Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty
There has been concern that President Trump’s immigration crackdown would one day extend beyond undocumented immigrants to target U.S. citizens. The arrest of Mohsen Mahdawi, a pro-Palestine activist and green-card holder who was detained by ICE agents last week at his naturalization interview in Colchester, Vermont, seemed symbolic of how close the administration has come to that threshold. “Homegrown criminals next,” Trump told his Salvadoran counterpart, Nayib Bukele, at a White House meeting that same day. He confirmed to reporters that his team is “studying the laws” to determine whether the hundreds of undocumented people he is paying Bukele to incarcerate at CECOT, El Salvador’s megaprison, could eventually be joined by native-born Americans.
Yet despite setting off alarm bells, there remained a sense that these musings were still a ways away from becoming reality. Trump and Bukele are expert trolls; even the most sober warnings from experts about their ominous but “obviously illegal” machinations have seemed to imply that they resembled “hopes” more than actual plans. In fact, the targeting of U.S. citizens by immigration agents is already being trial-ballooned. Local cops and ICE officials are functioning as a de facto laboratory for testing out what Trump can get away with, subjecting people they deem seditious or even just suspicious to a brand of law-enforcement terror that the president no longer pretends to reserve for “violent, predatory, and gang-affiliated criminal illegal aliens.”
The latest victim of this campaign is Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old from Georgia. Lopez-Gomez was detained on his way to work last Wednesday by a Florida Highway Patrolman who, under a recently enacted state law, had been empowered to arrest anyone he suspected of having entered the U.S. illegally, even though a district judge had placed its enforcement temporarily on hold. Lopez-Gomez was charged with being an “unauthorized alien” and held for 24 hours anyway. His mother had to show his birth certificate to a judge on Thursday, which should have resolved the matter. But ICE officials insisted that he be detained, and it was not until she and others protested outside the Leon County Jail that evening that Lopez-Gomez was released “at a nearby Wendy’s for the officer’s safety,” according to NBC News.
This kind of close call is increasingly common, though it was not unheard of for a citizen to get caught up in an immigration dragnet before. Since Trump took office in January, reports have proliferated detailing the ICE arrests of several Americans, including a Mescalero Apache man in New Mexico, a naturalized Hispanic Trump voter in Virginia, and a 10-year-old cancer patient who was detained en route to a doctor’s appointment in Texas and then deported along with her undocumented Mexican parents. Going back even further, enforcement of Arizona’s infamous anti-immigration law, SB 1070, was rife with racial profiling. NPR reported that, under President Obama, immigration authorities requested that almost 700 US citizens be held in local jails while they were being investigated, while, according to ProPublica, an additional 600 were held during Trump’s first term, with about 70 likely citizens actually getting deported.
What sets Trump 2.0 apart are his stated intentions and his single-minded fixation on removals. In February, he was reportedly so frustrated that ICE had not captured enough people to fulfill his sensational campaign promises and early-term deportation quotas that he reassigned the agency’s top enforcement officials. And his agents are not inadvertently snatching up their fellow Americans in the course of otherwise routine tough-on-immigration theatrics. The president explicitly wants to round up and deport U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, he is gradually establishing this position as orthodoxy within the GOP. “‘Deporting’ U.S. citizens is not an option,” wrote Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar on Facebook following Trump’s remarks last week. “This idea is blatantly unconstitutional, and every Republican needs to stand up and call it out.” Yet even before the administration began targeting non-citizens like Mahdawi, Mahmoud Khalil, and Rumeysa Ozturk for deportation due to their political beliefs, Republicans had been using calls to expel their Democratic opponents as an applause line. “Legal immigrants are more patriotic than the leftists these days,” claimed former UN ambassador Nikki Haley at a 2022 rally in support of Herschel Walker, who was running against Raphael Warnock in the U.S. Senate race in Georgia. “The only person we need to make sure we deport is Warnock.” Her comments prompted a minor outcry. But now that their sentiment has become Trump’s official position, Republicans seem to be having more and more trouble passing it off as mere bare-knuckle politicking. Senator John Kennedy told Meet the Press last week that deporting citizens was not “appropriate or moral.” But when CNN’s Dana Bash grilled Representative Tom Emmer on the matter over the weekend, the third highest-ranking House Republican repeatedly dodged the question.
Maybe such escalations are what get Democrats off the sidelines. Party officials have been hesitant to confront Trump’s immigration agenda head-on, seeing it as a political loser that could draw resources away from more potent lines of attack, like tariffs and the economy. “I know it’s an important issue,” one House Democrat told Axios,” but should it be a big issue for Democrats? Probably not.” Another called it a “trap,” with California Governor Gavin Newsom dismissing it accordingly as “the distraction of the day.” At the same time, the imprisonment in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a non-citizen resident of Maryland with protected status, has emerged as an unlikely cause célèbre among the party’s base and a subject of deepening consternation for the public, 50 percent of whom think he should be brought back to the U.S., according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Senator Chris Van Hollen and a growing number of Congressional Democrats have visited CECOT in recent weeks to draw attention to the legal dubiety of Trump’s arrangement with Bukele, offering up a stark contrast to the pro-autocracy cheerleading from the administration’s allies.
It’s a promising start. But considering that the president has already made a habit of defying the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, a stronger paradigm shift is in order. Trump may be using ICE agents to execute the early phases of his plan to detain and deport US citizens he deems criminal or disloyal, but this is no longer merely an immigration policy. It is starting to look like a form of cleansing.
