The ‘Criminal Alien' Slander

The Atlantic

4 hours ago

Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. 'Pretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,' the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by the state of Florida on a disused airport runway. The detention center features tents that contain chain-link cages crammed with bunk beds, surrounded by miles of barbed wire. By the end of August, it may have the capacity to hold 4,000 people waiting to hear whether they'll be deported.
On Fox News that night, Stephen Miller, the White House's deputy chief of staff for policy, argued that there was nothing dehumanizing about an immigrant-detention center built in a hot, humid, mosquito-infested, subtropical wetland. 'What is dehumanizing is when Democrats let illegal alien rapists into the country to attack our children,' Miller said. Laura Loomer, a Trump adviser, expressed the hope that alligators would eat the immigrants detained in the Everglades. 'Alligator lives matter,' she posted on X, along with an implied threat to the Latino population of the United States: 'The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.'
The Everglades detention center, the nationwide roundups of immigrants, the massive increase in spending for ICE, and the Trump administration's harsh rhetoric were foreshadowed during the 2024 presidential campaign. 'This is country changing; it's country threatening; and it's country wrecking,' Trump said about undocumented immigration at one campaign rally. At another he said, 'It's a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.' Trump called immigrants 'animals,' accused them of stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and claimed that they were ' poisoning the blood of our country.' These claims helped ensure Trump's election. Last year, an opinion poll commissioned by CBS News found that almost half of all adults in the United States agreed that undocumented immigrants are 'poisoning the blood' of the country. More than three-quarters of Republican adults agreed.
I've been writing about the role of undocumented immigrants in the American economy for 30 years. They are the bedrock of our food, construction, and hospitality industries. They are also some of the nation's poorest, most vulnerable, most devout, most family-oriented workers in the U.S. They routinely suffer wage theft, minimum-wage violations, sexual harassment on the job, and workplace injuries that go unreported and uncompensated. Most of them have lived here for more than a decade. The lies now being spread about them are too numerous to mention. But one that must be addressed is the falsehood at the heart of Trump's immigration policy: that undocumented immigrants are likely to be murderers, rapists, and violent criminals who wreak havoc upon law-abiding citizens.
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A recent study of 150 years of American incarceration data, from 1870 to 2020, found that immigrant men were far less likely to be sent to prison than men born in the U.S. Since 1990, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has roughly tripled—yet the homicide rate has fallen by almost 50 percent. A 2020 study published in the journal PNAS compared the crime rates of undocumented immigrants in Texas with the crime rates of U.S.-born citizens there. 'Relative to undocumented immigrants,' the study found, U.S.-born citizens 'are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.' That helps explain why crackdowns on undocumented immigration aren't the most effective way to improve public safety. Texas would be a much safer place if everyone born in Texas got deported.
'Under President Trump's leadership, we are targeting eight terrorist organizations, including six Mexican drug cartels that threaten the foreign policy, the public safety, the national security of the United States,' Miller said during his Fox News appearance, stressing the urgent need to build more ICE detention centers. But ICE isn't part of the criminal-justice system. The apprehension and deportation of immigrants is conducted under civil law by the executive branch of the federal government. The phrase criminal alien, widely used by the Trump administration, is misleading. It conjures images of a dangerous, perhaps homicidal, stranger. Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, likes to issue grave warnings about the threat posed by 'illegal criminal aliens' and 'criminal illegal aliens.' That threat is greatly overstated.
A criminal alien is an immigrant who has already been convicted of a crime. Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol arrested about 17,000 criminal aliens. Among the convictions recorded for that group, 29 were for homicide or manslaughter, 221 were for sex offenses—and 10,935 were for unlawful entry or reentry to the U.S. The Trump administration's harsh, fearmongering rhetoric is contradicted by a simple fact: The overwhelming majority of criminal aliens become criminals by violating immigration laws. And almost three-quarters of the people now being held in ICE detention centers aren't even criminal aliens.
The federal agencies actually devoted to hunting down terrorists and members of Mexican drug cartels—-the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—all face major cuts in Trump's 2026 budget. The FBI's budget will be reduced by $545 million; the ATF's by $418 million; the DEA's by $112 million. The Justice Department's Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Forces program, created to 'disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal networks,' will lose its entire $547 million in funding. The program is being completely shut down. Meanwhile, the omnibus bill that Trump signed on July 4 triples the size of ICE's budget and allocates about $170 billion to immigration enforcement. Roughly $45 billion will be spent during the next four years to build new ICE detention centers, which will hold mainly people who have never been convicted of any crime.
Unauthorized entry to the U.S. wasn't a criminal offense until 1929, almost a century and a half after the nation's founding. The Undesirable Aliens Act had two sections outlining the first federal immigration crimes. Section 1325 made it unlawful to enter the U.S. without proper inspection, and Section 1326 made it unlawful to reenter the U.S. after being deported. As Eric S. Fish, a law professor at UC Davis, reveals in a 2022 Iowa Law Review article, 'Race, History, and Immigration Crimes,' the Undesirable Aliens Act was designed to keep people from Latin America, especially Mexicans, out of the U.S. Its principal sponsors were advocates of eugenics, a pseudoscience that claims that races have innate characteristics and that the white race is superior to every other.
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Harry Hamilton Laughlin served as the 'expert eugenics agent' for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization when the bill was written. Laughlin had a biology degree from Princeton. He called for laws against interracial marriage. He called for laws requiring the forced sterilization of criminals; people suffering from alcoholism or epilepsy; deaf people; blind people; people deemed mentally or physically impaired; and poor people, including 'orphans, n'er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps, and paupers.' The Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was directly inspired by Laughlin's model law on forced sterilization. He believed that Mexicans were innately criminal and feeble-minded as well as carriers of disease. 'If we do not deport the undesirable individual,' Laughlin testified before Congress, 'we can not get rid of his blood, no matter how inferior it may be, because we can not deport his offspring born here.'
Coleman Livingston 'Coley' Blease, a Democrat from South Carolina, introduced the Undesirable Aliens Act in the Senate. Blease publicly called Black people 'apes' and 'baboons.' He publicly celebrated the lynching of Black men in 'defense of the virtue of the white women of my State.' He sought a constitutional amendment to outlaw interracial marriage. He opposed all immigration to the U.S., especially from Mexico, arguing, 'I believe in America for Americans.' The legislation that became the Undesirable Aliens Act made it through the Senate with a voice vote and without any debate. In the House, Representative John Box, a Democrat from Texas, claimed that Mexican immigration would lead to the 'mongrelization' and 'degradation' of white racial purity, creating the 'most insidious and general mixture of white, Indian, and negro blood strains ever produced in America.' The House debate on the bill didn't focus on 'legal versus illegal methods of entry,' Fish writes, 'but on the reasons why we should not let Mexicans immigrate at all.' He goes on: 'The primary reason given was their race.'
Almost 100 years later, Sections 1325 and 1326 are still in force. Today, more people are prosecuted for violating those two sections than for any other federal crimes. Indeed, the majority of all convictions in federal court stem from that pair of statutes. Unlawful entry is a misdemeanor; unlawful reentry is a felony, often punished with a sentence of about a year in federal prison. Ninety-nine percent of the people convicted for unlawful reentry last year were Latino—-just as the authors of the Undesirable Aliens Act intended. Nevertheless, by some estimates, almost half of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. violated neither of those statutes. They entered the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas. They have violated civil immigration law but not federal criminal law.
Immigrant-detention centers are not prisons. They are being built throughout the U.S. not to punish criminals but to hold people facing deportation for violations of civil immigration law. The Department of Homeland Security, which administers these centers, admits that fact. 'Detention is non-punitive,' according to ICE. But immigrants in ICE detention centers frequently endure living conditions much worse than people who are incarcerated in American prisons.
ICE puts immigrants into dangerous, overcrowded jails, paying local authorities for their care. It sends immigrants to state prisons. And it holds about 90 percent of detainees in facilities run by private prison companies—-whose stock prices have soared since Trump's reelection. The name Alligator Alcatraz suggests that the health and well-being of detainees are not top priorities. Each of the Florida facility's chain-link cages can house 32 men but has only three toilets. Immigrants detained by ICE have been forced to sleep on floors, live in windowless cells, spend a week or more without a shower, and go without medicine for chronic illnesses. ICE can move immigrants to jails or detention centers anywhere in the U.S., regardless of where they were apprehended or where they may have lived for years. During an unannounced visit to the Krome Detention Center in Miami this May, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida found the conditions 'incredibly disturbing.' An attorney for one immigrant detained there said that the daily ration of food was a cup of rice and a glass of water. In June, a group of immigrants at Krome went outside and arranged their bodies into an 'SOS.'
The tactics used by ICE agents to arrest immigrants and bring them to detention evoke those of a police state—masked, armed officers raiding churches, farms, schools, garment factories, and Home Depots; appearing by surprise to seize graduate students; separating parents from children; conducting sweeps while on horseback. ICE agents can arrest anybody, without a warrant, based on probable cause that a person is undocumented and may flee. All of these practices may be legal, but they don't inspire faith in the rule of law.
The administrative hearings that determine whether an immigrant can remain in the U.S. are similarly out of keeping with traditional democratic norms. Immigrants have no legal right to an attorney in these proceedings, and most never gain access to one. The stakes are extraordinarily high now that the Supreme Court has permitted the deportation of immigrants to distant nations they've never visited before, such as El Salvador and South Sudan. Immigration courts are run by the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security employs the attorneys who make the government's case for deportation. Both the DOJ and the DHS are headed by Cabinet members who report to the president. The Trump administration has imposed quotas on ICE agents to increase apprehensions, and may once again impose quotas on immigration judges to speed the completion of cases.
An immigration judge can be removed from a case at the discretion of the federal attorney general. And a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of immigration law no longer seems to be a job requirement. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order —'Protecting the American People Against Invasion'—that authorizes state and local officials to serve as federal immigration officials. During Trump's visit to the Everglades detention center, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that 47,000 Florida law-enforcement officers had been deputized to work for ICE. DeSantis has also proposed letting attorneys who serve with the Florida National Guard act as immigration judges.
Outside the Everglades facility on its opening day, Enrique Tarrio spoke with a group of reporters. Tarrio is a former leader of the Proud Boys, a neofascist group. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, sentenced to 22 years in prison, pardoned by the president, and praised by Trump during a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago with his mother. Tarrio is now promoting a new app, ICERAID, that offers a cryptocurrency reward to users who help the government locate and arrest undocumented immigrants. 'We didn't vote for cheaper eggs,' Tarrio said in the Everglades. 'We voted for mass deportation, and we voted for retribution.'