The incredible extent of Trump's deportation plans

The idea that the United States should arrest, detain, and deport every single person who crosses the border illegally is not built into the immigration system. The crime of “unlawful entry” was only introduced in 1929. The immigration detention system we have today came about much later, along with the rise of mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s, writes Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network. in her book published in 2024 Tear down walls. Until the 1980s, the routine detention and deportation of people who crossed the border without authorization was uncommon. Previously, immigration authorities only held people for a few days before releasing them on parole as part of the immigration process.

At this point, the narrative of “criminal aliens” also became established, argues Shah. It began to show up in aspects of anti-drug legislation – such as the “detention policy” that empowered the Immigration and Naturalization Service and local law enforcement to coordinate to move immigrants arrested on drug charges more quickly into INS custody and deportation proceedings to transfer. After the September 11 attacks, politics and the narrative about “criminal aliens” became even more closely linked through the “war on terrorism.” When Congress abolished INS in 2002 and ICE was created, federal legislation defined a larger number of immigrants as “criminal aliens” by expanding the list of crimes for which immigrants could be detained or deported and through the initiative 287(g), local police could help ICE track them down, streamlining the arrest-to-deportation pipeline. “The arguments used to expand immigrant detention cemented xenophobic beliefs that migrants had no rights,” Shah writes, “and over time the law changed to support that belief.”

Homan, Trump, Miller and many others are not really innovative with the content of this rhetoric –Immigrants are criminals. “It’s a very intentional narrative, but it goes beyond a narrative,” said Marlene Galaz, director of immigration rights policy at the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC). “Portraying immigrants and asylum seekers as criminals has been a strategy for some time. But I think that narrative is crossing over into actual policy.” Trump et al. are popularizing the narrative and taking it to a new extreme: a more straightforward, scapegoating narrative about what should happen to immigrants, one with a memorable solution that can be captured on a campaign sign.