Demonstrators rally before marching to the White House in Washington on Thursday as they protest the fatal shooting by an ICE officer of Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis.Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press
Joe Davidson is a retired Washington Post columnist, and a former national and foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant policies are cruel – though sadly, no longer unusual – for a nation that once welcomed the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” His administration is making the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty reek with hypocrisy.
Mr. Trump’s zeal for mass deportation has subjected people to callous detention conditions, as U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE)’s dragnet captures thousands who aren’t the criminals he promised to expel. In many cases, they’re also not migrants or asylum seekers – and in some, including the killing by an ICE officer of Renee Nicole Macklin Good in a residential area in Minneapolis, the consequences of these raids have been deadly.
Despite White House claims that its deportation onslaught targets the “worst of the worst,” it often corrals others, and without evidence. Records obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by NBC News show that approximately one-third of the roughly 220,000 people arrested by ICE between Jan. 20 and Oct. 15 had no criminal records. The New York Times reported that in the available June 6 to July 12 reporting period, 57 per cent of those arrested by ICE in the Los Angeles area had no criminal charges; in Washington, D.C., from Aug. 11 to Sept. 10, the number was a frightening 84 per cent, with just 2 per cent having a violent criminal conviction. Nationally, only 7 per cent had a violent crime conviction; the most frequent offences were traffic violations.
More protests planned after immigration enforcement shooting in Minneapolis
For those caught by Mr. Trump’s ruthless rush to deport, incarceration can mean “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” according to an Amnesty International report on two Florida facilities, the Krome North Service Processing Center and the Everglades Detention Facility (also known as “Alligator Alcatraz”). Amnesty’s findings – conditions described as “inhuman and unsanitary”; a lack of oversight and due process protections; and terrible treatment of detainees, including prolonged solitary confinement and the routine use of shackles that may “amount to torture” – are not befitting of the country that welcomed new migrants to New York with a statue of the “Mother of Exiles.”
This is all fuelled and rationalized by what Amnesty calls “racist, discriminatory, xenophobic and dehumanizing” rhetoric on the part of the President of the United States. Last month, Mr. Trump attacked Somalis and others, including American citizens: “Our country is at a tipping point … and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said. “Ilhan Omar [a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota] is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
These actions have been enabled by an acquiescent Supreme Court that scrapped longstanding norms by allowing ICE officers, often menacingly masked, to use racial profiling and other superficial characteristics to justify detention. In September, the country’s highest court overturned a lower court action that prohibited investigative stops based on “presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day-labourer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; the type of work one does; speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and apparent race or ethnicity.” Though this is an interim ruling, the fear this has inflamed in Latino and Spanish-speaking Americans will be lasting.
When legal residents are stopped, it is “typically brief,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued when siding with Mr. Trump – an argument that gravely understates the trauma suffered by those accosted by masked strangers with guns. We saw the fears of arbitrary threats dramatically and tragically realized – perhaps inevitably so – when an ICE officer shot and killed Ms. Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen who had just dropped off her child at school. No one, it appears, is safe.
The court’s ruling now allows law enforcement to inflict more trauma on people like Jason Brian Gavidia. He is a U.S. citizen of Hispanic descent who was aggressively confronted and pushed against a metal fence in a tow yard in Montebello, Calif., by arm-twisting, rifle-carrying Border Patrol agents. He was released after showing identification, which the officers kept – leaving him vulnerable to arrest the next time he’s stopped.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was spot-on in her dissent to the Supreme Court’s decision when she wrote: “We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.” America’s constitutional freedoms are corrupted when the courts allow the government to do so.
This is America in 2026, where no one is breathing free.