Trump Targets Children to Distract from Deportation Failures
When political theater becomes reality, people in power use policy to oppress those they deem responsible for their failures
Fulfilling a promise from Tom Homan, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported a family with five children, four of whom are U.S. citizens, one is recovering from brain cancer. Without a power of attorney allowing children to be cared for by friends or family, the alternative for a migrant family with U.S.-born children is the foster care system. For parents, whether or not to deport as a family is simple.
While not a new practice and was seen during Biden’s presidency, family detentions are going mainstream under Trump because of the expected broad use of the strategy. In anticipation of implementing the administration’s plans, ICE is reopening facilities in Dilley, Texas, and Karnes County, Texas, and private prison facilities in five states have expanded their contracts with ICE.
Both Texas facilities have a long history of human rights abuses, including reports of women and girls being sexually assaulted, and the facilities lack proper medical care.
Immigration law in the United States provides far too much leeway for an administration to make unilateral moves that deny noncitizens their rights. Children, parents, and family members are routinely denied protections like due process under U.S. law. And despite all of the issues with the immigration policies of previous administrations, President Trump and his white nationalist staff have made targeting the children of immigrants a priority, more so than his last term.
Focusing on families follows the Trump administration ordering agents in February to track down hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the U.S. alone and have since been placed with sponsors, typically family members. Despite the continuous studies on the trauma this targeting inflicts on children, Trump’s policy advisors seem to salivate at the idea of harming migrants under the guise of “deterrence policies.”
The Trump administration is struggling to produce the mass deportation numbers promised largely because the operation they envisioned isn’t plausible. Detention space in ICE facilities is full and the agency is reportedly out of money. The administration's decision to stop the use of military planes for deportations and move migrants from Guantanamo back to the U.S. because of their exorbitant costs further highlights its struggles.
And in yet another sign of desperation, the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow him to end birthright citizenship based on a widely dismissed fringe theory.
Seeking accurate information from an administration heavily focused on expensive messaging (propaganda) and “flooding the news cycle” is difficult. However, the data to discredit much of what the administration claims is there. On Thursday, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin started making the rounds on social media and Fox News claiming the Biden administration was “cooking the books” on ICE arrests.
Rather than issue an official statement, she posted one on X:
“The Biden Admin was cooking the books on illegal alien arrest numbers, lying to the American people … [DHS and ICE] discovered that the Biden administration was *purposefully* misleading the American public by categorizing individuals processed and released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests,” said McLaughlin
What she fails to realize is that many of those “processed and released” resulted in migrants receiving court dates to present their cases after being arrested. It appears that this claim was made by someone in the administration who overlooked something, possibly intentionally, and no one has gone back to verify the veracity of such a claim.
“The previous administration directed illegal aliens to report to ICE offices for processing,” McLaughlin continued. “Instead of putting these aliens into detention and holding them until their immigration hearing, they were just released into American communities.”
She, of course, ended her rant with an attack on journalists. While I may have beef with bias in the news media, this is not that. It’s not being reported because what she says is a lie. She also ignores that migrants were more likely to be released under the previous Trump administration than they were under Biden.
“It’s telling what reporters have actually reported on this vs. those who bury it,” said McLaughlin.
While laughable, their failure to achieve some self-determined goal makes this administration dangerous. To spare themselves the embarrassment of failure, they’ll seemingly go to great lengths to prove their lies right. Failing to realize that they could never meet the moment behind the lies they created, they are now using federal agencies to target people exercising their right to free speech, citizens, and children to boost their numbers and distract the public.
After being caught padding their arrest totals in late February, the Trump White House is on the defensive. Because of this, it has begun targeting citizens for deportations to deflect from failing to deliver on mass deportation numbers as promised, the exorbitant costs of their plan, and the lack of support from the public.
On Wednesday, DHS claimed to have doubled the arrest rate under Biden. Despite the history of manipulating data, most major media outlets are taking these latest numbers as fact. While they may be accurate, the numbers suggest the Trump administration would be lucky to deport one million people by the end of this term. Again, another shortfall.
“In the first 50 days of the Trump Administration, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) has made 32,809 enforcement arrests. To put this figure into perspective, in the entire fiscal year 2024, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations made 33,242 of these at-large arrests.”
For the people in the Trump administration, the focus has always been to instill fear in and terrorize nonwhite communities. In this case, Latino communities. That part is working. Many noncitizens were already living in the shadows. The threat of untrained Gestapo-like federal agents and cops hunting noncitizens (and citizens alike), targeting them for deportation, only makes the situation markedly worse.
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