Soldiers at Our Borders, Agents on Our Streets: The Fight for Immigrants’ Rights Is a Fight for Democracy

As of today, the fate of the approximately 11 million undocumented people in this country hangs in the balance. 

The Trump administration is currently playing coy after details leaked about its original plan to start conducting mass deportation raids across the country as early as this past Tuesday. But the only uncertainty now is when, not if, these raids will unfold. Mass deportations will engulf the nation “very early, very quickly,” Trump has promised. “We’re already geared up and it will begin.”

Indeed, the day after election results were certified, the Border Patrol launched a large-scale raid throughout Bakersville, California, with promises of similar raids as if to send a message about our new normal: if there is no safety in a self-avowed Trump-proofed sanctuary state, there is no safety anywhere. 

And, in keeping with that promise and that message, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders mere hours into his second presidency that attacked the constitutionally protected right to birthright citizenship, dismantled a legal pathway for asylum-seekers, eliminated deportation safe-zones like churches, schools, and hospitals, and commanded a military deployment on the southern border. 

But this dystopia is not just of Trump’s own making. Congress has unrolled a red carpet for the worst of Trump’s agenda.  On the local level, elected officials are practically competing with one another to craft the most punitive immigration policies for their states. And even the private sector is weighing in. 

As we pledged to you last month, we will keep our eyes on these state-level stories, which tend to get drowned out by the noise and the flash of a Trump presidency. We will also spend some time exalting the good–much needed in these dark and perilous times. Thank you for reading.             

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Net-Widening of Our Criminal System: Expansion of the Immigration Dragnet

On the State Level:

• In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has called a special session for the week of January 27th to help implement Donald Trump. He has also said he would suspend elected officials if they “neglect[] their duties” under new immigration mandates. 
• Never to be outdone, in Texas, legislators have filed a slew of criminal-immigration bills. One increases penalties for people who illegally cross the border with a prior conviction.  Another requires governing municipal and county officials to “enter into a written agreement” with ICE to enforce immigration law, and a third effectively requires Sheriffs in counties with populations over 250,000 to enter into agreements with ICE “to enforce federal immigration law” “if offered.” 
• Louisiana, the second largest state for immigration detention, has opted to follow Texas’ lead. The incoming right-wing administration has pledged its support for mass deportation and just enacted a new law modeled after Texas’. That law would allow local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws by arresting people who are “suspected immigrants.” The law also imposes state criminal penalties for being undocumented and creates an “interstate compact” with Texas to support that state’s expansive deportation machine.
  • Bolstering Louisiana’s already-large deportation apparatus would be disastrous for a state whose nine detention centers have already been cited for high rates of preventable deaths, routine denial of vital services, and torturous conditions including rampant sexual abuse, beatings, filthy water, and feces-infested food.
  • Louisiana’s obsession with immigration comes at a great cost for the state. Governor Landry has already poured $3 million dollars into sending 150 Louisiana National Guard members to the Texas-Mexico border while simultaneously cutting $1 million dollars of state funding to the region’s largest homeless shelter simply because the organization happens to also serve immigrants alongside its U.S. citizens. Undocumented immigrants, meanwhile, paid almost $200 million dollars in taxes in Louisiana alone, nearly half the entire projected budget deficit in the state for next year.     
• Georgia’s governor recently signed a bill that would force local law enforcement to become de facto ICE agents or face devastating cuts to local funding and even criminal prosecution.  In Georgia, immigrant detention has skyrocketed in recent years. Like Louisiana, the state would play a key role in a national mass deportation plan, and, like Louisiana, immigration detention centers in Georgia are plagued with rampant physical abuse, including nonsensual, invasive, gynecological surgeries, and a disturbing lack of access to basic services like legal counsel. 12 people have died in Georgia immigration detention since 2017. 
• Senator-Elect David Gregory has authored a bill in Missouri that would deputize citizens to report individuals they suspect of being undocumented immigrants, with a $1,000 reward for any such report that results in an arrest. The bill, which harkens back to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and mirrors a recently-passed law in Texas that offers bounties for anyone who may have helped someone receive an abortion, would also allow citizens to serve as bounty hunters “for the purpose of finding and detaining illegal aliens.”
• Tennessee lawmakers have introduced a sweeping immigration bill that, among other things, would threaten local elected officials with a felony conviction and prison time for failing to comply with Trump’s immigration vision. Under the bill, even voting in favor of adopting a sanctuary policy is subject to criminal penalties. Attorneys general are also empowered to remove resistive officials who are convicted under the bill.  
• Chicago’s police department has emerged as an unexpected opponent of a newly proposed ordinance that would allow police to cooperate with ICE when undocumented persons are merely arrested for “gang,” prostitution, or drug-related crimes. Illinois law, they argue, prohibits police from participating in immigration enforcement. 

Federal Overreach: 

• Unconcerned with the presumption of innocence, the federal government is about to enact the Laken Riley Act. That Act would dramatically increase the role state actors play in the deportation machine. It requires immigration officials to arrest and detain any undocumented person who has been accused of petty offenses like theft and shoplifting at the state level. It also allows state Attorneys General to sue federal officials over individual immigration decisions.
  • This bill does nothing to protect public safety, and it probably makes it worse. It paves the way for predators to target undocumented individuals, and then threaten them with false reports of theft if they think of going to the police.
• On Wednesday, the DOJ ordered federal prosecutors to investigate and potentially even prosecute any state and local officials who do not participate in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. The policy was announced days after Stephen Miller, the architect of some of Donald Trump’s harshest first-term policies, sent letters to elected officials threatening civil and criminal consequences for the same, complete with a list of 249 local officials who are directly in the crosshairs over their immigration policies.
  • The firing squad has already taken formation. The incoming border czar, Tom Holman, has also threatened to incarcerate elected officials, including the Mayor of Denver, who don’t cooperate with new federal policies. 
  • And on Wednesday, the Arlington GOP took to X to request that the Justice Department take “a short drive across the Potomac” to hold the city’s county board chair and prosecutor “accountable” for being “front-line resisters.” This is likely only the beginning of the right using the executive order as pretense to retaliate against elected officials and policies that do not align with their extremist agendas.    

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Big Tech Is Fueling Mass Deportation Plans

Border Surveillance Is Big Business–and Ripe for Abuse

• All these mass deportation fantasies could not be a reality without technology–specifically, the very surveillance and AI technologies that the Biden administration has championed in its own immigration enforcement efforts. 
• But while Biden has attempted to implement some oversight, all guardrails are off under Trump. Unregulated and unbound from any human rights ethics rules, such technology can be powerfully abused–on the table is everything from AI-powered surveillance towers to robodogs to biometric tracking–with huge payoffs to the multibillion border surveillance sector. 
• As one United Nations AI advisor warns, “…AI can be weaponized, eroding civil liberties, violating privacy, and fostering systemic bias. Under the Trump administration, the aggressive expansion of AI in border security could turn these tools into mechanisms for mass surveillance and control.”  

Misinformation, Hysteria, and Xenophobia. 

• A couple of weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg abruptly announced that Meta would stop using its fact-checking program on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram and instead rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts through Community Notes. 
• The policy’s real-life dangers and implications for democracy cannot be overstated. Facebook’s algorithms played such a prominent role in promoting ethnic cleansing in the 2017 Rohingya massacre in Myanmar that Amnesty International called upon the company to pay reparations to the Rohingya people. 
• But one need not look that far out or back for a compelling example: just a few months ago during this presidential election, false rumors of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio was the lie that traveled from JD Vance’s X account onto the stage of a presidential debate, leading to over thirty bomb threats to the otherwise sleepy, small town. 
• In this current anti-immigrant climate, with all genuine effort to combat misinformation gone, the Springfield saga is likely to become our new and dangerous norm.