The Incomprehensible Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans
The idea that the United States should arrest, detain, and deport every single person who crosses the border unlawfully is not built into the immigration system. The crime of “unlawful entry” was created only in 1929. The system of immigration detention we have today came much later, in tandem with the rise of mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s, writes Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, in her 2024 book Unbuild Walls. Routinely detaining and deporting people who crossed the border without authorization was uncommon until the 1980s. Before then, if immigration enforcement detained people at all, it was for a few days, after which they were released on parole as immigration proceedings unfolded.
This is also when the narrative of “criminal aliens” took root, Shah argues. It was beginning to show up in aspects of anti-drug legislation—like “detainer” policies, which authorized the Immigration and Naturalization Service and local law enforcement to coordinate so as to more quickly move immigrants arrested on drug charges into INS custody and deportation proceedings. After the 9/11 attacks, policy and narrative about “criminal aliens” were bound even more tightly together through the “war on terrorism.” By the time Congress scrapped INS in 2002, and ICE was born, federal legislation defined a greater number of immigrants as “criminal aliens” by expanding the list of crimes for which immigrants could be detained or deported, and, through the kick-started 287(g) program, 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 are undeserving of rights,” Shah writes, “and over time the law changed to support the belief.”
Homan, Trump, Miller, and many others are not really innovating with the substance of this rhetoric—immigrants are criminals. “It’s a very intentional narrative, but it goes beyond a narrative,” said Marlene Galaz, director of immigrant rights policy at New York Immigration Coalition, or NYIC. “Painting immigrants and asylum seekers as criminals has been a strategy for a while now. But I do think that that narrative leads into actual policy.” Trump et al. are popularizing the narrative, taking it to a new extreme: a more straightforward, scapegoating narrative about what to do with immigrants, one with a catchy solution that can be captured in a campaign sign.
