Washington, DC — As Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice stated earlier this week, “The Trump administration’s obsessive focus on immigration and related scapegoating and scare tactics are a way to justify a more sweeping set of power grabs and crackdowns that threaten Americans’ rights and liberties and even the basic separation of powers.”
That assessment was made after the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and subsequent ignoring of a federal judge’s court order to pause deportation flights and following their attempts to deport green card holder Mahmoud Khalil without due process and for political protest. Yet the past few days have demonstrated the Trump team is intent to go even farther in proving the point – with ominous implications for all Americans’ freedoms and liberties. Details include:
- Stripping U.S. citizenship from naturalized Americans: As Axios previewed this week, the Trump team has plans for “stripping U.S. citizenship from naturalized Americans.”
- Warrantless home searches: The New York Times reported, “Trump administration lawyers have determined that an 18th-century wartime law the president has invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant, according to people familiar with internal discussions … ‘It undermines fundamental protections that are recognized in the Fourth Amendment, and in the due process clause,’ said Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.”
- Lying about who they’re deporting: Numerous reports highlight that the administration’s assertions about the gang members being deported to El Salvador don’t hold up to scrutiny. As Bloomberg News stated, “Trump Deported Venezuelans Who Aren’t Gang Members, Lawyers Say,” or as Adrian Carrasquillo of The Bulwark put it, “Trump’s Deportations Rely on Tattoos—It’s Bullshit.”
- Focusing enforcement against long-settled family members and contributors: As we highlighted yesterday in a range of examples, there is a growing body of troubling stories that highlight inhumane detentions and unsparing deportations of parents, long-settled immigrants, and others far removed from the “worst of the worst” pledge of this administration.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice: “The Trump administration is using immigration law as a pretext to seize sweeping new powers that threaten the rights and liberties of both immigrants and U.S. citizens. From warrantless searches to weaponizing immigration enforcement to suppress political speech, the stakes are sky high, and Americans will pay a high price. And despite the Trump regime’s desire to make this all a fight about immigration, their overreach, cruelty and abuses are already stoking buyer’s remorse even through the lens of immigration public opinion.”
To the final point above, while topline support for deportations of public safety threats exists, support for mass deportations declines precipitously and the public recoils when it’s clear those targeted go beyond people with criminal convictions and are instead long-settled immigrants who lack status. In fact, when offered a choice between deporting or legalizing undocumented immigrants, the latter is more popular by a 2:1 margin among Americans (see this polling deep dive from America’s Voice here).
