Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here |
Donald Trump’s assault on the city of Chicago began in September, and it claimed its first casualty quickly. As Reuters would later report, on September 12, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez dropped his kids off at their school in the suburb of Franklin Park on his way to his job at a diner on the northwest side. Villegas-Gonzalez had come to the United States in 2007 to flee the violence in his home state of Michoacán, Mexico—violence wrought by the Mexican government’s militarization of its drug war, a policy encouraged and funded by the United States. (In November, the mayor of the city of Uruapan was assassinated after calling for a crackdown on organized crime.)
Described by friends and co-workers as kind and soft-spoken, Villegas-Gonzalez had two sons and met a woman from his hometown as he worked long hours in kitchens around the city.
After he dropped off his sons on the morning of September 12, two Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers approached the 38-year-old in his car. He put the vehicle in reverse and attempted to flee. One officer continued to chase him on foot and eventually fired his weapon, striking Villegas-Gonzalez, who crashed into a delivery truck and was pronounced dead an hour later. Officials of the Department of Homeland Security would later say that Villegas-Gonzalez “drove his car at law enforcement officers,” a claim clearly refuted by surveillance video. DHS also claimed the officer who killed Villegas-Gonzalez had been struck and dragged by the car and feared for his life. That allegation is more difficult to confirm or refute—the officer is obscured by the car in the video. The officer was later treated for “minor” injuries.
Villegas-Gonzalez had no criminal record. Over eight years, he had only a series of traffic citations for offenses like a broken taillight and driving without insurance. His most serious citation was for driving 30 miles per hour over the speed limit. In its press release laying out the ICE agents’ version of events, DHS referred to him as “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving.” The release included the striking line, “The illegal alien was pronounced dead.”
In the weeks that followed, immigration agents continued to arrest parents and nannies as they dropped off and picked up children from school, a tactic unheard of in prior administrations.
Videos posted to social media showed ICE and Border Patrol agents pointing their guns at unarmed protesters, unnecessarily tackling children and elderly people, and shutting down streets and intersections as they extracted people from their cars. Agents tear-gassed entire neighborhoods, in some cases enveloping schools and even Chicago Police Department officers in clouds of chemical irritant. Videos showed federal officers engaging in Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT, maneuvers to cut off fleeing vehicles, a dangerous tactic banned or limited by the Chicago Police Department and many other police agencies in the country. On at least three occasions, ICE officers violently pulled U.S. citizens from their cars and detained them, claiming the drivers had deliberately crashed into agents—despite video and witness accounts contradicting the officers’ narrative.
Activists in Los Angeles photographed immigration officers wearing Halloween masks of horror movie villains while conducting immigration raids. When the citizen journalism site L.A. Taco asked DHS for comment, a spokesperson replied, “Happy Halloween.”
As October dragged on, the raids intensified. Toward the end of the month, immigration officers gassed a neighborhood just hours before a scheduled Halloween parade for children. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker asked the administration to pause the raids on Halloween night so Chicago kids could go trick-or-treating without fear of being gassed, witnessing traumatic arrests, or seeing their parents or caretakers apprehended and detained. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem refused, calling the request “shameful.” Activists in Los Angeles would later photograph immigration officers, in an especially galling display of cruelty, wearing Halloween masks depicting horror movie villains while conducting immigration raids. When the citizen journalism site L.A. Taco asked DHS for comment, a spokesperson replied, “Happy Halloween.”
Trump has launched similar federal crackdowns in Los Angeles, Washington, Charlotte, Memphis, Minneapolis, and New Orleans, and threatened them in Baltimore, San Francisco, New York, and other cities. He has sent National Guard troops into Los Angeles and Memphis, and has promised to send more to other cities, along with active-duty troops. With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. Masked secret police now tear-gas entire city streets, jump out from unmarked vehicles to abduct and detain suspected undocumented people, and demand that foreign-looking people (mostly Latino) produce papers on demand. These deportation forces have been told by the president and his advisers to cast a wide net, that immigrants are “animals,” that the activists defending them are “domestic terrorists,” and that the officers themselves have “immunity” from any form of accountability. Meanwhile, administration lawyers have brazenly lied to federal judges to supplement those deportation forces by deploying U.S. troops to the streets of American cities—seeking to break this country’s healthy antipathy toward domestic use of the military policing that dates back to the founding.
“They’re assaulting basic democratic ideals on all fronts,” said Dana Marks, an immigration judge who retired in 2021. “It’s really just classic authoritarianism. It always starts with the minorities. It always starts with the immigrants. If we don’t stop them, it will be American citizens. Congress, the courts, the people, we should all be jumping up and down and screaming about this. We need to be screaming that this isn’t America—that this isn’t who we are.”
I’ve been writing and reporting on policing in the United States for more than 20 years. I’ve spent much of that time writing about the effects of police militarization, or the way military weapons, training, uniforms, and culture have infiltrated domestic law enforcement agencies. But I’ve never seen anything quite like the last six months.
We’ve seen rapid normalization of abuses we once associated with authoritarian regimes or the old Iron Curtain countries. It’s now routine for masked, unidentifiable government agents to sweep people off the street and whisk them away in unmarked vehicles. Some of those arrested have been quickly shuttled off to detention facilities in other parts of the country without any notification to their families or attorneys. Others have been sent to a third country, often a country in the developing world to which they have no connection. Still others have been explicitly targeted for their political opinions, their activism, or their journalism.
The phrase “your papers, please” has historically been the sort of demand we associated with Hitler’s SS or the East German Stasi. Immigration officers now routinely stop people who simply “look like” immigrants and demand they prove their citizenship or legal residency. Legal residents who fail to produce documentation on demand have been fined, and flustered immigrants who fail to produce sufficient records or recall a Social Security number have been arrested.
The administration is also shredding due process. The United States government has extradited immigrants to a torture prison in a foreign country after lying to a judge, then falsely claimed it was helpless to get them back. Immigrants are now stacked in detention centers under already inhumane conditions that appear to be deteriorating. And in a brazen contravention of a principle ingrained in the American founding, the president and his aides have claimed the power to deploy active-duty troops in cities they allege have been overrun with migrants, crime, or homeless people—or merely those overseen by mayors or governors the administration dislikes.
Most alarmingly, the administration no longer feels obligated to even pretend that it’s observing norms and constitutional restrictions. “They just don’t care when judges or the public says they’re violating the law,” one longtime immigration judge, now retired, told me. “That’s unheard of in my lifetime.”
Over the last year, I’ve spoken to and met with immigration attorneys and advocates all over the country. Many who openly spoke with me prior to the 2024 election are no longer willing to be quoted, fearing retaliation against their organizations or their funders, or even against them personally.
In more recent months, I’ve also interviewed former ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials, and former Immigration Court judges who served across multiple administrations of both parties. Career legal and law enforcement officials tend to be circumspect in their critiques of fellow law enforcement officers. They tend to avoid casual references to police states, or comparing U.S. police agencies to those in authoritarian countries. That’s no longer the case. These career police executives and prosecutors now use language I’ve rarely heard from current or former government officials in my career.
“What we’re seeing is a disgrace to policing,” said Reneé Hall, president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, or NOBLE. Hall compares the tactics used by ICE and Border Protection officers to the worst abuses of the civil rights era. “We’ve made a lot of progress in policing,” she said. “They’ve wiped it out in months.… We’re back to letting police target people because of their skin color. We’re letting them kidnap people and take them to undisclosed locations. They’re barging into homes with no warrant. We saw them zip-tie young Black children—U.S. citizens—in Chicago. We’ve seen them use unnecessary force, slam people on the concrete. If I were just watching these incidents on television, I would think that we were not in the United States of America. Back then they wore hoods. Today they wear masks.”
“I’m horrified by what I’ve seen,” said Chris Magnus, who served both as Joe Biden’s CBP commissioner and as police chief of Tucson, Fargo, and Richmond, California. “I wish the public had a better understanding of the harm they’re doing. Because it’s going to take a very long time to undo.”
“I wish I had something better to say than that it’s really bad,” another former senior Department of Justice official told me. “But it’s really fucking bad.”
The new federal budget Trump recently signed into law will triple the ICE budget and significantly increase the budgets both for Border Protection and for the construction of new detention centers. Trump’s deportation force will be larger than all but a handful of foreign militaries. According to the Brennan Center, the 2025 budget for immigration enforcement already exceeds that of every other federal law enforcement agency combined. And going forward, spending from the “Big Beautiful Bill” on immigration alone will exceed total spending by every state and local police agency in the country.
And if there’s one thing this administration has made clear, it’s this: What happened in Chicago will soon be happening in cities around the country.
One of the more maddening patterns playing out in the federal courts right now is the administration’s exploitation of a legal principle called “the presumption of regularity.” The legal doctrine instructs courts to presume that government lawyers argue in good faith and don’t deliberately misrepresent facts. The doctrine has rarely been a problem, because most administrations have argued in good faith, even when making bad arguments.
In the months since Trump’s second inauguration, the site Just Security has documented more than 60 instances in which federal courts have ruled that Justice Department attorneys misrepresented the facts or the law.
This administration is different. As of this writing, in the months since Trump’s second inauguration, the site Just Security has documented more than 60 instances in which federal courts have ruled that Justice Department attorneys misrepresented the facts or the law. Some judges have done so with unusually frank language, including accusing the administration of outright lying. One judge wrote, “Trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”
Many of Trump’s power grabs are grounded in “