By Andy Yorke
At his inauguration speech Trump threatened to deport ‘millions and millions of criminal aliens’, a constant racist theme, linking immigrants to drug gang violence. In one of his first executive orders, ‘Protecting the American People Against Invasion’, he pledged to round up and deport illegal immigrants, officially estimated at over 11 million and a vital workforce in sectors of the US economy, particularly agriculture, hospitality and construction.
But the wave of raids and abductions by the feared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Trump’s inauguration has extended to asylum seekers, settled legal immigrant communities and those guilty of speaking out against US foreign policy, particularly Palestine solidarity activists.
In the USA 15.6% of the population is foreign born, some 52 million people. Nearly half are naturalised citizens, a quarter have legal residence, and a quarter are undocumented, while 4.4 million children are born to illegal parents. Violating the US constitution, Trump is trying to take away their citizenship, and bending the law to breaking point to arrest, imprison and deport them. Immigrants and their kids are scared to go to work, school, the doctors or even the supermarket for fear that ICE agents will ‘disappear’ them.
Asylum system deleted
As soon as Trump took office, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ‘scrubbed’ its key app for asylum seekers to book interviews and appointments, simply cancelling tens of thousands in the process, replacing them with orders to leave the US immediately. Trump has terminated temporary protection programmes that allow over a million migrants to stay and work indefinitely on ‘parole’, including Ukrainians, Afghanis, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem invited those affected to deport themselves before ICE catches up with them, launching a self-deporting app for illegals offering a $1,000 bribe and a free flight.
Trump has pressured Panama and other states to be ‘bridge countries’ where asylum claimants are warehoused while the local government negotiates return or alternative countries to settle in. With one in four dollars circulating in Central America originating in remittances, this will seriously harm them economically, another example of Trump shifting the costs of ‘making America great again’ onto poorer countries.
When three planes holding 299 asylum seekers, arrived in Panama in February, where they are kept in a heavily guarded hotel, they put signs in the windows reading, ‘Help us’, ‘Please save the Afghan girls’, and ‘We are not safe in our country’. Many were unable to access lawyers. Meanwhile 120,000 asylum seekers are marooned outside the US, their applications cancelled, while Trump has flown in 59 white South African farmers, claiming they face a genocide.
Move fast and break the law
To justify his hardball tactics, Trump has grossly exaggerated the numbers with a criminal record, or are gang members. In March 200 Venezuelan immigrants, supposedly gang members, were televised being illegally deported to El Salvador with the cooperation of its authoritarian president and MAGA favourite Nayib Bukele. Many were reported to have legal visas to stay in the US and be innocent of any crime.
When taken to his notorious El Salvador’s maximum security prison they were forced to kneel in their underwear and their heads forcibly shaved, before heavily armed police in balaclavas frogmarched them to cells.
When federal judge James Boasberg on 15th March moved to block the removals, Trump got the deportees’ planes in the air at 4pm to get round it. Despite a court order for the planes to turn around, they landed in El Salvador and Honduras, with Bukele gloating, ‘Oopsie… Too late’ on X with a lol emoji, retweeted by Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Trump promised several times before his election ‘I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.’ This act, explicitly limited to wartime and only invoked three times previously (all during actual wars), allows the state to arrest and deport citizens of enemy countries without legal recourse, including the right to appear before an immigration or federal court judge. Trump officials insist that only the president has the right to determine whether the country is being invaded!
Trump has extended his attacks to non-citizens legally living, working or studying in the US, exploiting the grey area of their right to free speech. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University Palestine activist, was abducted 8 March despite holding a visa granting legal permanent residence. Many other foreign academics have since been arrested or barred from entry to the US despite holding visas.
This is now being extended to hundreds of foreign students because of their political activity. Marco Rubio bragged, ‘We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.’ A new AI tool has been developed to scour the social media accounts of those ‘who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups’, with far right groups helping to identify potential targets.
The question of immigrants’ right to free speech has not been seen in US courts since the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s.
Trump the Bonaparte
On the day he took office Trump quoted Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘He who saves his country does not violate any law.’ And indeed, Trump has shown open contempt for adverse rulings by judges or explicit clauses of the US Constitution. He has done all he can to break with the famous ‘separation of powers’ and exalt the authority of the presidency.
But has it worked? Trump’s rallies whipping up his MAGA followers, the ICE raids and televised deportations have certainly deterred border crossings. By February these had collapsed to a trickle of 8,347, the lowest level for decades. The New York Times reported, ‘Once-crowded migrant shelters are empty. Instead of heading north, people stranded in Mexico are starting to return home in bigger numbers. The border is almost unrecognizable.’
This immigrant dragnet has stretched the limits of the US president’s already immense constitutional powers, sparking clashes with the judiciary. Thomas Homan, Trump’s hard-right ICE Director, told Fox News the deportation flights ‘are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think,’ though he now says they will respect court decisions.
Vice President Vance for his part is on record tweeting, ‘Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.’ Much of this is now tied up in the courts, building up to Trump-packed Supreme Court – how will it rule?
To hit back, Trump has leveraged extra-constitutional pressure from his base. On his social media platform Truth Social, he has attacked the ‘Radical Left Lunatic of a judge’ and ‘troublemaker’ James Boasberg: ‘This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!’ He has coordinated with the Republican majority in Congress to introduce bills to impeach Boasberg and other ‘troublemaker’ judges.
In his first administration Trump lost 80% of the 246 cases that went before the courts, forcing officials to rework proposals so they fit the constitution and federal law, a major constraint on Trump’s initiatives. Now he is pulling every lever, with executive orders targeting law firms that take cases challenging his policies, hitting their pockets by banning their lawyers from federal contracts and targeting them for misconduct charges. Advocacy and human rights groups have already reported being frozen out by firms that before would have defended them.
But if Trump faces serious legal and constitutional constraints, he has a mass, potentially violent MAGA movement behind him, solidified in the Republican Party structures. Embedded in this are outright fascist groups, like those that spearheaded the storming of congress in 2021.
He could well push for more radical tactics if the judiciary blocks his most high-profile moves. He has a strong incentive to string along his base with ‘big wins’ like the migration drop and dramatic televised crackdowns, but if his promised investment and jobs fail to materialise Trump’s immigration policy could have an ugly spillover in terms of mob violence.
So what opposition has there been to Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant policies. The Democrats have been largely silent in Congress, busy triangulating for the midterms next year. And though immigrant workers have been a crucial component of the organising and strikes of the last two decades, the unions have ducked ‘toxic’ issues like immigration.
The 3 February ‘Day without Immigrants’ walkouts were a small start, but US workers and youth need to struggle to build grassroots community defence against ICE raids, and bring the unions into the resistance against Trump. In the process they need to shake off the tactics of waiting for the Democrats and build a new fighting ‘party of labor’, on a programme aiming to abolish capitalism through revolution, along with its racism, national chauvinism and borders.
