The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee advances human rights through grassroots collaborations.
The Truth About Trump’s So-Called “Mass Deportations”
By Josh Leach on February 6, 2025
In the opening weeks of his second administration, Donald Trump issued a number of orders designed to sow terror in immigrant communities and pander to xenophobic prejudice. These actions ranged from the merely symbolic and ridiculous (remember the “Gulf of America”?), to ones that are already upending people’s lives—such as Trump’s order to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelan nationals.
In all of these actions, Trump’s deliberate goal is to stoke fear. As one of Trump’s henchmen has said in the past: undocumented immigrants “should be afraid” under Trump’s regime. To further this goal, Trump’s team has already set out to make a spectacle of the suffering they have caused. They are even producing glitzy propaganda videos, edited to look like Hollywood action movies. In short—to quote the journalist Adam Serwer—“the cruelty is the point” of many of Trump’s actions.
We therefore should be careful not to play into Trump’s strategy by helping him spread baseless fear among the communities he is targeting. It’s undeniable that many of his early actions are cruel and disturbing. But they are also not particularly strategic or effective; and communities are already finding ways to resist his actions. Here are a few examples:
- Trump’s Attacks on Asylum
In his first hours back in the White House, Trump issued an executive order declaring an “invasion” at the southern border. The order tries to use this claim (along with baseless assertions of a public health threat) to justify shutting down the entire U.S. asylum system. As a result, people seeking refuge—on the basis of legitimate fears of persecution and torture in their home countries—have already been turned away or rapidly expelled without any due process.
To get away with this order, Trump essentially has to argue that the single word “invasion” allows him to set aside the immigration laws enacted by Congress. Federal courts have not looked kindly on this type of argument in the past (including during Trump’s first term), and there is no reason to think they will respond differently this time. For this reason, organizations serving people in migration have already filed suit to block Trump’s order—and they may well prevail.
- Rescinding TPS for Venezuela
Similarly, Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan nationals in the United States lack any real legal basis. Of course, Trump spent a large portion of his campaign trying to demonize and scapegoat Venezuelan immigrants (who in reality are not “invaders,” but asylum-seekers who fled a dictatorship). It is therefore no surprise that he has chosen to target Venezuelan TPS holders in one of his early acts as president.
However, it is by no means clear if he will get away with it. The TPS statute says the executive branch can only revoke TPS when it expires at the end of each eighteen-month renewal period. By trying to terminate it sooner than that, Trump may have breached the law, and his orders could therefore be struck down in court.
- Deportation Flights to Guantanamo
It’s the same story all over again with Trump’s much-publicized plans to detain people in the U.S. military site at Guantanamo Bay. The idea of disappearing people to this sinister offshore facility—which the U.S. has used in the past for indefinite detention and torture—fits perfectly into Trump’s larger “theater of cruelty” (that is—his effort to make a spectacle of people’s suffering to stoke fear). But such a move would also be flagrantly unlawful and probably short-lived.
The U.S. government does not have any legal authority to detain undocumented immigrants after they have already been removed from the country. So far, it is unclear who exactly the Trump administration is sending to the facility, or what stage of their immigration proceedings they are in when they arrive—but we can certainly expect legal resistance to this effort to terrorize our communities, just as we have seen with Trump’s other policies.
- Revoking Birthright Citizenship
The federal courts also wasted no time in halting Trump’s order to eliminate birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders. This should not surprise us. For more than a century, courts have consistently held that the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to all people born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Trump’s order flies in the face of this unbroken tradition and is therefore “blatantly unconstitutional” (as the judge who blocked the order put it).
***
The pattern throughout these incidents is clear: Trump’s actions may be cruel, but they are not invincible. The president has a lot of power, but he is not a king. He does not have authority to ignore people’s rights. Our communities are already coming forward to defend this truth from Trump’s lawless incursions. (To give one further example, this past week saw the largest mass protests in support of immigrant communities since the start of Trump’s second term.)
UUSC will keep monitoring this work and flanking our grassroots partners as they organize to resist. You can sign up here for regular updates on these efforts and make a donation to support our efforts. A contribution in any amount helps us backstop our partners as they continue to defend human rights—regardless of who’s in the White House.
Image credit: Ted Eytan
