Trump’s war on migrants (Part I)

Fear and panic are overwhelming migrant communities across the U.S. as Trump seeks to dismantle a host of Constitutional rights—from birthright citizenship (the law that grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil) to due process rights (the right to a legal defense before being found guilty of a crime).

ICE agents and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are brutally rounding up unsuspecting migrants who find themselves dragged off to waiting unmarked vehicles and taken to detention centers in undisclosed locations, with no legal recourse. Worse yet, some find themselves on planes deporting them to prison in countries they have never entered before, often without their knowledge of their destination.

Meanwhile, their distraught families search for them in vain for days or weeks with no information of their whereabouts. There is no publicly available information about exactly who or how many have been “disappeared” because the Trump administration classifies it as a matter of “national security.”

These are true stories

Here are just a few of the thousands of stories emerging in the press over the last several weeks:

On April 14, an ICE agent was videotaped using a sledgehammer to smash a car windshield in order to detain Francisco Méndez, a resident of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Francisco, who is a Guatemalan immigrant, was dragged along with his wife out of their car by ICE agents, who claimed to be looking for someone named “Antonio.” Méndez, who has no criminal record, was in the process of filing paperwork to get asylum status in the US, a status his wife and 9-year-old child achieved two years ago.
Rosemary Alvarado, who has lived in the US for decades, showed up to a S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field office in Kansas after they sent her a letter of approval for a permanent residency interview. After agents asked her husband to leave the room, they detained her. All her other family members are US citizens. There are other cases of people being lured into such traps.
Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian woman who had been in ICE custody in Florida for two months, died after complaining of chest pains. According to Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.), the only Haitian-American in Congress, Blaise had been complaining for hours and was finally given some pills and told to go lie down.
Six other people have died in immigration detention centers in 2025, with numerous reports of medical neglect, overcrowding, sexual assaults, lack of water and food, and other forms of mistreatment. Krome detention center in Miami now holds 1700 immigrants—nearly 3 times its capacity. By late March the number of detainees nationally had increased to 48,000, a 21 percent spike since Biden left office.
At the Bluebonnet detention facility in Anson, Texas, dozens of Venezuelan men are imprisoned under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—ICE claims they are “terrorist” members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Many were detained by ICE for having tattoos that family members, as well as experts, say have nothing to do with gang affiliation. Ironically, many of those detained fled gang violence in Venezuela. Only a last-minute ACLU appeal to the US Supreme Court along with an emergency hearing before the federal judge who tried to block the first flights of detained immigrants to El Salvador prevented, for now, their deportation. But their fate hangs in limbo. “A Reuters drone recently filmed men in the yard of the detention center spelling out S-O-S with their bodies as a plea for help,” writes Mother Jones in a report about Bluebonnet.
Kiseniia Petrova, a Russian-born scientist who worked at a renowned Harvard lab doing cancer research, was arrested at Boston Airport in February and quickly bundled to a detention center in Louisiana. She describes her experience there as “a grinding machine,” “We are in this machine, and it doesn’t care if you have a visa, a green card, or any particular story. … It just keeps going.”
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student was snatched off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts by six plainclothes officers in hoodies and face coverings and immediately shipped 1,500 miles away to an “ICE processing center” in Basile, Louisiana. Rumeysa, who is from Turkey, is in the US on a valid F-1 student visa. In transit she suffered an asthma attack and was not permitted to contact a lawyer. She was targeted, along with many other students, for expressing sympathy with Palestinians in Gaza. Her “crime”? She cowrote at Op-ed in the campus newspaper calling on the University to divest from companies with ties to Israel. Her deportation has been temporarily halted by a Massachusetts judge.
Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian Actor who travels frequently between Canada and the US, was detained for two weeks based on a minor paperwork error in her initial Visa application. This is part of her description of her experience:

I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.

For two days, we remained in that cell, only leaving briefly for food. The lights never turned off, we never knew what time it was, and no one answered our questions. No one in the cell spoke English, so I either tried to sleep or meditate to keep from having a breakdown. I didn’t trust the food, so I fasted, assuming I wouldn’t be there long…..

Then they moved me to another cell — this time with no mat or blanket. I sat on the freezing cement floor for hours. That’s when I realized they were processing me into real jail.

I was told to shower, given a jail uniform, then fingerprinted, and interviewed. During one of the interviews, I begged for information.

“How long will I be here?”

“I don’t know your case,” the man said. “Could be days. Could be weeks. But I’m telling you right now — you need to mentally prepare yourself for months.”

Mooney describes the detention center she was shipped to in Arizona as having 30 women to each cold room, with fluorescent lights shining 24-7, inedible food, hand towels for showering, ill-fitting uniforms, men’s shoes, and insufficient blankets.

“To put things into perspective,” she writes, “I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family, and even politicians advocating for me. And yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks. Now imagine what this system is like for every other person in there — people who don’t have my privilege.”

White nationalism and Trump

Moreover, the racism woven through Trump’s agenda is often breathtaking, as he regularly employs the bigoted tropes of white supremacists and fascists. At a rally last year, he called undocumented immigrants “animals” and “not human.”

At a different campaign stop last year, Trump said of immigrants,

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

That statement is eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s claim of the “blood poisoning” of immigrants in Mein Kampf.

In contrast, Trump has embraced ultra-wealthy and white supremacist foreigners who might wish to migrate here. Of the 140 executive orders he has signed in his second term, one offers a “gold card” to rich non-citizens willing to pay $5 million to reside legally in the U.S.

Another order designated white South Africans as “victims of unjust racial discrimination” by the post-apartheid regime and directed U.S. officials to fast-track processing them as refugees. Two months later, the first 60 Afrikaners are scheduled to arrive in the U.S. with a welcoming ceremony, even though most asylum applications can take years to process.

Trump has made clear he wants to rid the country of all Black and Brown migrants—even offering a free one-way airline ticket and $1,000 to those willing to self-deport.

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced she was “vacating” Temporary Protective Status for Venezuelans, she repeatedly called migrants “dirtbags“.

Mass deportations

Along with sending troops to the U.S.’s southern border, Trump’s primary focus has been on mass deportations—upending long-standing legal protocols, which were already skewed against those who are poor, especially Black and Brown migrants.

There are many ways for non-citizens to find themselves in the Trump administration’s cross hairs:

Overstaying a visa, even while awaiting the government’s decision for an asylum application.

Neri José Alvarado, for example, is a Venezuelan asylum seeker in Texas with a hearing date set for February 13. Just days before the hearing, ICE agents detained him as he got into his car to drive to work. He told the agents that he had an asylum hearing in a few days, but they brought him to the Bluebonnet Detention Facility anyway. He missed his asylum hearing while in detention.

Wearing “high end urban streetwear” or tattoos, which Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials often (wrongly) declare as “proof” of gang affiliation.

The Trump administration instructed DHS agents that Venezuelans “dressed in high-end urban street wear”—especially jerseys featuring the Chicago Bulls or basketball icon Michael Jordan—could denote affiliation with Tren de Aragua. ICE agents accused Alvarado, above, of having a gang tattoo on his leg. But it was a rainbow ribbon made of puzzle pieces, which he had in honor of his autistic brother. And as the New York Times reported, “In one instance, a man who was deported was accused of having a crown tattoo that officials said proved his membership, but his lawyers claimed that the tattoo was in honor of the man’s favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. Another migrant got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to commemorate the death of his grandmother.”

Having a “criminal record,” for violations as small as a misdemeanor traffic ticket.

Nineteen-year-old Ximena Arias-Cristobal, a college student in Georgia who had been living in the U.S. since she was a toddler, was pulled over by police after she illegally turned right at a red light. Her father was arrested two weeks earlier for going 19 miles over the speed limit. Both are now being held at the same detention facility. Neither has a prior criminal record.

Having attended a pro-Palestine event or protest.

Trump, and Biden before him, have used charges of “antisemitism” against all pro-Palestinian protesters to justify violently cracking down and expelling students who had taken part in opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Trump has ratcheted up punishment to detention and deportation, using the Cold War era “Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952″—which allows the State Department to deport non-citizens who it deems pose a threat to “U.S. foreign policy.” This was a key tool used in the persecution and deportation of communists during the McCarthy era, which for good reason has been likened to the witch hunt against pro-Palestine activists today.

In the first and most publicized detention (followed by numerous others), ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil on March 8 outside his apartment building without a warrant. He has not been charged with any crime but is targeted for his role in organizing protests at Columbia University while a graduate student.

Although he had a Green Card, the State Department revoked his student visa, making him eligible for deportation. He remains in a detention center; he was denied a temporary release to attend the birth of his first child in April.

In an interview last year, he made his political views clear: “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.” Khalil famously wrote a letter from his Louisiana detention facility, “I am a Palestinian political prisoner in the U.S.”

Having Temporary Protected Status revoked

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a legal immigration status reserved for migrants who would face life-threatening or dangerous conditions if they were returned to their home country. In March, the DHS revoked TPS for 532,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who had arrived in the U.S. since 2022—which would make them eligible for deportation a month later. A judge temporarily blocked this order in April, and it continues to work its way through the courts.

So, when Trump blanketly refers to migrants as “criminals,” this is only because his administration has arbitrarily dictated so.

Arrogance and incompetence

The Trump administration has claimed that it has the legal right to conduct mass deportations without due process by invoking the 1789 Alien Enemies Act. This was intended as only to be invoked during a declared war or after being invaded by another nation.

This Act has only been used three previous times in history—all during wars—and was last used to round up and confine 120,000 people of Japanese descent in concentration camps during World War Two.

The “genius” behind Trump’s “Alien Enemies Act” strategy is Stephen Miller, the white nationalist White House deputy chief of staff. As Miller explained to right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk in a September 2023 interview: The Act “allows you to instantaneously remove any noncitizen foreigner from an invading country, aged 14 or older,” adding, “That allows you to suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding.”

Although the U.S. is not currently at war with Venezuela, the Trump administration argued that it had proof that all the Venezuelans being deported were members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang who the Venezuelan government had sent to the U.S.

Both these claims have been proven false. As the Guardian reported,

In the days that followed. [the deportation to El Salvador], news organizations began publishing details of the operation, including that some of the Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador were not members of the Tren de Aragua gang…

Despite the Trump administration claiming that alleged Tren de Aragua members were sent by the Venezuelan government, an intelligence document suggests otherwise. Reporting from the New York Times last Thursday revealed that the CIA and the National Security Agency contradict Trump’s claims of the Venezuelan government’s ties to the Tren de Aragua gang, raising questions about Trump’s invocation of the war-time Alien Enemies Act.

Instead of retreating after this embarrassment, Trump’s justice department dug itself in deeper, and announced a criminal investigation, claiming that the “deep state” had leaked “false information” to the New York Times.

But by then the March 15 deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador had already exposed the utter incompetence of the Trump administration. In its zeal to rush the Venezuelans out of the country, officials had mistakenly sent eight female prisoners to the all-male prison in El Salvador, requiring their immediate return to the U.S.

On March 15, that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father of three married to a U.S. citizen was also mistakenly deported to El Salvador. The Trump administration initially admitted that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant, was deported because of an administrative error, ignoring a judge’s 2019 ruling that he couldn’t be sent back to his native El Salvador, because his life could be in danger from local gangs there.

Trump has since refused to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., insisting that he is actually a gang member—based on a photoshopped picture of tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s hands.

In so doing, Trump has set off a showdown with the Courts.

Part Two of this article will follow soon.

Paul D'Amato

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Paul D'Amato is the author of The Meaning of Marxism and was the editor of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide array of topics.