Despite violent rhetoric from right-wing politicians and provocateurs scapegoating immigrants for the nation’s problems, U.S. policy itself is what drives conflict and migration, putting vulnerable, working-class immigrants in danger. In addition to dividing working-class people from uniting in the struggle against exploitation and global inequality, anti-immigration vitriol doubles down on punishing marginalized members of our communities while also diverting attention away from the true sources of violence, crisis, and discontent.
The Trump-Vance presidential campaign has promised to carry out the largest military-led mass deportation plan in American history. During the vice presidential debate, when the moderators asked Vance a question about this deportation campaign pledge, Vance said that America had to “stop the bleeding,” going on to explain that Biden and Harris’s supposed open border is leading to a fentanyl crisis in the United States.
He went on to claim that “criminal migrants” are an existential threat to Americans and that “illegal aliens” are driving down wages for American workers.
The truth is that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. For example, while Vance and Trump peddle the myth that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes and claim that unauthorized migrants are smuggling illegal fentanyl into the U.S., 91 percent of the seizures were from U.S. citizens, according to Border Patrol data.
Most of the fentanyl entering the country is smuggled by US citizens through official ports of entry. About 90 percent of the fentanyl seized at the border in recent years was at legal crossings, which unauthorized migrants avoid.
Additionally, immigration has had net positive impacts on the U.S. economy. Rather than drive down wages, as Vance and other far-right Republicans claim, a report from the Economic Policy Institute found that “immigration overall has led to better, not worse, wages and work opportunities for U.S.-born workers.”
In California alone, immigrant workers and business owners generate $1.1 trillion of economic output. In fact, current U.S. immigration policy wastes even greater potential benefits by depriving immigrants of their full rights as workers and granting employers too much power.
The far-right, however, does not let facts get in the way of fear-mongering. Before and after the vice presidential debate, Trump’s public diatribes against immigrants included false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pet cats and dogs, as well as promises he made at a rally in Aurora, Colorado to “send elite squads of ICE, border patrol and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country.”
At that Colorado rally on October 11, Trump exacerbated the hate and fear afflicting the Venezuelan community in Aurora by falsely claiming that “savage gangs” were ravaging the once peaceful town. He announced that upon taking office he would implement “Operation Aurora” at the federal level invoking the Alien and Sedition Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any non-citizen from a country that the U.S. is at war with.
History repeats
Trump and Vance are attempting to revive the playbook of the anti-immigrant and anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. Their calls for federally operated, militarized campaigns for mass deportation are reminiscent of Operation Wetback, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched on June 9, 1954.
This militarized effort to deport one million undocumented Mexicans—mostly focusing on California, Arizona, and Texas, but ultimately reaching cities far away from the U.S.-Mexico border like Chicago—was racist at its core. The term “wetback” was a horrible, yet common, racial slur used against working-class Mexican immigrants to disparage migrants as social burdens and criminals.
At the same time, in the 1950s, anyone who offered left-wing or communist political critiques of the government or society was denounced as un-American, subversive, and dangerous. A slew of undemocratic legislation was enacted that fused anti-communism with anti-immigration hysteria.
For example, the 1950 Internal Security Act gave the federal government the power to deport “aliens” who had ever admitted to or were suspected of having joined the Communist Party. In 1952, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 made possible the denaturalization of foreign-born citizens if they were found to have been “communist sympathizers.”
Historian Natalia Molina points out that “Anti-communist campaigns were often thinly veiled efforts to intimidate unionized workers.” Moreover, she argues that racist deportation campaigns “affected not only Mexican immigrants but other racialized groups as well,” such as Japanese Americans and African Americans.
Trump recently said that if elected he would use the military to go after “radical left lunatics,” further pointing to the joint revival of historically rooted McCarthyism and anti-immigrant panic.
The mass deportation campaigns of the 1950s broke up families whose members had different citizenship and immigration statuses. Working-class immigrants were subjected to arrest and detainment without due process. Citizens and employers were threatened with charges of “harboring” if they assisted an undocumented person.
When interviewed by Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes, Tom Homan, head of ICE during Trump’s administration, was asked whether it was possible to carry out mass deportation without family separation. Homan responded, “Families can be deported together.” Homan proceeded to explain that the MAGA plan for deportation includes deporting birthright citizens—children born in the U.S. whose parents migrated “illegally.”
History shows that anti-immigrant hate cuts across a range of urban communities affects citizens and non-citizens alike, and is not only linked to “the border” but rather can impact localities far into the interior of the country, like Springfield, Ohio. Trump and Vance want racist and classist hysteria to be the law of the land once again.
Became targets
Once Trump gained power, overwhelmingly law-abiding and productive immigrant communities became targets of increased repression and violence through executive orders on immigration, which called for the construction of a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the hiring of an additional 10,000 ICE officers and 5,000 Border Patrol agents, and a ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.
Trump’s executive orders also directed the Department of Homeland Security to pursue any non-citizen arrested for or suspected of having committed a deportable offense, “fugitive aliens” with prior removal orders, and anyone suspected to “abuse public benefits.”
Although deportees are treated as criminals, they do not receive the same due process rights in the immigration system that are provided in the criminal justice system. Many migrants are held for extended periods without the option for bail, and few have access to legal representation or a court hearing before being permanently removed by ICE.
This situation arises because deportation is classified as an administrative action rather than a criminal penalty. Furthermore, deportation disproportionately impacts people of color, particularly immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Migrant deportation is deeply linked to the idea that mass arrests for low-level offenses prevent more serious crime. In the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement agencies across the nation implemented “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” policing.
The Reagan, Bush senior, Clinton, and W. Bush administrations increased police department funding and added tens of thousands more personnel to police communities of color. The immigrants who lived in these communities fell victim to racialized policing, mass incarceration, and deportation. During the 1990s, the federal government started prosecuting immigration violations that were once treated as civil issues and began deporting a record number of immigrants with minor criminal histories.
An imminent risk
Trump’s election in 2016, and his seemingly pervasive presence in politics since, emerged out of this unsettling trend. Now, with Trump and Vance making another push for far-right control of the highest office in the nation, the risk of greater war and violence seems imminent. Far-right, Trump-supporting politicians have been amping up conflict with Mexico, threatening to unilaterally deploy military force to fight against cartels.
South Carolina’s Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on March 8, 2023, that the U.S. was planning to “unleash the fury and might of the United States” against Mexican cartels. Right-wing Republicans have been pushing for years to designate the cartel as terrorists to justify military deployment and declare war.
Ironically, U.S. policy facilitates weapons smuggling into Mexico from the U.S., fueling cartel violence that wreaks the greatest havoc upon Mexican people. Graham’s call for the violent destruction of supposed enemy threats encapsulates the far-right’s myopic opposition to gun control and international peacebuilding.
The U.S. approach to the so-called War on Drugs has not only unleashed greater violence in Mexico, but it has also fueled the migration that now Republicans rail against. Plan Mérida was enacted in 2008 through an agreement among the governments of the United States, Mexico, and Central American countries, primarily aimed at combating organized crime.
However, since its inception, the drug war in Mexico has escalated into a quasi-genocide, leading to significant loss of life due to armed violence, with most weapons smuggled in from the U.S.
Given how easy it is to purchase guns in the U.S., and the massive arsenal of weapons of all kinds available across the country, Mexican drug cartels use the proceeds of their sales to U.S. drug buyers to pay for guns to be smuggled from the U.S. to Mexico. Between 2016 and 2022, Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Relations found that 70-90 percent of traced firearms originated from and passed through the U.S.
When CBS News asked the Justice Department about these trends, a senior official confirmed that “We absolutely recognize the problem here that … the lion’s share of firearms trafficked to Mexican cartels are coming from the United States.”
Widespread regional violence resulting from this trend is one factor driving forced migration. Combined with the threat of U.S. intervention and military escalation, as well as the increased menace of mass deportation, the drug wars and the criminalization of immigrants directly attack Mexico’s sovereignty and the peace its people deserve.
Resisting racism
The right’s racist campaign against immigrants, particularly labeling them as inherently criminal through anti-immigrant policy and rhetoric, has made immigrants scapegoats for virtually all issues, from public safety to inflation to climate change and housing. An increasing number of Americans erroneously hold migrants responsible for the fentanyl crisis.
According to an analysis by the LA Times, social media posts attributing the drug’s increasing ubiquity to an influx of migrants surged more than threefold from December 2023 to January 2024. Hateful rhetoric and myths, alongside other harmful narratives depicting migrants as terrorists and invaders, are driving demands for states to deploy National Guard troops to the border—even from states as distant as Florida.
Reforming the immigration system needs to remain a feature of the nation’s immigration discourse and policy conversations, even as the right wing pushes the Overton Window further into retrograde cruelty and dangerous falsehoods. According to polling conducted by Lake Research Partners of 800 likely voters in battleground states, with an oversample of 100 Latino likely voters, the most compelling message overall for the Harris campaign was the following: “Harris will restore order at the border and modernize our broken system so it works for America. She also supports comprehensive immigration reform that includes an earned path to citizenship. Already she has helped protect undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens and doubled the number of asylum cases heard each week.”
Seventy percent of voters chose this message as a reason they would most likely support Harris, making it the top-performing message tested by the research group. It scored similarly high among Black (72%) and Latino (73%) voters.
Immigration scholar Adam Goodman, whose research focuses on America’s long history of deportation, asserts that “immigration officials have deported so many people, regardless of which party has been in the White House or has controlled Congress,” admitting that it is “tempting to say that the machine has operated somewhat autonomously.” However, Goodman argues that Trump’s administration “left no doubt that who is in power also matters.” In other words, the danger of a MAGA victory in this election cannot be underestimated or understated.
It was through fear that Trump gained power and used it to wage war against Black, Latino, and Muslim immigrants for four years. Through concerted fear campaigns, nativist policies, and anti-immigrant hate, the Trump administration created a constant feeling of anxiety in the immigrant community, chasing people into the shadows or out of the country altogether. In fact, heavy reliance on coercive self-deportation campaigns represented a key feature of Trump’s brutal policies.
Now is the time to fight back against the racist campaign of the extreme right against immigrants to move forward together and not take a single step back.
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