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immigration detention
To Fight Trump’s Mass Deportations, We Need Local Efforts to Defend Immigrants
The best way to resist enforcement activities, we learned under the first Trump administration, is for citizens and noncitizens to claim one another as fellow community members, and then work together.
Dec 22, 2024
Throughout his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised mass deportations of the more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Those of us on the ground who work with immigrants are apprehensive about what that will look like and how we can respond.
During the first Trump administration, I was part of local organizations working on issues of migrant detention and deportation defense in Washington state and writing my dissertation on interior immigration enforcement. I was also active with migrant justice efforts during the Obama presidency.
Some of what happened during these periods involved large-scale raids that made national news. Such operations are expensive to plan and orchestrate, are highly disruptive to the communities where they occur, and provoke opposition. This can happen again. However, much more immigration enforcement took place quietly, through the intensive targeting of specific locations such as workplaces, highway stretches, bus stations, and apartment complexes where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents believed there may be undocumented people.
Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.
At any point, ICE could round up those immigrants under remote surveillance, through GPS devices and mobile phone apps, who now number 181,000 people. ICE agents also capture people as they are being transferred from police custody, jail, or prison. Traffic stops, domestic disputes, and altercations with neighbors lead to deportation. This kind of enforcement is the most efficient for ICE; it has made up more than 90% of ICE arrests under President Joe Biden and will likely happen even more aggressively under Trump.
The Trump campaign drummed up support through scapegoating “migrant crime.” This is a pretext for mass deportations. There is no evidence of a crime wave related to immigration, but tying together the criminal justice system and immigration system becomes a way to ensnare people in the deportation dragnet.
The best way to resist these kinds of enforcement activities, we learned under the first Trump administration, is for citizens and noncitizens to claim one another as fellow community members, and then work together. Much of this work happens at the local level.
For example, Pacific County Immigrant Support was formed in 2018 in a rural county in Washington state that has voted for Trump for the past three election cycles. Citizen and noncitizen community members tracked ICE arrests and organized community protection.
Group members accompanied immigrants to ICE appointments and court dates, raised funds for immigration attorneys and bonds, and provided know-your-rights training to immigrants and employers of immigrants. They also sat down with the local sheriff to ensure that he wasn’t collaborating with ICE.
What is needed now is a blossoming of local-level efforts to defend immigrants. In Washington state this includes the Washington Immigration Solidarity Network hotline for reporting deportation events and connecting people who are facing enforcement with resources. The Fair Fight Bond Fund provides bonds to immigrants in detention while going through their proceedings in Washington, as does the National Detention Bond Fund at the national level.
Washington’s Shut Down the NWDC (Northwest Detention Center) campaign in Tacoma, and other campaigns nationwide coordinated through the Detention Watch Network, have exposed deadly and inhumane conditions in migrant detention centers, gathered support for people to survive detention, and strategized to shut down the detention infrastructure.
There is evidence that shutting down detention centers is an effective strategy for restraining immigration enforcement. There is also evidence that ICE enforcement was not able to function as smoothly in jurisdictions regulated by sanctuary ordinances. Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.
The first Trump administration was vengeful towards those who thwarted its restrictionist agenda. Trump revoked some federal funding to sanctuary cities. As I have documented in my scholarship, ICE agents also targeted activists, community organizers, journalists, and artists who spoke out against them.
The Biden administration refused to place restraints on ICE’s capacity to repress activist immigrants. Also during the Biden administration, the revanchist mantle was passed to state governments, like Texas, which bused asylum seekers to sanctuary cities, prosecuted immigrants for trespassing, and punished border humanitarian organizations. We can expect more of this kind of thing.
That is why it is crucial that we build solidarity within our local communities and get ready to defend against the coming attacks.
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We Will All Be Casualties in Trump’s War on Birthright Citizenship
What Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the 14th amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S. might look like and what it would mean for all of us.
Dec 20, 2024
On December 8, President-elect Donald Trump sat down for an interview on “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. The interview covered a wide range of topics, but one that drew a lot of attention was his response to a question (more of a statement) that Welker posed. She reminded him, “You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one,” to which he responded, “Correct.”
When Welker asked him about how he would “get around the 14th amendment,” Trump gave a rambling, incoherent answer about using an executive order, mixed with an easily disprovable lie that the U.S. is the only country to offer birthright citizenship, when in fact many countries do. It is important to emphasize that all U.S. presidents take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and when Trump says he will issue an executive order abrogating the 14th amendment, this is a clear violation of his oath and an impeachable offense.
It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America.
I previously wrote about why we need to defend birthright citizenship against right-wing attacks. That article goes into depth about the 14th amendment, the fringe and absurd conservative theory saying it doesn’t apply to children of undocumented parents, the horrible dystopia that would be created by a Trump administration that attempted to deny citizenship to people, and the positive benefits of birthright citizenship.
Here, I am going to attempt to flesh out what Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the 14th amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S. might look like and what it would mean for all of us. It is important to remember that Trump rarely speaks in terms of policy specifics. Instead, he carelessly tosses out grandiose, vague ideas and leaves it up to his underlings like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to make actual policy out of them. Although Trump bluffs and lies frequently, he was very active on immigration in his last term, and there is no reason to think this second term will be any different.
Denial of U.S. Passports and Immigrant Petitions to Draw a Legal Challenge
I believe the most likely way that President-elect Trump would start his war on the 14th amendment would be to direct the U.S. Department of State to require that anyone applying for a U.S. passport provide proof that their parents had legal status when they were born. Inevitably, some people will not be able to meet this requirement, and their passport applications will be denied. This will draw legal challenges that will eventually make their way to the Supreme Court.
Another potential attack that Trump could make would be to direct U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to demand proof of parental status for any U.S. citizen who tries to petition for permanent resident status for their relative. If you are a U.S. citizen, you can petition for your spouse, child, or parent to obtain permanent resident status (a green card) by filing form I-130 with USCIS. Currently, the citizen petitioner only needs to show they were born in the U.S. to prove citizenship. Trump could add a requirement that they prove their parents were in lawful status when they were born. If they are unable to, then they will not be able to petition for their relatives to stay with them in the U.S.
The Supreme Court is stacked with right-wing, activist justices who have shown time and time again that they are perfectly willing to ignore the plain text of the law (in this case, the 14th amendment) if it suits their policy goals. There is a non-insignificant chance that they will ignore the text of the 14th amendment and upend over 100 years of settled law to rule by fiat that children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents are not granted citizenship at birth.
Of course, this is the goal of Miller, Homan, and the other anti-immigrant MAGA acolytes. They know that they are never going to get enough popular support for a constitutional amendment that would strip citizenship from children of undocumented parents. Their best hope is to draw a legal challenge and take their case to a MAGA-friendly Supreme Court in the hope that they will invalidate birthright citizenship through a court decision.
The Nightmare Scenario: Weaponizing ICE to Detain U.S. Citizens
The nightmare, dystopian scenario, which I touched on in my previous piece, would be for Donald Trump to direct U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to begin detaining people who were born in the U.S., but who cannot prove that their parents had lawful status when they were born. Think about how onerous of a requirement it would be to have to prove that your parents had lawful status when you were born. Most people from previous generations didn’t have any affirmative proof of citizenship, unless they naturalized. If your parents were born in the U.S., how can they prove their parents were in lawful status? What about their parents? Would you have to prove a chain of unbroken status dating back to the inception of the 14th amendment? It creates a potentially impossible standard in order to prove U.S. citizenship for anyone born in the U.S., let alone children with undocumented parents.
Let’s imagine the implications of a bad-faith Republican President like Trump aggressively challenging the citizenship of people born in the U.S. If someone is retroactively deemed to be a noncitizen, then they have likely been unlawfully present in the U.S. their entire life. Whenever they worked or voted in any U.S. election, they were doing so unlawfully. This would give ICE a way to detain virtually anyone that Donald Trump wanted to go after. Since this would apply to so many people, it could easily be used selectively against Trump’s enemies. It is worth highlighting that people in immigration detention suffer horrible conditions. People in immigration proceedings have no right to an attorney, and the government has substantial power to hold people in immigration detention without bond.
It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America. Any citizen who commits any kind of minor crime, or even requests a government benefit like food stamps, could suddenly face deportation if they can’t prove their parents had lawful status when they were born. There really is no bottom to how awful things could be if we lose the protection of birthright citizenship.
Although we cannot predict exactly how the new administration will go after the 14th amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, it is important that we stand against it at every turn, because if we lose birthright citizenship, the country we are left with won’t be one that we recognize.
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Report Exposes 'Systemic Abuse' at For-Profit Migrant Detention Centers in Louisiana
"These individuals have fled persecution and violence only to be thrown in 'civil' detention and left to fend for themselves in an abusive, profit-driven, and manipulative system."
Aug 26, 2024
A coalition of rights groups on Monday released a report documenting "systemic human rights abuses" at migrant detention centers in Louisiana and called for an end to the use of for-profit facilities by U.S. agencies.
The 108-page report, drawn from more than 6,000 interviews at Lousiana immigrant detention centers since 2022, was produced by Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Human Rights, the ACLU, the ACLU of Louisiana, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, and the National Immigration Project.
Louisiana has nine immigrant detention centers that together typically hold more than 6,000 people—second only to Texas. Eight of the nine are run by for-profit companies that have contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The report—which calls for these detention centers, which are under the remit of the New Orleans (NOLA) ICE field office, to be shut down—details a wide range of abuses including sexual assault, humiliating speech, medical neglect, and a lack of nutritious food and clean water.
"These individuals have fled persecution and violence only to be thrown in 'civil' detention and left to fend for themselves in an abusive, profit-driven, and manipulative system," Sarah Decker, a lawyer at RFK Human Rights and a lead author of the report, said in a statement.
"We've heard horrific stories over the last two years, stories that have been corroborated by extensive documentation," she added. "Our findings further support what detained people and their advocates have long demanded: the NOLA ICE jails must be shut down."
The New Orleans #Louisiana ICE Field Office (“NOLA ICE”) detains over 6,000 immigrants each day, more than any other state in the U.S. but Texas.
Our new human rights report shares first-hand accounts from detained people of abuse and degrading conditions in NOLA ICE jails,… pic.twitter.com/w63e7zCKaj
— Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (@RFKHumanRights) August 26, 2024
Many of the interviews with the rights groups were conducted as part of initial legal screenings with detainees seeking representation. The work revealed widespread "inhumane treatment" at the nine facilities, including prolonged solitary confinement and the extended use of restrictive five-point shackles.
The report says the centers' food is insufficiently nutritious and cites instances of it being contaminated by rats or cockroaches. Authorities there often deny detainees access to menstrual products and key medicines, it says.
The report's authors argued that some of the abuses qualified as torture. "In some instances, the abuses that detained people describe firsthand in this report meet the definitions of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under international human rights treaties to which the United States is a party," they wrote.
The nine facilities are in rural Louisiana, far from New Orleans. One is connected to an airport—the only such ICE facility in the country, making it a key hub for the federal agency as it moves detainees around. The network of Louisiana facilities the result of what the report authors called an "explosion of immigrant incarceration" in the state that took place in the late 2010s.
Four of the nine centers are run by Geo Group, a Florida-based multinational prison firm that has long been the target of activist rage and reform efforts, which the Biden administration hasn't successfully delivered. The company reported $2.41 billion in revenues for 2023. Four other facilities are run by LaSalle Corrections, which operates facilities across the U.S. South, while one is publicly run per an ICE contract with a local sheriff's office.
The report says that the "for-profit incentive" leads to "a dangerous combination of overcrowding and understaffing" as the firms seek to pad their bottom line. A woman at one detention center said she was not fed enough so she had to buy extra items at its commissary, where a bag of Doritos cost $9. Meanwhile, detainees who took jobs at the center earned as little as $1 per day.
The rights groups' statement calls for an immediate investigation into abuses at facilities under NOLA ICE's remit. In fact, the detention centers have already been the subject of a federal oversight investigation, initiated in December 2021, but no findings have yet been released publicly, an ACLU spokesperson told Common Dreams.
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