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Mass Deportation Is Unjust and Harmful to All Americans by Regie Stites  People hold up handmade signs reading, "Immigrants Make America Great" and "NO HATE NO FEAR / Refugees are welcome here!" - Photo by Nitish Meena In her first press conference, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, repeated a vicious lie to justify one of the cruelest presidential priorities in American history. She said millions of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. must be deported because they have all broken U.S. law and are therefore “criminals.” This is a lie. An article on the press conference in Axios pointed out that violation of U.S. immigration policies is a civil, not a criminal offense. According to the article: “There is no law making it a crime to live in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant.” A summary of immigration laws prepared by the ACLU states unequivocally: “The act of being present in the United States in violation of the immigration laws is not, standing alone, a crime.”
The constant repetition of the lie that all undocumented immigrants are “criminals” is part of a broader disinformation campaign the Trump administration is waging to justify mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Calling immigrants “criminals” is an example of the political propaganda technique known as the “big lie.” Perfected by Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany, the “big lie” involves frequent repetition of an emotionally-charged untruth to arouse fear and stifle political dissent. The Nazi’s used the “big lie” technique to scapegoat Germany’s Jewish citizens and to enable the Holocaust. The Trump administration uses “big lie” propaganda in a number of ways to suppress opposition to their plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Below are four types of “big lies” MAGA politicians use to demean and dehumanize immigrants along with references revealing the truth behind the lies. Big Lie #1: Immigrants are threats to public safety. Trump and other MAGA politicians have frequently used isolated instances of criminal violence by undocumented immigrants to exaggerate and misrepresent the actual level of threat immigrants pose to public safety. In fact, numerous studies have shown that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. A study led by Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky found that immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than U.S. born white men for the past 140 years of American history. Other studies, including one by the Brennan Center and another by the American Immigration Council have used crime data analysis to debunk the myth that the United States has experienced a surge in crime caused by immigrants. The American Immigration Council study points out that as immigration has risen in the United States, the crime rate has fallen, from 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people in 1980 when immigrants were 6.2% of the population to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people in 2022 when immigrants were 13.9% of the population of the U.S. Big Lie #2: Immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy. The often repeated claim that undocumented immigrants are harmful to the U.S. economy is based on very selective use of data that distort the big picture of the overall benefits of the presence of immigrants on economic well-being in the U.S. On the flip side, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants will be tremendously expensive and cause severe harm to the economy. A report by the Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) Worker Institute at Cornell University summarized five ways that undocumented immigrants are powering the American economy, comprising 25% of all farm workers, 19% of maintenance workers, 17% of construction workers, 12% of food workers, and paying millions in taxes each year. According to a 2024 report from Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Senate, the costs of mass deportation could be devastating to the U.S. federal budget and catastrophic for the U.S. economy. The JEC report cites economic studies indicating that mass deportation could reduce GDP by as much as 7.4% and push prices up by 9.1% by 2028, could reduce the supply of workers in agriculture by 225,000 and in construction by 1.5 million, and could cost 44,000 American citizens their jobs for every half million undocumented immigrants deported. Big Lie #3: Immigrants are a threat to American democracy. Trump and other MAGA Republicans repeatedly claim that Democrats are letting unauthorized immigrants into the country to enable widespread voting by noncitizens in U.S. elections. This claim is pure fantasy. In fact, the documented number of noncitizens voting in elections in the U.S. is minuscule. A blog post from the Bipartisan Policy Center notes that even the large database on noncitizen voting compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation contained only 77 documented cases of noncitizen voting. According to the best available data, misguided and ill-informed attempts by Republicans to prevent noncitizens from voting instead result in denying eligible voters the right to vote. For example, in October 2024, the state of Alabama removed more than three thousand people suspected of being noncitizens from voting rolls. A federal judge reviewing the removal found the state had identified only “a handful, at least four, perhaps as many as ten, noncitizens… on Alabama’s voting rolls.” That state later acknowledged that more than two thousand of the people whose registrations had been inactivated were actually eligible voters. Big Lie #4: Immigrants (if they are not white people or rich) are “poisoning” American culture. During his first term, Trump complained about accepting immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa and then followed up with musing about encouraging immigrants from “countries like Norway.” With such statements Trump insinuated that only white people are desirable immigrants to America. This, too, is a lie In his new term in office, Trump quickly put his racist beliefs into action by signing an executive order cutting off aid to South Africa and including an invitation to white South Africans to immigrate to America. Trump also signed executive orders denying entry to the U.S. to Afghan refugees. He also ordered the removal of protections from deportation for Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants who are legally in America. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly talked of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” using language which directly echoes Nazi propaganda and evokes the white supremacist fantasy known as the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that envisions an overturning of race-based social hierarchy in white-majority countries as people of color “replace” and eventually outnumber and take power from white people. In fact, the dominant position of white people in the U.S. racial and ethnic social hierarchy is unlikely to change even as demographic changes continue to shift the profile of the U.S. population in upcoming decades. Sensational news accounts frequently point to the growth of the Hispanic population as a sign of an impending loss of majority status for white Americans. However, the overwhelming majority of the people identifying themselves as “Hispanic or Latino” on the U.S. Census also consider themselves to be “white.” Thus, even in California, a state where the “Hispanic or Latino” population is currently more than forty percent of the total, the “white” population remains numerically dominant at more than seventy percent of the total. America Needs to Hear the Truth about Immigrants. Donald Trump has repeatedly told harmful and intentional lies about immigrants. These lies and his actions targeting immigrants (and others, including LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people) have many Americans living in fear. Trump claims his victory in the 2024 presidential election was a landslide that gave him a powerful mandate. But this is also a big lie. Trump’s margins of victory in both the electoral college and in the popular vote count were historically small. In the popular vote, Trump was supported by just over 77 million people. Kamala Harris got roughly 75 million votes. Tellingly, nearly 90 million eligible voters did not cast a vote in 2024. Recent polling shows that public support for mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants does not extend to separating parents from children who are citizens or to deporting undocumented immigrants who are not violent criminals. Seen in this light, the MAGA effort to falsely brand all unauthorized immigrants as criminals is revealed as manipulative propaganda aimed at reducing resistance to harshly punitive measures the majority of Americans do not support. There are two things we can do to stop the madness and senseless cruelty of Trump’s plans for mass detention and deportation of unauthorized immigrants: speak out and act to protect immigrants. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants are not criminals. Overall, they are a benefit to the economy, pose no threat to American democracy, and enrich and renew one of the key strengths and sources of innovation in American society, our cultural diversity. We need to raise our voices in opposition to mass deportation and reveal the truths the big lies are meant to hide. Immigrants have rights that must be respected. Please support immigrants in their struggle against the despotism of the Trump administration by donating or volunteering your time with groups providing legal information and services to immigrants:
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