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immigrant rights
Unpacking Trump’s Immigration Lies
The narrative that the Democrats should counter with is that immigration is a good thing, but right-wing policies create illegal immigration by pushing people out of their home countries and denying them a legal way to come to the U.S.
Mar 11, 2025
On March 4, 2025, President Donald Trump gave a speech to a joint session of Congress. Although this speech may be labeled by some as a State of the Union address, it is actually not a State of the Union address because those are delivered by a president in January or February after they’ve completed their first year in office.
Of course, a president is free to speak in front of Congress anytime he or she wants to, but I think a fake State of the Union address that is filled with lies spewed out by a man who was convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, whose company has been found guilty of fraud, who ran a fraudulent university that defrauded its students, who filed numerous fraudulent lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, and who orchestrated a multi-state fraudulent elector scheme to stop the 2020 election certification, is very on brand.
It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them.
Donald Trump tells lies like a fish swims through the water, but some of his most egregious lies are related to immigration and immigrants. Perhaps his most notorious and dehumanizing lie about immigrants was about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs. However, his speech to Congress on March 4 contained numerous lies about immigration that are worth debunking. I cannot possibly write about all of the lies contained in his speech, but I want to highlight the ones that stood out to me, and that I can help provide important context on.
Immigration Lie No. 1: Lowest Number of Border Crossings
Within minutes of starting his speech, Trump shot out the following lie: “Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border, and I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country, and what a job they’ve done. As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded, ever. They heard my words, and they chose not to come.” This is actually multiple lies tied together to push a false narrative, which again, is very on brand.
First, the military was already deployed to the border by former President Joe Biden in 2023. It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them. Second, the Border Patrol was already at the border, because that’s their entire mission. His lie makes it seem like the Border Patrol wasn’t there before, but that he, in his infinite wisdom, sent them to the border and now they are stopping people from crossing. Third, the U.S. is not being invaded at the southern border. An invasion implies a foreign army or some other militant group, but we know that the people who come to the border are increasingly families and other desperate people seeking help, many of whom are fleeing from the effects of decades of right-wing U.S. policy. Characterizing these people as invaders is not only extremely loathsome, but it is just plain incorrect, and it serves the greater narrative that Trump is pushing that we are under attack.
Remember, the purpose of framing migration at the southern border as an “invasion” is to build support for himself and his brutal, militarized immigration policies that will cause suffering to a vulnerable group of people who need help, as well as enriching his private prison corporate campaign donors and increasing the power of the federal police state, which he will almost certainly use for nefarious purposes.
If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it.
Fourth, Trump claims that as a result of his actions, “illegal border crossings” dropped to the “lowest ever recorded” in February 2025. Of course, he doesn’t cite to a specific number, so it’s impossible to know what exactly he is referring to when he makes this claim. The best guess is that he is referencing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s February 2025 border “encounter” numbers, which haven’t even come out yet. Because the number hasn’t been released, we can’t definitively fact check him, but there are months from the past that already have lower numbers than what’s been reported by news agencies for February 2025. However, the bigger issue is that Trump is conflating “border crossings” with border apprehensions. This is an important distinction. The number of arrests decreasing doesn’t mean that fewer people tried to cross the border illegally: it just means fewer people were caught.
It’s also important to understand that many of the illegal crossings were people crossing the border and then immediately turning themselves in so they could claim asylum. If we had a well-functioning immigration system, there would be a way for people to come to the border, claim asylum, do their credible fear screening, get a background check, and then be legally paroled into the country to pursue their asylum claim. This is what the CBP One app was designed to facilitate, but it was woefully inadequate. Instead, the only practical way for most people to claim asylum was to cross illegally and then turn themselves in. The status quo before Trump was already a failure in our immigration system, caused by a lack of funding and the right-wing policy that treats asylum-seekers like an invading army.
To make matters worse, one of Trump’s first executive actions after the inauguration was to cancel the CBP One app, and completely suspend asylum at the border. Suspending asylum is not only illegal, but it will cause people to cross the border and disappear into the interior instead of crossing the border and turning themselves in to start the asylum process. Trump is pointing to the lower number of arrests and lying to you by saying that illegal crossings are down, when in reality, he has likely just pushed more of them into the shadows.
The best way to reduce illegal border crossings is to: 1) give people pathways to come to the U.S. legally; and 2) stop the right-wing policies that disrupt living conditions in the countries to the south of us that cause people to flee and seek refuge in the U.S. Trump wants to push the narrative that immigrants are invaders and the best way to stop them from crossing the border is with walls and militaristic border policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Immigration Lie No. 2: Insane Asylums
The next immigration lie from Trump is that under the Biden administration, there were “…hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month, and virtually all of them, including murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and people from mental institutions and insane asylums, were released into our country.” I’m not going to spend much time on this, but this is false. He previously said it was millions of people, so he can’t even get his story straight, but this has been debunked numerous times. This is one of his favorite immigration lies, and I am sure he will keep repeating it for the foreseeable future.
Immigration Lie No. 3: Gold Card
Trump briefly touched on the so-called “gold card” he had announced recently. “With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the Gold Card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship. It’s like the green card, but better and more sophisticated.” He says they have developed this “in great detail” but there is actually no detail as to how this would work. It appears that he is saying that people would be able to buy permanent residency by paying $5 million dollars, but that would have to be enacted by Congress because the president cannot create new green card categories. Also, there is already an EB-5 investor green card, that actually requires investment in a U.S. business and creation of jobs, whereas the “gold card” apparently doesn’t actually require that any U.S. jobs be created. He is lying to the American public by implying that rich people will create jobs in the U.S. if we allow them to just buy their way into the country.
Remember when they called former President Barack Obama a tyrant because he tried to help Dreamers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)? DACA is well within the purview of presidential authority because it is simply prosecutorial discretion coupled with employment authorization. I wonder if the GOP will make the same critique if Trump illegally creates a new category of permanent residency that he admits will allow Russian oligarchs to effectively buy U.S. citizenship. He also said of the gold card holders, “They won’t have to pay tax from where they came, the money that they’ve made, you wouldn’t want to do that.” Since he doesn’t have the authority to suspend tax laws in the home countries of these people, this is clearly a lie, or possibly just incoherent rambling.
Immigration Lie No. 4: 21 Million People Poured into the U.S.
Trump claimed that, “Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States.” Not only does this use dehumanizing language, likening people fleeing from desperate situations to some kind of flood, but it’s completely incorrect. The narrative that the Democrats should counter with is that immigration is a good thing, but right-wing policies create illegal immigration by pushing people out of their home countries and denying them a legal way to come to the U.S.
Immigration Lie No.5: The Dangerous Immigrant
Trump’s last major immigration lie was the “immigrants are dangerous” narrative that he has been poisoning American discourse with for nearly a decade. He pushed this lie by making a spectacle out of the deaths of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray and cynically using their families as political props. This exploitative appeal to emotion is meant to obscure the basic fact that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crime at a lower rate than U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens are the primary smugglers of fentanyl into the U.S. through ports of entry. Statistically speaking, if you were walking down the street and there was a U.S. citizen walking toward you from one direction and an undocumented immigrant walking toward you from the other direction, you’d be safer if you walked toward the undocumented immigrant.
To bring it full circle, the ultimate irony is that Donald Trump is himself a convicted felon. If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it. He would have you believe that immigrants are a threat to public safety, while he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths due to his Covid-19 mismanagement, responsible for freezing USAID funding that will lead to thousands of deaths around the world, and many more.
Every single thing that Trump says about immigrants should be scrutinized and not taken at face value because there is a good chance it is a lie or misleading. They say that every Republican accusation is a confession. We should all keep that in mind the next time Trump tries to fearmonger about immigrants.
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Trump’s Christian Nationalists Are Targeting Those the Bible Is Most Worried About
The battle of theologies taking place right now is anything but a new phenomenon, even if it’s at an inflection point, with life-and-death consequences for our democracy, Christianity itself, and those who are God’s greatest concern.
Mar 03, 2025
“There has almost always been an outright hostility that is shown towards people of the Christian faith,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on a podcast recently. He was talking with Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana lawmaker and president of the Family Research Council, about freedom of religion and the actions of the second Trump administration.
I have to admit that such a statement from this country’s third most powerful politician and an avowed Christian nationalist almost takes my breath away. Of all the people facing hostility, discrimination, and violence now and throughout history, Christians like Mike Johnson rank low on the list. Still, his comment is consistent with a disturbing religious trend in the country right now.
As an early act of his second administration, President Donald Trump has created an anti-Christian bias task force to be chaired by Attorney General Pam Bondi. At the same time, he’s slashing federal jobs and programs, threatening Medicaid, Head Start, the Department of Education, affordable housing programs, accommodations for the disabled, environmental protections, public health and safety, Social Security, and Medicare, while scapegoating immigrants and trans kids. It’s particularly ironic that Trump, Johnson, and the people with them in the top echelons of power are targeting those that the Bible is most concerned about—children, the poor, immigrants, the sick and disabled, women, the vulnerable, and the Earth itself. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the richest man ever to exist, who has built his wealth off exploiting the poor, goes so far as to call the impoverished “parasites.” After all, there are more than 2,000 biblical passages that speak about protecting the vulnerable, offering good news to the poor, stewarding God’s creation, and bringing judgment down upon those with wealth and power who make people suffer.
The Christian nationalism, exceptionalism, and white supremacy ascendant in Trump 2.0 has evolved from a long genealogy that has enabled an elite strata of mostly white Christian men to rule society and amass enormous wealth and power throughout American history.
Pope Francis himself has weighed in on the regressive policies and posture of the current administration. To America’s bishops he wrote, “The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all—as I have affirmed on numerous occasions—welcomes, protects, promotes, and integrates the most fragile, unprotected, and vulnerable.” Indeed, if any Christians are under attack right now, it’s those included in what liberation theologians have called “God’s preferential option for the poor” (the very creation for whom God has special love and care) and those standing up with and for them.
The Pope hasn’t been the only one to challenge the use of religion in the Trump administration. Since the inauguration, the actions of Johnson, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and others have been opposed and decried by people of faith of many persuasions. Remember Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde imploring President Trump to show mercy, especially to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, at the Inaugural Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral? Since her gentle reminder that the Bible teaches love, truth, and mercy, she has received regular and credible death threats on a daily basis, even as people have also flocked to the cathedral and other houses of worship in search of moral leaders willing to stand up to the bullying tactics of Donald Trump, the richest man on earth Elon Musk, and their cronies.
In response to Trump’s threats of mass detention and deportation, especially removing “sensitive sites” status from houses of worship, schools, and hospitals, while threatening “sanctuary cities” with a loss of federal funding, 27 religious groups have sued the Trump administration for infringement of their religious liberty to honor and worship God by loving their immigrant neighbors. Kelsi Corkran, a lawyer with the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and lead counsel in that lawsuit, said that plaintiffs joined the suit “because their scripture, teaching, and traditions offer irrefutable unanimity on their religious obligation to embrace and serve the refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants in their midst without regard to documentation or legal status.”
Faith leaders are coming together to support and protect transgender and nonbinary people now under attack by the Trump administration as well. My colleagues Aaron Scott and Moses Hernandez-McGavin recently penned an article for Religion News Service where they affirmed the dignity of LGBTQ+ people, even as Christian nationalists continue to build their influence and power by damning LGBTQ+ communities, all while claiming to protect children and traditional family values. “Gender diversity,” they wrote,
is a fact of human existence older than Scripture and is thoroughly attested to in the Bible. Jesus’ teaching about eunuchs in the Gospel of Matthew makes clear there are human beings who exist outside of the gender binary from birth, as well as those who live outside the gender binary “for the sake of the kingdom.” In the story of the Ethiopian eunuch’s baptism, the Book of Acts lifts up the spiritual leadership of gender nonconforming people of African descent. In the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah, God affirms not only the sanctity but the spiritual importance of people outside the gender binary, promising us “a name better than sons and daughters.”… The Talmud reflects this affirmation of gender diversity, recognizing no fewer than seven genders.
A Battle for the Bible in History
The battle of theologies taking place right now is anything but a new phenomenon, even if it’s at an inflection point, with life-and-death consequences for our democracy, Christianity itself, and those who are God’s greatest concern. The Christian nationalism, exceptionalism, and white supremacy ascendant in Trump 2.0 has evolved from a long genealogy that has enabled an elite strata of mostly white Christian men to rule society and amass enormous wealth and power throughout American history.
Such Christians have always anointed themselves with the lie of divine righteousness, while insisting that they are God’s chosen representatives on Earth. To maintain this charade, they have brandished the Bible like a cudgel, bludgeoning poor people, people of color, the Indigenous, women, LGBTQ+ people, and others with tales of their supposed sinfulness meant to distract, demean, divide, and dispossess. Therefore, if we are truly serious about confronting and countering the influence of such an authoritarian version of Christianity under Trump, Vance, Johnson, and their associates and followers, we must learn from how it’s been wielded (and challenged) in other times in history.
The roots of such idolatry reach back centuries, even before the founding of this nation, to the conquest of Indigenous lands by European invaders. In 1493, after Spain first sent its ships to islands in the Caribbean, Pope Alexander VI issued the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls granting all newly “discovered” lands to their Christian conquerors. Those church documents asserted the supposed “godlessness” of Indigenous peoples, smoothing over the ruthless colonial campaign of extermination being waged with a veneer of moral virtue. Centuries later, the idea of “manifest destiny” drew on the same religious underpinnings as the Doctrine of Discovery, popularizing the belief that white Christians were destined by God to control and therefore redeem the lands of the West. Manifest destiny not only valorized the violence of westward expansion but sanctified and made exceptional the emerging project of American imperialism. God, the argument went, had chosen this nation to be a beacon of hope, a city upon a hill for the whole world.
Today, while the Trump administration continues to unveil new attacks daily on what the Bible calls, “the least of these,” it’s important to remember the prophetic tradition of faith leaders of the past as well as the heroic, if often unnoticed, moral organizing happening now.
Alongside the dispossession and attempted extermination of Indigenous peoples, invocations of God and the Bible were used to justify the enslavement of African peoples and their descendants. Slaveholders cherry-picked passages from the book of Ephesians—“slaves obey your earthly masters”—and lines from other epistles of the Apostle Paul to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They ripped out of the pages on the Exodus from Egypt, huge sections of the prophets, and even Jesus’ inaugural sermon praising the poor and dispossessed from the Bibles they gave to their enslaved workers. Those “Slave Bibles” would serve as evidence of just how dangerous the unadulterated gospel was to the legitimacy of the slaveholding planter class.
They also twisted theology to serve their political needs by obscuring the common interests of enslaved Black workers and poor Southern whites. Readings of the Bible that claimed God had singled out Black people for slave labor helped the Southern ruling class turn many of the region’s majority of poor whites into zealous defenders of a system that relegated them to marginal lands and poverty wages.
After the fall of the Confederacy, the Bible remained core to the new racialized divide-and-conquer system in the South. Pro-segregationist preachers, no longer able to use the Bible to defend slavery per se, turned to stories like the Tower of Babel to claim that God desired racial segregation and abhorred intermarriage across racial lines. In 1954, Baptist preacher Carey Daniel wrote a pamphlet entitled God the Original Segregationist in which he explained: “When first He separated the Black race from the white and lighter skinned races He did not simply put them in different parts of town. He did not even put them in different towns or states. Nay, He did not even put them in adjoining countries.” The pamphlet was distributed widely by White Citizens’ Councils and sold more than a million copies.
Parallel to the theological justifications for the system of segregation that came to be known as Jim Crow, a national theology of industrial capitalism emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the Gilded Age, a prosperity gospel and its theology of muscular Christianity flourished among the white upper class. Amid the excesses of the Second Industrial Revolution, they celebrated their own hard work and moral rectitude and bemoaned the personal failings of the poor. When the economic bubble finally burst in 1929 with the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal ushered in an unprecedented era of financial regulation and labor protection, the nation’s corporate class turned once again to the church to fight back and put a stamp of approval on its free-market aspirations.
As historian Kevin Kruse writes in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, in the 1930s and 1940s, “corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase ‘freedom under God.’ As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most—not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as ‘Christian libertarianism.’”
The phrase “freedom under God” captures the tension at the heart of the long battle over the Bible in this country in which there have always been two diametrically opposed visions of freedom: on one side, the freedom of the vast majority of the people to enjoy the fruits of their labor and live with dignity and self-determination; on the other side, the freedom of the wealthy to control society, sow division, and hoard the planet’s (and in Elon Musk’s case, the galaxy’s) abundance for themselves. Poor people, disproportionately poor people of color, have always been on the front lines of this battle, as both canaries in the coal mine and prophetic leaders. Think of it this way in the age of Trump: As their lives go, so goes the nation.
Ordo Amoris and Other Theologies of the Day
This age-old debate is playing out in JD Vance’s recent statement about “ordo amoris” (or “rightly-ordered love“). Weighing in on cutting both domestic and global aid as well as scapegoating immigrants, the vice president wrote on social media, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Pope Francis offered a fitting rebuttal to Vance’s statement and the actions of the second Trump administration by summing up its deeply heretical nature and echoing a historic prophetic tradition of increasing importance again today. In his letter to the American bishops, urging them to reject Vance’s theology of isolationism and egotism, Pope Francis wrote, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
As this statement from the Pope reminds us, history is replete with examples of people from many religions who have grounded their struggles for justice in the holy word and the spirit of God, not just extremists trying to claim and justify their lust for power and avarice for wealth. Abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, student protestors, civil rights leaders, and various representatives of poor and oppressed people have insisted that divinity cannot be reduced to private matters of the soul and salvation. They have affirmed that truth, love, and justice, starting with the most vulnerable and marginalized, are what matter the most to God. They have insisted that the worship of God must be concerned with the building of a society in which all life is cared for and treated with dignity. In every previous era, there were courageous people for whom protest and public action were a form of prayer, even as the religious leaders and institutions of their day hid behind sanctuary walls—walls currently being torn down again to release forces devastating to the most vulnerable among us and to the planet itself.
Today, while the Trump administration continues to unveil new attacks daily on what the Bible calls, “the least of these,” it’s important to remember the prophetic tradition of faith leaders of the past as well as the heroic, if often unnoticed, moral organizing happening now. I return to my colleagues Aaron Scott and Moses Hernandez-McGavin who sum up the sentiment of many people of faith in our society today: “God’s love and truth are alive whether elected officials seek to legislate them out of existence or not. God’s Word continues to call for justice and mercy for all people regardless of the distortions of the Word by religious and political leaders obsessed with the worship of their own power. They are not God. And God will not, and cannot, be stopped.“
As they conclude, offering a message of hope and encouragement in these dark and dangerous days: “God’s liberating action will break through in this world through the steadfast work and witness of people of goodwill who are beholden to a higher law, who refuse to comply with unjust executive orders, who continue to defend the vulnerable against abuses of the powerful in courtrooms and school buildings and hospitals and in the streets across the country.”
The question then is: In the second age of Donald Trump, which side will you choose?
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We Will Protect Immigrants
With a budget working through Congress potentially allocating $350 billion for more detention facilities and to hire more ICE agents, our networks are ready to protect our families and neighbors.
Mar 02, 2025
When there were rumors that ICE agents were in the neighborhood, I called my mom to see if she could drive around and verify.
Such activities have been common to rapid response for years, even decades, as I learned when I first volunteered with immigrant rights groups that were organizing in response to the Bush administration’s workplace enforcement actions. Then, as now, people filled church basements with other community members for “know your rights” trainings. We were given red cards, which list the rights migrants have in the event that ICE detains them, to pass out to undocumented workers in our neighborhoods. Just a couple weeks ago, I attended a similar meeting in Oakland, California. We went over many of the same materials. The red cards are back. Also like years ago, the room was filled with that same intergenerational mix of people, including immigrants and their families, and people of faith.
But the difference this time is how everyone has cell phones. We exchanged information, not only contacts, but for websites. We set up text groups. And now, we communicate, not only in our neighborhoods, but with similarly minded people from around the country. In fact, while I live in California, my mother is in Wisconsin. Organizations, such as the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have facilitated these nationwide networks, mobilizing since President Donald Trump took office to host virtual and in-person trainings on themes such as how to monitor ICE if they appear in your neighborhood, why 287g agreements ought to be opposed, and what rights undocumented immigrants have.
Trump and Homan are not enforcing laws, but using the state to commit acts of violence that spread fear and terror.
Just as important as the knowledge we circulate is how our networks are built on the firm foundation of trust and care that exists within our neighborhoods. With a budget working through Congress potentially allocating $350 billion for more detention facilities and to hire more ICE agents, our networks are ready to protect our families and neighbors.
Besides concern for our neighbors and loved ones, we also see through the Trump administration’s bald-faced lies. The most ready-used lie, whether spouted by Trump himself, or his “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, is that they are going after “the worst first.”
Case in point of the administration’s mistruths on immigration enforcement was seen in the deportation of Luis Alberto Castillo from Venezuela, who had the misfortune to cross the border shortly before Trump to office, and then found himself in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Castillo was sent to Cuba because immigration officials believed that one of his tattoos indicated that he was a gang member.
So much for due process.
Similarly, reporting shows that nearly half of the people arrested in Chicago a few weeks ago had no prior criminal record. Homan legitimizes these as “collateral arrests.” The rationale, according to Trump’s enforcer, is that ICE is forced to go out into the communities to find people because sanctuary cities release criminals from jails if they are arrested.
Again, smarter minds should wonder about the veracity to the logic Homan uses.
Think about it—what kind of police force, when looking for a particular suspect, would do blanket arrests of people in an area?
Supporters of mass deportation are quick to note that if a person is in the country without legal status, then they are subject to arrest and possibly deportation. Technically, they are right, as according to the U.S. Civil Code, anyone who enters the country without authorization is subject to removal.
But let’s be honest—the real reason for carrying out “collateral arrests” and deporting people trying to make a better life for themselves is to carry out a political agenda. Even before taking over, Homan broadcast that Chicago would be targeted and made the initial focal point of Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Moreover, the call for mass deportation plays directly into the right-wing “law and order” fantasy, connecting nicely with the other heavy-handed approaches to crimes such as increasing penalties for minor infractions like shoplifting.
The reality is that people come to the U.S. for a variety of reasons, with many forces, such as poverty, pushing them across borders and making them ineligible for asylum. “To do it the right way,” as others would encourage, is not possible for most because of our outdated immigration laws. Dating from a time when immigration was minimal, our laws place unreasonable limits on the number of people who could legally come to the U.S. from neighboring countries, creating the millions of undocumented immigrants who now reside in the country. Adding insult to injury, our laws are broken just as much by employers as by their workers. As both political parties have passed the buck for years on figuring out a legislative answer to this reality, the average time an undocumented person is in the United States has become 16 years.
Such a scenario calls not for enforcing the laws, but for reforming them. Our immigration system, as it currently exists with so many responsible for its failing, is illegitimate. Trump and Homan are not enforcing laws, but using the state to commit acts of violence that spread fear and terror.
Fear empowers those who wield it by isolating and freezing those who feel it. But fear becomes courage when we come together to share our experiences, whether in church basements, living rooms, school libraries, or coffee shops. Given that it is in human nature to live, love, work, and play together, courage will beat back fear. So, when serious politicians return to public life and show their readiness to work on real policies to address our decades-long immigration crisis, we will be ready to work with them. Until then, we will fight; just ask my mom.
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