The Trump administration is pounding a concerted pressure campaign against undocumented immigrants, as well as hundreds of thousands legally whose status is trying to revoke. The measures threaten to make daily life more unsustainable for millions, since President Donald Trump aims to carry out the purge of immigrants he promised during his campaign.
Trump has intensified his repression against immigrants beyond what was done during his first presidential mandate, which included separating children from their parents on the border, working to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico and curb legal immigration through less visas and refugee admissions.
This time, in addition to immigration raids and arrests, the administration is inflicting difficulties to immigrants by taking multiple levers from the government to undermine their daily lives.
Administration threatens criminal charges against immigrants without legal status that do not register with the government. He has provided access to the application of immigration and customs to the information of previously confidential taxpayers to locate immigrants and cancel the social security numbers of thousands of immigrants by marking “illegal immigrants” as dead. Officials have canceled the probation that the Biden administration granted to some groups. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the revocations.
“What we are seeing now is this press of the government’s complete court on immigration,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Immigrant Rights Center, a non -profit organization to defense the rights of immigrants whose financing to provide legal assistance to unaccompanied immigrant children that Trump reduced.
The many actions are all parts of the administration’s strategy to subtract as many immigrants from the United States as possible without having to go through more cumbersome deportation processes. Trump’s actions are based on a “wear strategy through the application” that was attempted in 2010 with state laws against immigration, a strategy promoted by Kris Kobach, a former Kansas Attorney General who has defended the conservative causes.
The data obtained by NBC News show that the deportations of the Trump administration are staying slightly behind deportations under President Joe Biden at the same time last year, despite the fact that Trump has made mass deportations one of his main priorities since he assumed the position.
The Secretary of National Security, Kristi Noem, recently made clear what level of parties the administration wants to see. At a recent cabinet meeting, he said: “We have 20, 21 million people who need to go home.” Republicans and conservatives have long used around 20 million as the number of undocumented people in the country, although the analyzes for a long time They have set the number closest to 11 million to 12 million.
As is evident in the case of Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland man that an official of the Justice Department said he was erroneously deported to a prison in El Salvador, the administration is willing to push the edge of the legal envelope to meet his objective of mass deportation. At a contentious hearing on Tuesday, a United States district judge ordered the administration to provide evidence of any step that has taken to facilitate the return of Abrego García.
“More than 77 million people delivered a resounding mandate on election day in November to ensure our borders, more mass criminal migrants and enforce our immigration laws,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai, NBC News in a statement. “The Trump administration is aligned in an approach to the entire government to fulfill this mandate to once again put Americans and the United States first.”
He did not answer questions about criticism of administration’s actions or on any indirect effect on US citizens.
‘Remove the legal status of people’
The White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced Tuesday that Trump would sign an order that prevented undocumented immigrants from obtaining social security benefits.
But undocumented immigrants, and many people who work legally, are already prohibited from receiving payments of the Social Security or Medicare, said Mariena Dancapié, a distinguished immigration scholarship and visiting academic of the Cornell Law Faculty.
She said that Trump’s last order is “to continue with fear and misinformation because, in fact, undocumented immigrants pay in Social Security, but are never eligible to obtain those benefits.”
“On the one hand, Trump’s rhetoric has been to focus on undocumented immigrants and the worst ‘criminals’, etc., but what we have really seen from a perspective of policy formulation is that they are actually removing the legal status of people,” he said.
There are immigrants in the United States with different forms of legal status, such as temporary protected status or labor authorization that was granted while waiting for asylum claim results, which makes them eligible to request social security numbers. But obtaining social security numbers does not mean that they are eligible for benefits, emphasis said.
“There are separate laws that date from the 1996 Welfare Reform Law that indicate who is eligible for what program, and for most people, it must have been a legal permanent resident, a green card holder, for at least five years to be a qualified legal immigrant that is eligible for certain benefits,” he said.
The administration has threatened sanctions against undocumented immigrants of 14 years or more that are not registered with the government and carry evidence that were recorded with them.
To register, they must complete a form that asked not only about the crimes for which they may have been arrested or accused, but also any of those who committed but for which they were not prosecuted, said Bill Hing, founder of the Immigrant Legal Resources Center.
The law to register has existed for decades, but had not been previously applied.
Hing questioned how Trump would enforce the required registration, because, he said, trying to receive someone accused of not carrying registration documents would complicate and extend a deportation process. He acknowledged that the administration could try to give an example of a case or two. But the requirement “is a mechanism to induce people, to force people, to expose themselves,” he said.
In addition, Hing said, if he represented the people arrested for not registering, he would argue that they have a right of the fifth amendment against self -inculting, since they are asked to admit crimes when they complete the forms.
“I don’t know about you, but I have Jayas. I have accelerated,” he said. “I think someone is prosecuted has a very good argument of the fifth amendment so as not to register.”
While immigration repression actions are aimed at immigrants, they are also affecting citizens.
In early April, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner, published on social networks that he had ordered the HUD offices to ensure that HUD programs do not benefit undocumented immigrants. People illegally cannot obtain federal subsidized homes. But it is estimated that 25,000 families in public homes include at least one American citizen and at least one person without legal immigration status, according to the National Housing Law project, a non -profit legal defense organization. The citizen would be eligible for housing.
Marie Claire Tran-Leung, lawyer of the National Housing Law project, said Trump and Turner are trying to display HUD “to scare immigrant families in Self-Victo.”
It is unknown if administration measures will expel sufficient immigrants to satisfy Trump and his base is unknown.
But emphasis said that with the administration moving “so quickly” and in a “chaotic way”, some US citizens can be trapped in the immigration network. For example, some could erroneously end as dead and their social security numbers in the agency’s death file, he said.
“Are they going to do the same thing they are doing with Kilmar [Abrego Garcia] To say: ‘Wow, I’m sorry, we made a mistake and we can’t do anything about it now’? “
