Extraordinary Cruelty, Ordinary Policy.

ICE raids are happening in cities across the country with Fox News, Kristi Noem and apparently Dr. Phil gleefully tagging along. Donald Trump announced that he wants to send tens of thousands of migrant detainees to Guantanamo Bay. Trump signed legislation that allows for the deportation of immigrants who have been accused of non-violent crimes. And garbage person Tom Homan has pledged to get around all sanctuary cities and states to purge the nation of all eleven million undocumented persons. Welcome to the jungle.

Trump’s vision is gut wrenching and dystopian. And there are a lot of people rooting for it. Even some people who you might otherwise not expect. To set the table for how complicated this narrative is, here is a snippet from a young man of color in the Bronx speaking to a reporter about deportations in his neighborhood.

“They’re taking our money. They taking our food stamps. They taking our jobs. They taking our streets over. And they bringing more police. And we don’t need police over here. We fine the way we are. Send them back! Take them back, Trump!”

This is what losing control of the narrative looks and sounds like and why brushing up on the facts is important. That’s a Bronx resident commenting to camera crews covering round ups in his neighborhood. It’s not Stephen Miller or Tom Homan, it’s a person of color who lives in an area being targeted by ICE as we speak. I offer this as a reminder that nothing is black and white and, as we’ll discover, oftentimes left-right narratives are both misguided.

One of the hard questions I posed to you all was what you were willing to do beyond #resistance, especially when it comes to immigration. For example, are you willing to shelter an undocumented person in your community who is in danger of being swept up by ICE? Easier said than done but an example of how I think we’re going to be tested. To illustrate how difficult and painful this is, I want to share some Unf*cker feedback that put me on my heels this morning as I was prepping for this piece.

“The hotline is launched. ICE has their orders. And today we watched in horror as two homes were raided in our neighborhood. I can’t stop it. I don’t know their immigration status. Now a family is in shambles and I am pretty sure the loud and proud MAGA neighbor with a ‘I voted for the FELON’ sticker on his truck called and reported them. I mean who else fucking would! Who the fuck could!? My husband told me he is scared they will come for him. We have documents ready if that day comes. But it is one week in. The lump in my throat won’t go away. ‘It will never happen,’ rings as the familiar excuse in my head as the silence is deafening. Tonight, I mourn for the families. I apologize for the misguided hate. I am mortified to be an American.”

It’s hard to know where and how to step in. So in just these two examples we have a person of color in a targeted neighborhood cheering on deportations, and a well intentioned person who wants to step in but is unclear as to what the right move is. It’s imperative that we get the narrative down and commit ourselves to learning the issue inside and out, because we’ve all been subjected to bad information from Democrats, Republicans, the mainstream media and even some well intentioned online pundits you may follow.

This is a difficult issue so the least we can do—if we’re going to share opinions on the matter or get involved—is to get it right.

Let’s start with some basics.

When immigration and deportation figures are tracked by the U.S. government they’re broken out in a few ways. The first concept is something that we’ve covered before: Net International Migration (NIM). It’s pretty straightforward: You take foreign-born immigration, subtract foreign-born emigration, add net Puerto Rican migration, and factor in babies born to immigrants in the United States and there’s our figure. NIM has been relatively stable over decades and it’s a good thing that we’re in positive territory, especially with declining birth rates and Boomers retiring. (We do still have jobs and roles to fill in this economy and society.)

Put another way, you’d rather be accepting new people than losing existing ones because it’s an indication of economic strength and political stability. Believe it or not.

So that’s the big headline number. NIM. And despite the rhetoric, it doesn’t move all that much, but I’ll pinpoint the moment it did and it might surprise you. Now, in terms of criminality, I’ll let you internet sleuths find the myriad studies that concretely demonstrate how immigrants commit crime in this country at much lower rates than citizens born here. Sorry white nationalist pricks. Dems the facts.

Now, speaking of facts and figures.

The figures to watch over the coming months are apprehensions, removals and returns. Removals and returns together comprise total deportations, which is the headline number that is usually reported. But the removal and return numbers tell the actual story. In terms of apprehensions, it’s important to clarify that these are the total number of people who are stopped or apprehended coming into the country and turned away. The vast majority of them are at the U.S./Mexico border. Then there is a fraction, and I mean fraction, that elude capture and sneak across undetected. We only know of these because we pick them up in census data down the road.

At any given time over the past few decades, apprehensions is the number that is reported by the media with expected biases. And it’s a garbage number. For example, in Obama’s last year in office, there were only 530,000 apprehensions. Contrast this with Bush’s last year in 2008 when there were over a million apprehensions. Depending on the media reporting bias, this can go two ways. And, in fact, it did.

Conservative outlets blasted Obama for the net reduction in apprehensions, claiming he was soft on immigration. On the surface, this seems right. I mean it’s almost half. But let’s think about what was happening at the time. In 2008, the U.S. economy had yet to collapse and Mexico was still suffering from the effects of NAFTA. As a result, more people were attempting to cross into the United States to find work. By 2016, Mexico had turned its economy around and the United States was still recovering from the financial crisis in 2009. So the reason the apprehension number was halved under Obama is because fewer people were trying to get here.

Nevertheless, conservative media was able to portray Obama as soft and the establishment liberal media claimed Obama was simply more effective. In reality, the delta between total apprehensions and returns—the people who try to enter the country and are turned away—contributes to the NIM figure but never tells the whole story. But the figure generally fluctuates between 100,000 and 200,000 and these are the people that enter into the system with cases before immigration officials and the courts.

Let’s stay with Obama and open up the narrative. Why then do so many, particularly on the left, refer to Obama as the “Deporter in Chief?” This is where the real story behind the numbers comes into play. So let’s go back to the two figures that truly matter. Removals and returns.

Looking at the final years of Clinton, Bush and Obama we see an interesting trend in terms of enforcement and deportation. In 2000, Clinton’s final year in office, the number of removals was around 188,000. These were undocumented people living within the United States that were rounded up and deported to their home countries for a variety of reasons. Overstaying a visa, in the criminal justice system or perhaps released from the system, wrong place/wrong time—for whatever reason, these people were forced to leave the country and existed outside of immigration norms ranging from temporary protected status, work visas, student visas, tech or agricultural work visas, etc.

In 2008, at the end of Bush’s second term, this figure essentially doubled to 359,000. This was the result of better tracking, more resources, a post-9/11 intolerance for migrants and Clinton-era policies that actually trapped more people inside the United States, which I’ll address in a moment.

At the end of Obama’s term in 2016 this figure was relatively stable at 344,000, but during his term it reached a high of 434,000. All told, Obama removed a million more people from the United States than Bush, and more than 2.2 million more than Clinton. That’s why he earned the nickname.

Of course, the interesting part about left-right narratives is that Democrats didn’t want this information to be known. But neither did conservatives. So the narrative that endured was the one surrounding attempts.

The fascinating thing about NIM historically is that it used to flow naturally. People would come, people would go. Seasonal workers would cross the border for harvest seasons and return home. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. That is, until Bill Clinton decided to criminalize existence itself.

In 1996, Clinton dropped two nuclear bombs on immigration: An Anti-Terrorism Act that targeted migrants in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing—which was carried out by an American born, white guy so it made no sense at all—and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. These laws created what I call Clinton’s spider web: If you stayed too long, you were criminal. If you left and tried to come back, you were a criminal. This was the Catch-22 that led to more immigrants overstaying their visas or just trying to evade border patrols entirely.

The result? People stopped leaving. Because why would you risk never being able to return? The natural flow of migration was replaced with a trapped workforce living in constant fear. Thanks, Bill.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. Everyone’s freaking out about Trump’s deportation promises, but here’s the thing—he’s actually going to have to work overtime and continue this pace to match Obama’s numbers. Yeah, you heard that right. The “Deporter in Chief” presided over more formal removals than any previous administration. But Trump wants to inflict maximum pain for maximum political gain and film the whole thing to strike fear into people’s hearts.

Now, if you hear anyone putting hard and fast numbers to what’s happening in real time right now and extrapolating them to draw a firm conclusion or projection, it’s folly. There are only a handful of numbers that we can stand behind and Homeland has already indicated that it doesn’t feel compelled to share data with the public.

So here’s what we know.

So far Homeland—which I’m using as a catch all for Border Patrol and ICE—has claimed 969 arrests and 869 detentions on a single day. Compared to the most recent reports of a benchmark day in 2024 under Biden, this represents a 3x increase in activity, presuming all of these people are going to be shown the door and not simply held indefinitely in detention centers. If this holds, which would be historic, then the Trump administration would be on pace to remove 1,800 people per week if they worked seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, which would put him ahead of Obama’s height of around 1,200. All told, this would equal around 650,000 removals compared to 435,000 under Obama in 2013.

Even still, this doesn’t come close to hitting the promise of deporting millions, which we basically said in the lead up to Trump’s inauguration. The logistics behind deporting millions are nearly impossible unless they commit to quadrupling their efforts over this current shock and awe campaign.

I’m not trying to downplay their efforts because they’re winning the optics war and also tearing apart communities, especially in blue cities and it’s only going to get uglier for a time. It will likely have the desired effect of chilling border crossing attempts as well but not as much as it will when Trump drives this economy into the fucking ground and Latin American countries suddenly look a lot better in comparison just like they did during the Obama years.

The migration policy institute tracks NIM throughout the world and the stats for the U.S. are really interesting.

Between 1970 and 1995, U.S. NIM was relatively stable with around 3 million net migrants every five years. Then it balloons starting in the mid-1990s after Clinton passed his draconian reforms. Even though it backed down post 9/11 the figures are still elevated in comparison at around 5 million over a five year period.

Where all hell broke loose under Biden was post-pandemic and during the height of Venezuela’s economic crisis.

Source: Migration Policy Institute

The fact that Biden didn’t address the root cause of Venezuelan migration and the surge in post-COVID asylum seekers due to multiple financial shocks in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and even China, was a catastrophe. Their only solution was to continue the Title 42 expulsions that started under Trump, to close off the border and appoint Kamala Harris as the informal border czar armed with a knife at a gunfight.

So if Biden didn’t actually open the borders...And he was just as tough on immigration as Trump...Our restrictive laws haven’t changed since the 1990s...Then why and how did Biden lose control of the border...And the narrative?

Great questions.

Revisiting the Washington Consensus

We can’t talk about immigration without talking about why people come here in the first place. Enter what is known as the Washington Consensus.

Essentially, we have treated our neighbors to the south as a commodity source—labor, minerals, timber, oil—rather than a partner. We helped build entire economies on the other side of the world while ignoring the potential of the LAC to be more than a strip mine or cheap labor pool. As we’ve said before, the Washington Consensus is a reflection of ethnocentric attitudes rather than a suite of policy prescriptions and what contributes to this persistent narrative that these countries are filled with unproductive savages who want to suck on the teats of our welfare programs.

The opportunities remain abundant and available if only we developed a more proactive (and less racist) attitude toward the region as a whole. And it looked for a moment during the global pandemic that we might wake up to the possibility of a true partnership; one that would ameliorate trade, reduce the flow of asylum seekers and reduce carbon emissions. Sadly, the Biden administration ignored the opportunity even as two largest economies in the LAC—Mexico and Brazil—moved further left and tried to open up more productive conversations throughout the region.

No one represents this antiquated, paternalistic view of the southern hemisphere more than Joe Biden, mind you. Biden could have moved to normalize economic relations with Venezuela and eliminate sanctions that only serve to strengthen Maduro’s authoritarian grip on the country and punish its citizens. Conservatives bristle at the thought of being nice to a dictator though so it’s a non starter. Allow me to pause for dramatic effect.

Yes, the conservatives under Trump want nothing to do with dictator Maduro while cozying up to Putin, Kim Jong Un, Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele and Viktor Orbán. So what’s the difference? Venezuela is socialist (even though it’s in name only) and they tell us to go fuck ourselves on a pretty routine basis. We’ll partner with murderous regimes the world over so long as they kiss our ring and kiss Trump’s ass. Anyhoo, the crisis in Venezuela is a direct result of our punitive sanctions regime.

This is what led to the surge in migration that led us to Trump. Because that was an actual crisis of our own design. Biden could have also finished what Obama started in Cuba by minting it as a trading partner and opened up the flow of tourism. He could have partnered more closely with new president Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and returning president Lula da Silva in Brazil to form an economic alliance that would reduce our dependence upon China. Instead, he did nothing.

This left a vacuum that is once again being filled by the bloviator-in-chief who is taking all the wrong lessons from the strongmen in the region and ignoring partnerships with our two most natural allies who also happen to be the biggest trading partners and biggest democracies. Now, Trump once again designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, repeated his intention to implement punitive tariffs on Mexico, threatened Colombia of all places with sanctions after they refused to take in a military plane of deported migrants who weren’t even accused of crimes in the U.S. or Colombia, and is celebrating the brutal economic policies of Milei in Argentina and authoritarian policies of Bukele in El Salvador.

Roundups

In terms of who is being targeted in these roundups, the biggest threat I can see is in the characterization of criminality and status under the Trump regime. This is where it goes from business as usual to dictatorship-style pogroms.

Consider the following scenarios.

One. About 35% of the deportations ordered over the past decade were for people who didn’t appear in court under a deportation order. This goes back to Clinton’s criminalization Catch-22. This person might be the breadwinner for a family here, sends money back home, is raising a kid born on U.S. soil and is generally a productive citizen. This person is also considered a criminal and might be rounded up by ICE.

Two. There are about 3 million people who have permission to work here but no path to citizenship. These people are here under programs that can be killed at the discretion of the new administration. These people are falling into Homan’s collateral damage roundups as we speak.

Three. They might be legitimate criminals. They could be a member of a gang, wanted for a violent crime here in the United States or perhaps in their home country. There are immigrants being targeted by ICE currently and historically that fall under this category and this is the pretense under which this administration and most of Trumpland media is operating. A few good eggs will be swept up with these bad eggs but that’s the price we pay for freedom, right? This kind of aligns with what the young man at the top of the essay said as well.

But let’s dig into this last part a bit more. Trump just signed the Laken Riley Act, which would require ICE to also detain undocumented immigrants accused of lesser, non-violent crimes. There’s a lot going on here. So let’s take the undocumented person wanted for a crime in their home country. Assuming we have extradition privileges and communication with the nation of origin, this is a pretty straightforward path. Right?

Unless, of course, this person is a political refugee wanted for protesting an authoritarian regime and demanding fair and open elections.

Huh. Right. I guess a proper procedure should be followed in this instance. Well, what about the undocumented immigrant that committed a crime on U.S. soil? Surely they should go.

Unless, of course, this crime involves your family and this person stands a better chance of roaming free once back in their home country rather than facing our criminal justice system.

Oh. Well, the Laken Riley Act adds a bit of clarity by adding non-violent crimes, which basically just helps weed out bad actors from our society. Surely there’s no harm in that, right?

Sure. Except for the part about only needing to be accused of a crime.

In theory, you could press charges against someone you hold a grudge against for taking your parking spot and suddenly they’re in the system and ICE is deporting them. So because you lost your parking spot at Trader Joe’s and decided to make a false accusation against someone you don’t know, and it turns out they’re undocumented but also the provider for an entire family working nights and weekends in jobs that Americans won’t fill, sending money home to El Salvador so the rest of their family can survive and not seek asylum in the United States, and one of the jobs is as caretaker to an old disabled lady whose kids don’t live in the same state so they pay this person off the books because her insurance doesn’t cover the cost of an aid.

And since ICE swept up this person and the old lady wasn’t notified, she goes three days without eating, gets dizzy, falls and hits her head and dies. The family in El Salvador falls into crisis and the entire family has to flee the country, but they’re too weak and hungry so they die in the muddy waters of the Darien Gap while the father rots in a cell in Guatanamo Bay. Everyone died in this scenario because you needed to park three spots closer to Trader Joes.

Point being, this level of nuance isn’t being discussed anywhere so it’s important for us not to add to the confusion by getting it wrong.

Before we go, we should reinforce some facts that we’ve covered before to demolish some right-wing bullshit.

You’ve heard it before: “Immigrants are flooding across the borders to take advantage of our free social services!” Let’s see which programs they’re talking about.

Do they get Medicaid? Nope.

Medicare? Nope.

Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF)? Nope.

Child care? Nope.

Adoption assistance? Nope.

Low Income Home Energy Assistance? Nope.

Social Security? Nope.

SNAP food benefits? No, no, no, no and no.

But get this—undocumented workers pay about $13 billion a year into Social Security that they’ll never be able to claim. They pay property taxes through their rent and sales tax on goods they buy. I’m going to address healthcare in an upcoming essay so what we’re really talking about is public education and school lunches. But here’s the deal: public schools are primarily funded by local property taxes. These are paid by homeowners or landlords. Tenants pay these homeowners for apartments and rooms or landlords for apartments and storefronts. So if an immigrant pays rent, it de facto covers the public school funding. See how this works? That just leaves school lunches.

On this point, I have to concede. Undocumented children receive school lunches and the federal government is on the hook for that. So let’s do a little math.

• The federal government spends $17.2 billion on school lunches.
• About 7% of students are undocumented.
• That’s $1.2 billion per year feeding undocumented children.
• The federal budget for 2025 is $7.3 trillion.

So school lunches for undocumented children represents….016% of the federal budget.

These right-wing talking points are garbage and the media outlets that repeat them are garbage outlets filled with garbage people. But as leftists we don’t get to pick and choose the facts that support our narratives either. Now look, I get it. We need to call out Trump’s cruelty, his racist rhetoric, his intentional trauma infliction. But we also need to be honest about something: The difference between Trump and Obama or Biden is in the cruelty of execution but not in numbers.

If we’re going to build coalitions and align on policy, the left needs to be morally consistent here. Yes, Trump’s approach is more brutal, more racist, more intentionally cruel. But the machinery he’s using? That was built and maintained by both parties. Clinton criminalized existence, Bush militarized the border, Obama perfected deportation, Biden used it all and then some; and Trump...Trump just took off the mask.

The real solution isn’t in who can deport more people or build bigger walls. It’s in recognizing that the entire framework is broken. We need to rebuild our relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean, create real economic partnerships, decriminalize immigrant status and stop treating people like political footballs.

But that would require admitting both parties have blood on their hands. And in Washington, that’s the one thing that’s still illegal.

Here endeth the lesson.

Image Source

• Peg Hunter, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr. Changes were made.