When the president announced in an ominous tweet two weeks ago that mass immigration raids targeting “millions of illegal aliens” around the country were imminent, those who would suffer the worst did not have the luxury of wondering whether or not he was bluffing. Days later, the worst fears of many were seemingly confirmed as news came in that ICE agents were mobilizing to carry out what they and the DHS chillingly referred to as the “family op,” which was expected to include predawn raids and arrests of up to 2,000 families beginning on June 23. Communities around the country were bracing for impact. And as news broke one day before raids were set to commence that President Trump had abruptly called for a two-week postponement, undocumented individuals, families, and communities were once again left with frayed nerves and an unshakeable fear that the nightmare was far from over.
Like the loud, brutal spectacle of physical home and workplace raids, these threats are a transparent, calculated effort to terrorize people, their families, and their communities.
As some have reasonably argued, this episode demonstrates, at best, a familiar hardline bargaining tactic that Trump is employing to get what he wants from congressional Democrats, or, at worst, a callous publicity stunt aimed at amping up Trump’s base as his re-election campaign launches in earnest. But it must be remembered that the people who are suffering as a direct result of his threats are not an afterthought in this horrid melodrama, nor are they merely collateral damage in some political battle playing out over their heads. They are the primary targets.
Trump’s advance alerts about the raids, which clearly compromised ICE’s stealth (and rushed) plans to carry them out, and his dramatic declaration of postponement just hours before the “family op” was set to commence, are telltale signs of what these headline-grabbing raid threats are actually about. Like the loud, brutal spectacle of physical home and workplace raids, these threats are a transparent, calculated effort to terrorize people, their families, and their communities.
Even if ICE doesn’t carry out this most recent round of planned raids, and even if such raids are ultimately less effective at deporting people than the Obama administration’s quieter, more bureaucratic methods of immigration enforcement, they are still, as far as the Trump administration is concerned, a “success.” Because it’s not about raw deportation numbers: It’s about the role terror plays in transforming immigrant communities into a permanent, hyper-exploited underclass.
This is why the announced postponement from Trump is by no means a crisis averted. The effect these raids—and the threat of raids—are designed to manufacture has already become part of our world. It hides in plain sight, beneath the mirage of business as usual keeping average citizens from having to confront the daily torture of people they live, work and worship next to. The terror is already here: It’s in people’s fearful goodbyes every morning, in the car parked across the street, in the footsteps coming up the stairs.
Spectacular cruelty
From the dramatic increase in workplace raids and arrests carried out by ICE to the vicious “zero-tolerance” policy that resulted in thousands of family separations, the Trump administration has made it clear that the cornerstone of its immigration enforcement policy is highly visible and spectacular cruelty. As reported in The Washington Post on May 13, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and ICE Deputy Director Matthew Albence have expressed their eagerness “to execute dramatic, highly visible mass arrests that they argued would help deter the soaring influx of families.”
Consistent with the cannon of Trumpism, these inhumane acts are, at base, a morbid “marketing strategy.” The cruelty is the point, but not because cruelty is an end in itself. As then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions summed up in one of his most harrowing speeches, the point of all this cruelty is to “send a message.” And this message is designed to sow terror among all members of a systematically subordinated underclass, further securing their subordination.
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The perverse desire to manufacture such terror echoes throughout the administration. “If you’re in this country illegally… you should be uncomfortable,” then-ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan told the House Appropriations Committee’s Homeland Security Subcommittee in 2017. “You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.”
For Trump and the larger systems of class and racial domination his administration serves, physically expelling undocumented people from the U.S. is ultimately less of a concrete priority than creating the conditions for millions of people to live in constant fear that they could be next.
As a result of this terror, plenty more undocumented migrants will leave or be forced out of the country: The number of immigration arrests, deportations and workplace raids is rising. As The Marshall Project reports, “voluntary departures”—or “self-deportations,” as Mitt Romney has described them—have also increased significantly under the Trump administration. Trump supporters have cited this increase as proof that the president’s immigration enforcement policy is working as promised.
But when Trump and his subordinates repeatedly and publicly stress the need to remove all undocumented migrants and “end illegal immigration,” they aren’t so much detailing the administration’s immigration policy as helping to enforce it. These words do more than they describe: They are air-born poison, making us sick and scared. Because, for Trump and the larger systems of class and racial domination his administration serves, physically expelling undocumented people from the U.S. is ultimately less of a concrete priority than creating the conditions for millions of people to live in constant fear that they could be next.
A life of exploitation and precariousness
This maximalist rhetoric becomes increasingly apparent the more we weigh the stated goals of Trump’s immigration enforcement policy against the concrete steps his administration has taken to enact it. If the presumed goal is to end illegal immigration while expelling as many undocumented people from the U.S. as possible, then history strongly suggests that Trump’s preferred means for doing so won’t work. The recent increase in workplace raids is a case in point.
There’s a reason workplace raids had seemingly gone away–until Trump brought them roaring back. It was in May of 2008 when Postville, Iowa, a factory town with a population just a nose above 2,000, bore witness to one of the largest ICE workplace raids in U.S. history, which resulted in 398 arrests. The town itself became a bleak monument to the era of major workplace raids, which seemed to have melted into history along with the Bush administration.
The devastation and outcry in the wake of the Postville raid was vast and surprisingly effective in turning the public against the Bush administration’s hardline approach. And over the next eight years, due in part to the catastrophe of Postville, the incoming Obama administration would end up taking a less public, more bureaucratic approach to immigration enforcement. Though it didn’t avoid them entirely, the Obama administration’s strategy focused less on physical workplace raids and more on I-9 audits, or “paper raids.” This strategy proved to be far more effective and publicly palatable than Bush’s Postville playbook: Obama, the “Deporter-in-Chief,” still holds the title for most deportations carried out during a presidential term.
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