by Susan LeMoine
When Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator to announce his first presidential candidacy, he also announced his view of immigrants from Mexico.
He told the assembled journalists that, “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…. they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Trump claims that this year’s ICE roundups are necessary to get these hardened criminals off American streets, but these raids have utterly failed to achieve the stated goal.
Just 7 percent of the people arrested in these raids have past convictions for violent crimes such as assault, robbery or homicide. In contrast, during President Biden’s last year in office, almost two-thirds of those arrested by ICE had a criminal conviction.
How can this be? There is a simple explanation: Trump wants to surpass the 1 million Mexicans deported during the Eisenhower administration.
But there are just not enough violent criminals among our immigrant neighbors to come close to “beating” Eisenhower. What’s a competitive nativist to do?
Enter Steven Miller, Trump’s aide in charge of immigration policy, who in May ordered ICE to do whatever it takes to make 3,000 arrests a day. Within weeks, ICE was rounding up vast numbers of people at farms, Home Depots, car washes, and bus stops.
These arrests have included U.S. citizens, green card holders, and law-abiding undocumented immigrants who have been raising their families and contributing to the U.S. economy for decades.
They have nothing in common but the color of thei skin.
When you are indiscriminately rounding up brown people, is it any wonder that the overwhelming majority of them are not violent criminals?
And as for targeting “the worst of the worst,” how many drug kingpins and gang leaders work at car washes or picking fruit?
In September, the Supreme Court further enabled ICE to act with impunity, ruling that racial profiling is no longer unconstitutional.
Are you brown? Do you speak Spanish? You are now fair game.
Further, ICE is currently in the process of hiring 10,000 new employees to better enable them to hit their 3,000-per-day goal. ICE will soon be the single largest federal law enforcement agency in our country, larger than the FBI.
So expect more raids in our cities, towns and farms in 2026.
More families will be separated; more children will be traumatized; and more brown men and women will spend time in squalid detention camps with no hope of due process.
iCE may be rounding up brown people today, but if Trump wants to use them to harass voters in next year’s midterms, it will be hard to stop him.
Only an overwhelming victory for Democrats in next year’s midterms will ensure that the men and women we elect will actually be seated in Congress in January 2027 – and then can begin the hard work of putting an end to this terrible chapter in American history.