers of disease. \u201cIf we do not deport the undesirable individual,\u201d Laughlin testified before Congress, \u201cwe can not get rid of his blood, no matter how inferior it may be, because we can not deport his offspring born here.\u201d<\/p>\n Coleman Livingston \u201cColey\u201d Blease, a Democrat from South Carolina, introduced the Undesirable Aliens Act in the Senate. Blease publicly called Black people \u201capes\u201d and \u201cbaboons.\u201d He publicly celebrated the lynching of Black men in \u201cdefense of the virtue of the white women of my State.\u201d He sought a constitutional amendment to outlaw interracial marriage. He opposed all immigration to the U.S., especially from Mexico, arguing, \u201cI believe in America for Americans.\u201d The legislation that became the Undesirable Aliens Act made it through the Senate with a voice vote and without any debate. In the House, Representative John Box, a Democrat from Texas, claimed that Mexican immigration would lead to the \u201cmongrelization\u201d and \u201cdegradation\u201d of white racial purity, creating the \u201cmost insidious and general mixture of white, Indian, and negro blood strains ever produced in America.\u201d The House debate on the bill didn\u2019t focus on \u201clegal versus illegal methods of entry,\u201d Fish writes, \u201cbut on the reasons why we should not let Mexicans immigrate at all.\u201d He goes on: \u201cThe primary reason given was their race.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Almost 100 years later, Sections 1325 and 1326 are still in force. Today, more people are prosecuted for violating those two sections than for any other federal crimes. Indeed, the majority of all convictions in federal court stem from that pair of statutes. Unlawful entry is a misdemeanor; unlawful reentry is a felony, often punished with a sentence of about a year in federal prison. Ninety-nine percent of the people convicted for unlawful reentry last year were Latino\u2014-just as the authors of the Undesirable Aliens Act intended. Nevertheless, by some estimates, almost half of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. violated neither of those statutes. They entered the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas. They have violated civil immigration law but not federal criminal law.<\/p>\n Immigrant-detention centers<\/span> are not prisons. They are being built throughout the U.S. not to punish criminals but to hold people facing deportation for violations of civil immigration law. The Department of Homeland Security, which administers these centers, admits that fact. \u201cDetention is non-punitive,\u201d according to ICE. But immigrants in ICE detention centers frequently endure living conditions much worse than people who are incarcerated in American prisons.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n ICE puts immigrants into dangerous, overcrowded jails, paying local authorities for their care. It sends immigrants to state prisons. And it holds about 90 percent of detainees in facilities run by private prison companies\u2014-whose stock prices have soared since Trump\u2019s reelection. The name Alligator Alcatraz suggests that the health and well-being of detainees are not top priorities. Each of the Florida facility\u2019s chain-link cages can house 32 men but has only three toilets. Immigrants detained by ICE have been forced to sleep on floors, live in windowless cells, spend a week or more without a shower, and go without medicine for chronic illnesses. ICE can move immigrants to jails or detention centers anywhere in the U.S., regardless of where they were apprehended or where they may have lived for years. During an unannounced visit to the Krome Detention Center in Miami this May, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida found the conditions \u201cincredibly disturbing.\u201d An attorney for one immigrant detained there said that the daily ration of food was a cup of rice and a glass of water. In June, a group of immigrants at Krome went outside and arranged their bodies into an \u201cSOS.\u201d<\/p>\n The tactics used by ICE agents to arrest immigrants and bring them to detention evoke those of a police state\u2014masked, armed officers raiding churches, farms, schools, garment factories, and Home Depots; appearing by surprise to seize graduate students; separating parents from children; conducting sweeps while on horseback. ICE agents can arrest anybody, without a warrant, based on probable cause that a person is undocumented and may flee. All of these practices may be legal, but they don\u2019t inspire faith in the rule of law.<\/p>\n [Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]<\/p>\n The administrative hearings that determine whether an immigrant can remain in the U.S. are similarly out of keeping with traditional democratic norms. Immigrants have no legal right to an attorney in these proceedings, and most never gain access to one. The stakes are extraordinarily high now that the Supreme Court has permitted the deportation of immigrants to distant nations they\u2019ve never visited before, such as El Salvador and South Sudan. Immigration courts are run by the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security employs the attorneys who make the government\u2019s case for deportation. Both the DOJ and the DHS are headed by Cabinet members who report to the president. The Trump administration has imposed quotas on ICE agents to increase apprehensions, and may once again impose quotas on immigration judges to speed the completion of cases.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n An immigration judge can be removed from a case at the discretion of the federal attorney general. And a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of immigration law no longer seems to be a job requirement. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order\u2014\u201cProtecting the American People Against Invasion\u201d\u2014that authorizes state and local officials to serve as federal immigration officials. During Trump\u2019s visit to the Everglades detention center, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that 47,000 Florida law-enforcement officers had been deputized to work for ICE. DeSantis has also proposed letting attorneys who serve with the Florida National Guard act as immigration judges.<\/p>\n Outside the Everglades facility on its opening day, Enrique Tarrio spoke with a group of reporters. Tarrio is a former leader of the Proud Boys, a neofascist group. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, sentenced to 22 years in prison, pardoned by the president, and praised by Trump during a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago with his mother. Tarrio is now promoting a new app, ICERAID, that offers a cryptocurrency reward to users who help the government locate and arrest undocumented immigrants. \u201cWe didn\u2019t vote for cheaper eggs,\u201d Tarrio said in the Everglades. \u201cWe voted for mass deportation, and we voted for retribution.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. \u201cPretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,\u201d the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2831,4516,5072],"class_list":{"0":"post-11632","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-alien","9":"tag-criminal","10":"tag-slander"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}