Trump’s immigration crackdown is about creating fear for more than migrants

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

ICE agents arrest a suspect during an enforcement action. Credit: Courtesy Photo / Immigration and Customs Enforcement

There are two types of people: those who feel safer when the cops show up and those who feel on edge.

Since I spent my youth smoking copious amounts of a plant known to induce paranoia, I tend to fall into the second category. A recent trip across West Texas, for example, was made decidedly less fun by multiple Border Patrol checkpoints and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers speeding around in SUVs.

But I’ve had it easy.

The same can’t be said for Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a college student near Boston who intended to surprise her parents on Thanksgiving by flying back home to Austin. Border Patrol agents slapped the cuffs on her at Logan Airport instead. Although a judge ordered an emergency stay to pause her deportation for 72 hours pending a review of her immigration status, Belloza was flown to a country she’s not set foot in since age 7.

“I burst into tears because I couldn’t believe it,” she told ABC News via phone from Honduras.

If you’re from San Antonio, you’re likely aware of the recent raid on an after-hours food truck park near San Pedro Avenue and Basse Road. Federal agents rounded up more than 140 people, ultimately charging two Honduran men with illegal reentry, while claiming some 51 of those arrested were “confirmed” members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

The feds have offered no proof of gang affiliation as of press time, and elected officials are still seeking answers, to uncertain avail.

Lest we confuse Donald Trump’s intensifying immigration crackdowns with a zeal for bringing drug traffickers to justice, he last week suspended the 45-year prison sentence of the former president of Honduras for conspiracy to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.

Non-presidents, however, have a tougher row to hoe.

Take George Retes, a U.S. citizen and Iraq War veteran detained by ICE on his way to work this summer.

“One ICE agent’s knee was on his neck, another’s was grinding his back. Drenched with tear gas and pepper spray, Retes might have wished that he were back in Kirkuk,” conservative columnist George Will wrote of the ordeal, adding sardonically, “a glimpse of your tax dollars at work.”

Retes, who remained locked up for three days without a lawyer, has since sued the government.

“This doesn’t just affect one person,” he told National Public Radio. “This doesn’t just affect the Left or the Right. This is a civil rights problem that affects everyone. There’s no accountability. There’s no justice.”

Goodness help the soldiers without their papers in order.

“More than 100,000 U.S. military veterans lack citizenship,” Rolling Stone disclosed earlier this fall. “Some are lawful permanent residents who enlisted on the promise of a fast-track to naturalization. Many of them have family members who believed their loved one’s sacrifice would protect them from immigration enforcement. Instead, they live with the constant fear that ICE could knock on the door at dawn, or grab them off the street, and ship them to countries they’ve never been to.”

As videos of families being ripped apart outside court hearings go viral, people ranging from hospital staff to farm hands now live in fear. The consequences aren’t just heartbreaking but lethal. More than a dozen inmates have died in ICE custody this year.

“Across the country, people are being held in abhorrent conditions and indefinite detention,” Zoe Bowman, a supervising attorney with the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, said early in Trump’s second term. “Immigration officials have proven time and time again to be unable and unwilling to prioritize the health and safety of the women, mothers, fathers, children and families that make up the people in their care.”

“The same conditions that allowed [tuberculosis] to flourish at the end of the 1800s are hallmarks of immigration detention, including overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a breakdown of health protocols,” medical experts informed progressive magazine American Prospect. “And, of course, the disease doesn’t recognize the limits of prison walls.”

You needn’t be a non-citizen to be subjected to such harm. ProPublica documented 170 U.S. citizens who endured incarceration for alleged immigration violations.

Even if you don’t land behind bars, you can still be watched.

“Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement shared information about U.S. citizens’ social media profiles and home addresses with each other after stopping them on the road,” the Associated Press uncovered last month.

In one pending case, a Houstonian named Alex Schott had his car ransacked after a tipoff from immigration agents who’d seen that he made an “overnight trip from Houston to Carrizo Springs, and back … stayed overnight in a hotel about 80 miles from the US-Mexico border … and met a female colleague there before they drove together to a business meeting.” Bexar County deputies held Schott on the side of the road for over an hour, only to find nothing incriminating.

With a $28 billion yearly budget, ICE is now the country’s largest domestic law enforcement agency. Reviewing procurement records, Lever News journalist Katya Schwenk ran across a $5.7 million contract signed with Zignal Labs, “a social media monitoring platform used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon,” adding to ICE’s “growing arsenal of social media surveillance tools, many of which employ artificial intelligence to generate leads and identify ‘threats’ from vast quantities of online data.”

“Hundreds of specialized ICE investigative agents, who normally focus on serious crimes such as human trafficking and transnational gangs, have been reassigned to routine immigration enforcement,” news agency Reuters revealed in August after interviewing current and former ICE officials.

So, the administration’s mass deportation agenda is literally sparing the so-called “worst of the worst” to hound folks who have lived and worked here for years. ICE’s massive recruitment efforts are also poaching beat cops, as Popular Information reported that same month, which “will shift resources from fighting local crime to arresting non-violent immigrants with no criminal record.”

“We’re told only the guilty need be afraid — the usual menacing excuse,” right-of-center blogger Andrew Sullivan recently warned. “But the effect of all this performative (and real) authoritarianism is that everyone — citizen and non-citizen — will become used to masked men with the power to arrest walking the streets of the country. We will become used to policing our words so we are not bundled into a van by mistake. We will carry passports to avoid being thrown into jail by mistake. That is not a free country. It is not America. And on this scale, it has never been done before.”

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Trump’s immigration crackdown is about creating fear for more than migrants

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