Historians are

From the first days of state -based immigration policies to explicitly racist Chinese exclusion laws of the nineteenth century, the systematic deportations of Mexico in the mid -twentie With the government.

But after 100 days of the second term of Donald Trump in office, a few weeks marked by an increasingly aggressive authoritarian power and racist dehumanization of migrants, even some experienced academics are struggling to express what has happened.

“The cruelty with which they pursue the expulsion of immigrants is shocking for me,” said Mae Ngai, an acclaimed historian at Columbia University who has spent decades studying the origins of the United States immigration application regime, including the creation of the concept of “illegal foreigners” itself.

“The principle of checks and balances … That idea seems to have been thrown out of the window,” said Emily Ryo, a scholar of the immigration application and the legal system in the Law Faculty of Duke. He described what he saw as the hug of the administration of “this vision of the executive power without restrictions that seems to be crosses a more flagrant contempt for the existing legal system that is in force, in the challenge of judicial decisions and judicial orders.”

“We can see a future in which Trump decides to go back, so as not to burn the Constitution,” said Jeremy Slack, president of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas, El Paso, who has spent years surveying migrants at the border between the United States and Mexico about their experiences. “I’m not super optimistic about that.”

In conversations with News themezone this month, the academics of history and the application of immigration in the United States (historians, sociologists, legal theoretical) sounded the alarms about what many described as generational abuse of power by Trump.

They made it clear that the tools available to Trump (dehumanization, surveillance, detention, expulsion) have been part of the presidents of the presidents. But they also distinguished what has made these last 100 days so extraordinary: Trump’s aggressive seizure of power and his contempt for anything that can restrict him.

“It is important to understand that we have never had a president who uses power and instruments of power, in this way,” said Benny Andrés, professor of History at North Carolina University in Charlotte, who last year co -edited. A special number of California History Magazine Marking the 100th anniversary of the border patrol.

“No one has boasted from traditions or authority like him. The system is stressing on purpose.”

‘Anyone is at risk’

More than any specific policy, Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda is emphasizing the bases of the United States constitutional system.

Trump has sent At least 288 people that they had previously been living in the United States, mostly Venezuelans, some Salvadorans, to the brutal center for the confinement of El Salvador’s terrorism, despite several federal judges explicitly order otherwise. More could followand the administration has similarly used Guantanamo Bay to house migrants, echoing past Uses By presidents of both parties.

Cecot is known for brutal conditions and unconditional life imprisonment. But none of the men sent there by the United States is being arrested as a result of any real conviction in a court of justice. Several lawyers and legal academics told News themezone that detained transfers comply with the definition of “forced disappearances”, where the Trump administration has not been any official recognition of who has been sent to Cecot, although there is no trace of men left in the United States.

The men were hurried to prison under a rarely used war power, the alien enemies law, or after having received standard deportation orders from a judge. The Trump administration has argued, almost completely without any evidence, much less criminal charges, that men are gangsters. Only in this saying, they have disappeared to a foreign black site, Maybe forever.

Even after the Supreme Court told the administration that a lower court was right by telling him to facilitate the return of a man in that group who had had a protection against being deported to El Salvador specifically, Kilmar Abrego García, the administration has He did not take action To bring it back.

Together with its use of CECOT, the Administration has signed for yearsapparently only due to the nature of your political Opinions. Often, these arrests are carried out without prior notice, using masked agents that quickly lead their subjects to several states, depriving access to their lawyers. (For many, this recalls the call Palmer Raidswhen the Federal Government arrested thousands of communists, anarchists, union members and others, and deported hundreds of them). It is said that thousands of student visas headlines were affected by the record purges of the Trump administration, which threw their legal status in question. The administration has said that these purges have stopped, for now.

Trump has also tried Final birth citizenshipThe Constitutional Right of Long Data that any person born in the United States, with rare exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats, is a citizen here. In Trump readingthis also excludes children born in the United States with temporary visa holders.

“The piece that really skip me is this idea that the law and the real legality of your [immigration] The state doesn’t matter, “said Slack. He pointed out that Vice President JD Vance has Calls “illegal” people Those who are in fact legally, and that the Trump administration has referred to any person here in violation of the immigration law, often only a civil crime, not a criminal, as a criminal. The administration has even attacked people with open asylum cases, who under the law of the United States entitle their day in court.

“You combine those two pieces, and basically it is giving a White letter To say: “Any immigrant is subject to anything we want at any time,” he said. “He First facie Affirmation that someone is illegal when we want, that is where it becomes really scary, because it means that each immigrant is under threat. ”

Then there is the issue of administration expelling American citizens from the country. In Three recent casesthe administration sent young children, one of them 4 -year -old cancer patient – To Honduras along with their mothers even though children are American citizens.

Historians have estimated that hundreds of thousands Of American citizens, mostly Mexican descent, they were similarly sent from the country during the twentieth century.

Throughout history, “we, as a country, feel strangely comfortable with that type of functional elimination of US citizens, but this looks different,” said Jennifer Chacón, professor at the Stanford Law Faculty that focuses on the Immigration Law, Constitutional Law and Criminal Law and procedure.

“If you know that this is a citizen, and you know that you should not be so that it eliminates citizens, it seems that you take the time to find out if there is in fact a family member in the United States with which the citizen child can remain.”

Chacón argued that the lack of due process for people who face the expulsion of the country, combined with the lack of investigation or responsibility for “mistakes” committed by immigration agents, is a dangerous combination.

“If there is no error cost, and there is no procedure protection, then it seems to me that anyone is at risk, particularly people who are vocally critical, particularly people who are a thorn on the side, particularly people who adjust phenotypically or descriptively in categories that the administration has labeled ‘dangerous’ and ‘and’ and dangerous and ‘poisonous to blood“”, Said.

“If there is no error cost, and there is no procedure protection, then it seems to me that anyone is at risk, particularly people who are vocally critical, particularly people who are a thorn on the side, particularly people who fit phenotypically or descriptively in categories that the administration has labeled” dangerous “and” poisonous to blood. “

– Jennifer Chacón, Stanford Law Faculty

A key official has threatened a Congress member with criminal prosecution for simply holding “knowledge of their rights” workshops. FBI agents recently arrested a state judge for thin accusations that an undocumented man helped evade arrest.

“[Between] Trying to block the federal funds of the jurisdictions of the sanctuary, and now trying to persecute the lawyers who are demanding them, they are really trying to close the resistance points that worked in the first Trump administration, “said Margot Moinester, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in St. Louis that focuses on the application of American immigration.

Referring to the attacks on the legal profession, Ry [immigration] work they have been doing, due to the fear of reprisals. ”

For Andrés, the most notable part of the administration execution agenda has been the almost silence of its co-equal branch: Congress. Other significant changes in application in the history of the United States have passed through legislation, he said; The legislation of the 1920s was “discussed, debated, reported” publicly for years. Now, he says, the Congress “does not work” and has not provided any significant control against Trump. Chacón similarly described a “legislative branch not totally dysfunctional entity, not working, not between the entity.”

“This is, for me, the most dangerous, most alarming result of the last three months,” Andrés said.

The control boom

To understand the Trump immigration application agenda, it is crucial to understand the history of the United States immigration. For decades, politicians of both parties have accumulated the government’s ability to stop and deport large -scale people, preparing the scenario so that Trump further pushes the envelope.

The federal government had not largely involved in the application of L to immigration for the first 100 years of the country. At the end of the 19th century, responding to a generation of Chinese immigrants and the Nativist reaction that followed, Congress approved a series of laws aimed at excluding the Chinese. The Johnson Realization Law of 1924, approved during the apogee of the Eugenics movement, then established quotas for immigrants of each nationality based on the 1890 census, disproportionately impacting the southern and east Europeans. The immigration and nationality law of 1965 redefined immigration qualifications, replacing national fees with family -based criteria and skills.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the law that possibly shaped our current situation more than any other: the illegal immigration reform law and responsibility for immigrants, or Iirira. “Ira Ira”, as it is called, expanded the reasons in which US residents could be deported and made it much more difficult for people to “legalize” their presence in the United States. Deportations shot dramatically.

The most recent legislation of immigration application to become law is the Law Lak Lak Riley, which adds even more reasons for the mandatory detention of undocumented persons. Now, even someone simply accused of stealing in stores must be stopped. The bill received the votes of 12 Senate Democrats in the last days of former President Joe Biden, and was signed in the law a week in Trump’s second mandate.

“The number 1 that has been promoting deportations [in recent history] It is the expansion of who lives in the United States that is vulnerable to it, and also, how the federal government has expanded its ability to find and apprehend people, “said Moinester, who has written about a” boom of control “: the process of application of American immigration becomes more punitive, expanding” the spectrum of deportation and, in turn, social control. ”

Via News

As the rules changed, so did its executors. Initially, the states handled immigration issues, then the Treasury Department and then the Labor Department. Finally, the Department of Justice took over. After September 11, 2001, the application of immigration was consolidated in the Department of National Security, and financing increased massively, as well as the use of for -profit prisons. What was once a local economic and labor concern had “come to be seen as a matter of national defense,” said Jonathan Cortez, professor of history at the University of Texas in Austin.

At the beginning of the 20th century, “the United States, for the most part, saw immigration as an act of good faith, as an act of coming to the United States mainly by economic promise,” Cortez said. As the decades advanced, “immigrants policies became tougher”

Trump’s immediate predecessors performed key roles expanding what some call the “deportation machine” of the United States. President Barack Obama still has the record of a single term for most interior deportations in the modern history of the United States, which he achieved largely through wide cooperation with local police departments. (The opposition to that registry gave rise to modern waves in the so -called “Sanctuary cities”, where local policy restricts cooperation with immigration agents).

In particular, a recent DHS memorandum explained that immigration agents would not affirmatively ask people if they were afraid of being deported to a determined “third country” or a country other than their original citizenship. Critics have said that this practice, which also happened during the Biden administration, means that migrants who do not know their ability to express the fear of being deported could be deported to dangerous situations.

Trump’s policy cited a June 2024 regulation, one that was issued in accordance with the repression of Biden asylum.

What Trump inherited

Trump’s second mandate expands in the inheritance he received from previous presidents and legislators.

For example, Trump has demanded that all undocumented people in the country register with the government, information that will surely be used to attack people for deportation, while threatening criminal charges against those who do not register. It can be a ploy of triumph to pursue criminal charges against a large number of people, but it is also based on a portion rarely used from the immigration and nationality law of 1952.

Trump has also exploited existing weaknesses in deportation protection for migrants.

In particular, the Biden administration offered temporary probation protections for hundreds of thousands of people who sought to legally enter the country, the protections that Trump is now working to strip.

For example, the Biden administration used a telephone application, CBP One, to allow migrants to program appointments in the entrance ports and enter the United States under a temporary probation program. Biden also offered temporary probation for migrants in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, “CHNV”, since the program is short -handed, if they organized their own trip, they organized a sponsor of the United States and approved the background verifications.

Trump has tried to reverse both programs, although, like many other initiatives, he faced judicial battles. CBP eliminated one on his first day: anyone with the application that is still on his phone will find that he was transformed last month into a platform to program “self -portedment.”

In more general terms, Trump began his second term with an avalanche of executive actions, almost closing the US refugee program, except, eventually, for White South Africans, and reverse the guidelines of the Biden era that prioritized the application of immigration against people considered public security threats. In addition to their attacks against probation receptors, Trump also left after thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians and Afghans who have received “temporary protected status”, which covers countries with extreme political or environmental instability.

And he has taken dozens of federal agents, from IRS, DEA, even special diplomatic agents from the State Department, outside other works and in the application of immigration, training them to enter schools and churches to make arrests. And, as in his first term, he has pressed to use the so -called “accelerated removal” to quickly deport people who have been in the country for less than two years, without a audience, instead of the old standard of 14 days.

‘Chill’ propaganda

Many of these movements remember Trump’s first term, which also included a policy of systematically separating the children of their parents on the border, and a prohibition of traveling in the United States for people from several Muslim majority countries. (A similar travel prohibition policy is in process again).

And there is no doubt that Trump came to power on January 20, 2025, with a mandate of voters to focus on immigration. Trump ran on a “mass deportation” platform inspired by a similar program during the mandate of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which bears the name of an insult and marked by a flagrant cruelty and violations of rights. And Trump won, ensuring not only the Electoral College, but also the plurality of popular vote.

But this is another point that concerns historians. Trump’s mandate is based on the persistent and racist dehumanization of immigrants, who, according to him, were “poisoning the blood” of the nation with “bad genes” and diseases. In an effort to deprive immigrants of public benefits, he even literally dehumanized them, digitally “killing them” of Social Security rolls, despite the fact that immigrants without status still pay taxes.

Like the previous anti -immigrant movements, Trump has blamed migrants for the economic displacement of US workers affected by broader market forces, NGAI said.

“It is very scary and sad that you have a section of the population that it likes this, and as Trump because it is extreme, outrageous,” he said, comparing images of Cecot detainees that shave after being sent there by the United States to the Nazi propaganda.

“It’s totally chilling.”

On Monday night, Trump showed some of Cecot’s images on a rally, while thousands of his followers cheered.

What should deal with a apparently dead racist and authoritarian government to seek “massive deportation” without protecting the legal rights of its residents, regardless of their legal status? Ngai and others said the story showed a path to follow.

“I think that every time we have had a reform in the immigration policy, it is because immigrants and their communities are organized,” he said, pointing out the success of activists to achieve immigration reform in the 1960s. “We must not rule out the organization’s capacity to organize immigrants communities.”

Chacón, from the Stanford Law School, said that given the apparent contempt of the administration by the courts, the public pressure was crucial.

“I think they have already indicated that it is not the law that has them, it is the public response that makes them responsible,” he said. “I suppose that I have already passed the point where I wonder, ‘Is the administration to comply with the law or not?'”

Instead, he said, it seems that “this is an administration that will respond to public pressure, and may not respond to much more.”