The Expanding Deportation Dragnet

Claiming we’re being made safer is a bald-faced lie

I keep running into people I know, usually on Facebook, who still claim that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are making us safer by rounding up and deporting “violent criminals”. That characterization of immigrants blends with hazy terms like “illegal immigrant” and “undocumented immigrant” that paint the entire immigrant community as somehow guilty and deportable, an “other” category of whom to be suspicious and fearful. After all, if darker skin or facility with the Spanish language is a marker worthy of suspicion, what is wrong with harassing such people on suspicion of being “illegal”? Aren’t they all “criminal” in some way? Doesn’t that justify ICE and CBP’s lawless and inhumane tactics? After all, some argue, “To make an omelette you have to break some eggs.”

It doesn’t matter to these folks (or they are rendered unaware by the media they follow) that verifiable and publicly available statistics clearly show that the rate of crime (of all types) committed by “undocumented” immigrants is a fraction of the rate of crimes committed by U.S. citizens and immigrants holding green cards (“legal permanent residents”). Statistics pale in comparison to the emotional effect of the repetition of gruesome anecdotes like the much-promoted story of the 2024 murder of Laken Riley, a 22 year old white nursing student in Georgia.

The blinding complexity of the U.S. immigration system promotes these anecdotal distortions. Today’s immigration system is the same system that candidate Trump lobbied congressional Republicans NOT to reform in 2024 because he wanted to campaign on his agenda of mass deportation. For Trump, blinding complexity is a feature to be exploited, not a bug.

While many are led to believe we are safer for ICE having detained immigrants responsible for crimes, the facts tell a very different story. According to the CATO Institute (notably a right wing think tank) in November of 2025, 75% of ICE detainees had no criminal conviction whatsoever, while only 5% had a conviction for any violent crime. (Of the remaining 25% the majority of “crimes” were traffic violations or infractions related to immigration.) This, of course, is hardly compatible with the “millions and millions of criminal aliens” the Trump regime claims to be in the midst of deporting.

So if 75% percent of (at least) of the ICE-targeted immigrants have absolutely no criminal record, then on what basis are people condemned to incarceration in the Trump concentration camps and lined up for eventual deportation? Read on.

Little noticed by the media, the Trump regime has been busy changing the rules to make previously protected groups of immigrants into groups eligible for concentration camp incarceration and eventual deportation. Unilateral rules changes make ever more people eligible for concentration camp incarceration and eventual deportation, people who had been perfectly legal and had followed all the rules.

These rules changes are often coupled with propaganda (and sometimes overt lies) painting the target group as lawless and dangerous.

For example, Trump’s demonstrably false debate assertion declaring that Haitians in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats was just a stage-setting for the regime’s summary revocation of Haitians’ TPS (Temporary Protected Status). TPS was revoked on the bogus grounds that the situation in Haiti had suddenly improved. The revocation of TPS intentionally converted 350,000 Haitians into deportable “illegal aliens”. Predictably, if you only watched Fox News or other right wing media, you might not be aware of the rules changes or the controversy surrounding them. Instead, you were left with the meme of criminal, violent, subhuman meme of Haitians “eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs”. That’s how propaganda works.

Remember, of course, that during Trump’s first term Haiti was listed first and foremost among his “sh_thole countries” (and that all of those countries are largely populated by black or brown-skinned people).

On Sunday, March 8, tucked away as a secondary headline (embedded in another article) at the bottom of A3 in the Spokesman was a short article entitled “Appeals court rules U.S. cannot end protections for 350,000 Haitians”. It is guaranteed that if the reader was not already aware of Trumpian immigration rules changes they would have missed the article. The article discussed the Federal Appeals Court ruling (2-1) further blocking the Haitian TPS revocation. Undoubtedly, the regime will appeal in the hope of the Supreme Court green lighting the vendetta against Haitians which Trump has nurtured with dogged persistence since 2017.

Obviously, Trump’s claim to be protecting us with deportation of “violent criminal aliens” is a bald-faced lie meant to obscure his racist deportation agenda. At least 75% of the people ICE is holding in its growing concentration camp system have no criminal history. Moreover, a growing percentage of the total number of “detainees” were made “illegal” by unilateral, precipitous rules changes. (The regime is actively trying or has succeeded in revoking Temporary Protected Status for refugees from at least seven countries.)

Stay informed and aware of what is being done by the Trump regime in our name to previously entirely “legal” immigrants. Do not look away. Honor the memory of the three U.S. citizens killed by ICE and CBP, Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti. In the midst of all the other head-spinning distractions, Trump’s Iran War, the Epstein files, and so forth, let us not lose track of the cruelty of Trump’s efforts not just to close our borders, but to deport immigrants far beyond the few with an actual criminal history.

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry