Not just bad guys: Trump deportations are coming for our law-abiding neighbors

In winning the solid majority of the voting public, Donald Trump would have added to that total plenty of non-citizen, undocumented immigrants had they been able to cast ballots (and no, there’s no evidence that non-citizens voted) because he pledged his deportation plans would ship out the bad people, the murderers, rapists and drug lords.

Many immigrants believe that when Trump has talked about mass deportations, he doesn’t mean them.

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but this is not true. Not for the honest hardworking woman cleaning your home or the guy at your corner bodega or your undocumented longtime neighbor who’s got a U.S. citizen spouse and kids, or even for the many immigrants around the country who hold statuses like TPS, parole or DACA.

The opposite is true; the Biden administration has reinstated an ICE enforcement prioritization scheme that puts national security threats and violent criminals at the top (that Trump always focuses on, including in his post-victory interview with NBC News), and instructs agents to largely steer clear of law-abiding and longtime residents. We say reinstated because Trump had terminated that approach, and he’ll do it again, directing his agents to sweep up anyone without status, or even with statuses he doesn’t like.

This could even go up to and include naturalized citizens. Trump immigration restriction guru Stephen Miller has been salivating over the prospect of a ramped up denaturalization force, which he said would be “turbocharged” under Trump.

So the Justice Department would have personnel dedicated to stripping immigrants of U.S. citizenship for minor errors or discrepancies in their records, with the aim of eventually deporting them. These are not just “bad guys,” but anyone they can get their hands on (other than friends like Elon Musk, of course, who almost certainly lied on his immigration forms after working in the country illegally).

Trump has said that he would end TPS protections for Haitians and probably hundreds of thousands from other countries. We know that this is not an empty threat because he tried to do this before.

Trump has explicitly referenced the heavy-handed, deadly and relatively indiscriminate Eisenhower-era “Operation Wetback” as an inspiration for his crackdown. This effort was not marked by its restraint or its close targeting of criminals or even those that did not actually have status; hundreds of thousands were removed in the span of a few years including, as historians now agree, a number of U.S. citizens. This is what Miller and his pals are imagining when they talk about camps full of immigrants waiting to be expelled.

Speaking with NBC News, Trump referenced people who “have killed and murdered” and “drug lords,” but that simply doesn’t square with the idea of a mass deportation of millions of people, one he said would have “no price tag.”

We can all get behind going after murderers and drug lords, but there really aren’t all that many out there. This pledge is a promise to go after everyone, destroying neighborhoods and economies and sweeping up a lot of people who felt that they would not be targeted.

— New York Daily News