I understand those who voted for Trump believing that he would rid us of violent criminal immigrants, the folks he characterized as rapists and murderers, the sort of folks Trump said would sneak up behind an innocent grandmother and whack her on the head with a baseball bat. Great campaign rhetoric. We can get behind that. What horrible people! They must be imprisoned or shipped out of our country!
While dealing with “those people” sounded fine and good, I must believe that most Trump voters, inured to Trump’s typical hyperbolic declarations, didn’t quite understand that he would use the numbers of people he was proposing to imprison or deport (sometimes saying as many as 20 million) to justify tossing aside the due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution, that he would use the “hardened criminal” trope in order to summarily round up and imprison and/or deport people, including people with legal status, on grounds of “evidence” like tattoos and anonymous accusations.
When Joe Rogan, the popular right wing podcaster, a prominent supporter of Trump prior to the election, puts it this way, we should all wake up and understand that something is badly wrong:
“What if you are an enemy of, let’s not say any current president. Let’s pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028, and this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process and shipping them to El Salvador. You’re a gang member. No I’m not. Prove it. What? I got to go to court. No. No due process.
“That is dangerous,” Rogan warned. “We got to be careful that we don’t become monsters while we’re fighting monsters.”
Trump and Stephen Miller (every time I see Miller speak I see the ghost of Joseph Goebbels standing behind him smiling) are using claims of mayhem by immigrants to justify effectively turning our democratic republic into a police state.
The article copied below is spot on, especially contrasted with Trump’s bluster on immigration and deportation. Accusational propaganda and the judgement of a few zealots cannot be allowed to replace the rule of law.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Trump’s Immigration Policy Is a Failure Built on Lies
A policy at war with the truth is doomed to fail.
MONA CHAREN—from The Bulwark
MAY 02, 2025
THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN WAS FESTOONED for the past week with mugshots of supposed illegal-immigrant criminals the administration has arrested or deported. It formed a backdrop for “Border Czar” Tom Homan’s threats from the briefing room that every illegal immigrant within our borders needs to register immediately with the Department of Homeland Security and carry documentation at all times. If they fail to comply, he advised, that itself will be treated as a criminal offense.
Homan is, to put it politely, winging it. This isn’t Russia yet. The “czar” cannot simply declare something to be a crime. Congress decides what is and what is not a federal offense and Congress has decreed that merely being in the country without documentation is not a crime. Certain other acts—such as returning to the country after being deported—can be prosecuted, but just being here without authorization is a civil offense, not a criminal one, as is earning money without a work visa (see, for example, Melania Trump). About four in ten undocumented aliens currently in the United States did not enter the country by sneaking across the border. They entered legally and overstayed.
At its 100-day mark, the Trump administration is touting its immigration onslaught as both a policy victory and a political victory. But neither is true.
The mugshots on the lawn and Homan’s snarling threats are meant to achieve a number of goals, including frightening many illegal (and doubtless some legal) immigrants into self-deportation, but they are also a tell—the administration just hasn’t been able to find those thousands of criminal aliens they claimed were rampaging throughout the nation. Like so many other themes Trump campaigned on, the plague of immigrant crime was a fiction.
This is not to suggest that there are no legitimate arguments against immigration. Trump could have made a case that immigration was placing an unfair burden on border states, that immigrants were driving down wages, that illegal entrants were “jumping the line,” or that excessive percentages of foreign-born people erode a nation’s identity. But that’s not the case Trump made. He and his enablers in the GOP instead smeared immigrants as rapists, drug dealers, pet eaters, and murderers. Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student who was tragically murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela in February 2024, became the symbol of a victimized America besieged by hordes of illegal-immigrant killers and rapists. Congress went so far as to pass the Laken Riley Act, a law whose terms make criminal apprehensions less likely but whose real purpose was just to reinforce the false impression of an immigrant crime wave.
Numerous records from law-enforcement agencies confirm that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Between 1980, when immigrants comprised 6.2 percent of the population, and 2022, when the percentage of immigrants had more than doubled to 13.9 percent, the crime rate declined. States with higher percentages of immigrants showed no greater incidence of crime than states with lower numbers according to data from the FBI and the Census Bureau. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute studied homicide convictions in Texas between 2013 and 2022 and found that native-born Americans were more likely to be convicted for murder than either illegal or legal immigrants.
But demagogues need scapegoats, and Trump relentlessly, grossly vilified immigrants as invaders, criminals, and threats to national security. I remember grandmotherly ladies at the GOP convention holding signs demanding “Mass Deportation Now.” It was a little shocking (even in this awful time). They wouldn’t have held those signs aloft with a clear conscience if they had not been deceived into believing that many if not most immigrants were rapists and murderers.
TRUMP PROMISED in his second inaugural address that “we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
But there are not “millions and millions” of criminal aliens unless you define criminality as simply being here without authorization, as Homan does. Virtually the entire Republican party has participated in this massive slander about immigrants. It’s a lie, so of course the policy cannot succeed.
They are deporting thousands of people, but how many of them are dangerous? I wonder even about the mugshots on the White House lawn. How many of those are actually guilty and how many have been caught in the heedless dragnet this administration is deploying? About 90 percent of the Venezuelan immigrants spirited off to the Salvadoran gulag had no criminal record, according to Bloomberg. That doesn’t make them Boy Scouts necessarily, but this administration lies incessantly, so we cannot trust its word.
At least one of the deportees (who received no due process) was a father of two who had gotten into trouble in Venezuela for participating in demonstrations against that country’s authoritarian regime. How’s that for irony? His ex-wife reported to the New York Times that he was arrested and tortured with electric shock and suffocation in Venezuela. That’s why he was seeking political asylum in the United States. He followed all of the legal steps to ask for asylum, but at his interview, immigration officials noticed a soccer tattoo (he was a coach) and sent him to Texas and then on to El Salvador.
Andry Hernandez Romero is a makeup artist. He has no criminal record, but he does have tattoos. He too was bundled off to El Salvador without due process, and is being held in a prison known for human rights abuses and in the hands of a regime that prides itself on its cruelty. Well, two regimes really, if you count the United States.
ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report that fewer than 50 percent of those arrested between January 20 and February 2 have criminal convictions. During Trump 1.0, 60 percent of those the administration labeled as criminal aliens had committed only minor crimes like immigration offenses or traffic violations. They are sweeping up so many non-criminals because the whole thing is based on the lie that millions of illegals are responsible for a massive crime wave.
So the immigration crackdown can in no way be called a success. It has depressed tourism, made a mockery of the rule of law, and tarnished our global reputation—and for what? Most of those removed were probably no threat to anyone, but they were working, paying taxes, caring for children, and going to church. Sure, a few were doubtless criminals. But as Judge Terry Doughty put it in a ruling in one Trump deportation case, “The Government contends that this is all okay. . . . But the Court doesn’t know that.”
This is a shameful, scandalous policy implemented in the most obscene fashion. The White House released videos of immigrants being chained and loaded on planes with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Immigration Deportation Flight.” Even if it were true that they were guilty, encouraging pleasure at another’s misery is depraved.
AS FOR THE POLITICAL WIN, where is it? The most vicious of Trump’s supporters may delight in this theater of thuggishness, but most voters are dismayed or worse. Some 52 percent say he has “gone too far” with deportations, while 53 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration generally. Majorities oppose sending undocumented immigrants “suspected of being gang members” to El Salvador without a hearing. Trump is underwater on the issue that is usually considered his greatest strength next to the economy (I know what you’re thinking).
Border apprehensions are way down. If that were all, Trump’s immigration policies would probably receive broad approval. Instead, Trump’s shameful, reckless, and lawless approach is creating a long-overdue backlash. At some point, newly disabused voters may be ready to learn that Trump’s claims about other topics—tariffs, NATO, vaccines, DOGE cuts—were also lies.