The Trump administration seems to revel in cruelty. Conditions in so-called “detention centers” (really immigrant prisons) are horrible. They’re overcrowded, people can’t even shower regularly, and families are torn apart. Meanwhile on social media, the administration posts “ASMR” videos of shackled migrants, “Studio Ghibli” style images of crying immigrants being arrested, and “video of alligators wearing Immigration and Customs Enforcement hats while dancing to Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’” to celebrate the opening of Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz” swamp prison in Florida. 

People who have lived here for decades are living in fear of being snatched off the streets and sent back to countries they have virtually no connection to. People who labor all day in the hot (and getting hotter) sun, fixing roofs and picking tomatoes, are now living in heightened fear that everything could be snatched away from them. The Trump administration vowed to prioritize deporting violent criminals. It’s not doing that. It’s terrorizing every unauthorized immigrant, even the ones who save lives. 

And it’s about to get worse. The Trump administration’s giant budget bill massively increases funding for immigration enforcement. The bill “earmarks some $170 billion for immigration- and border enforcement-related funding provisions,” including massive multi-billion-dollar slush funds for the Department of Homeland Security. The Trump administration is proposing to allocate three times as much money to ICE’s enforcement operations as it currently has, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the history of the nation and giving it a prison budget larger than the entire federal criminal prison system. 

Already, Trump’s raids are terrorizing immigrant communities. As immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explains, 

People aren’t going to their jobs. People aren’t going to school. Children are staying home. Parents are keeping their kids in safety. They aren’t riding the buses. They aren’t going to the parks. They aren’t going to restaurants.

This is just the beginning of the terror. It’s going to get much, much worse if this budget goes through, as the Trump administration adds 10,000 new ICE agents, which it aims to recruit quickly with $30,000 signing bonuses. Of course, we can expect that, given the administration’s desire to hire people quickly in order to reach daily arrest and deportation quotas, they’re not going to be putting much effort into screening out psychopaths, sadists, and outright neo-Nazis. 

All of this is totally cruel and unnecessary. The administration isn’t trying to deport people who actually pose some kind of demonstrable threat. It’s trying to get as close as possible to purging the country of everyone who entered illegally, and even anyone who did enter legally but whom the government doesn’t think ought to qualify as Americans. There’s no reason to do this. Entering the country without authorization should be treated as a simple civil infraction like parking illegally, punishable by a fine rather than removal. (Note that it is already not a crime to be here illegally, though it is a minor criminal offense to enter without authorization. People who enter on a legal visa and then overstay it have committed no crime.) We could simply let people apply for citizenship if they’ve been in the country a certain number of years. This is the way immigration used to work in the United States at the time of the country’s founding. There were essentially open borders, and citizenship became available to anyone who could prove they’d resided in the country for a certain period of time. A relaxed policy like this would be win-win for both immigrant Americans and native-born Americans, because immigrants are hugely important to the country’s economy. They want to be American, they work at higher rates than non-immigrant Americans, and they often embody all of the values conservatives say they want (pro-family, hard-working, patriotic, religious, etc.) We are talking about people who are totally harmless. What is the point of building a massive, costly police state and prison apparatus? Why would the country shoot itself in the foot like this? 

Well, one reason is that many on the right simply dislike people from different cultures and don’t think they belong. It’s simple bigotry. Look at how Republican congressman Brandon Gill responded to a video of Zohran Mamdani eating rice with his hands: "If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World." Influential MAGA activist Laura Loomer was even nastier, saying that “my dogs are cleaner and more civilised when they eat than little Muhammad.” Internet users quickly pointed out that Laura Loomer has herself eaten dog food with her hands, and personally I don’t think the culture that brought us the phrase “finger-licking good” is in a position to judge anyone for eating rice by hand. (Loomer appears to want to rid the country of its entire Latino population.) 

If you think the “Third World” is messy and gross, wait till you see how white people eat BBQ.

Many on the right then, are just bigots. They don’t like hearing people speak Spanish, they think Muslims are all secret jihadists, and they want to live in a Thomas Kinkade painting. I do think they are xenophobic in the most literal sense: they are terrified of foreigners. They share Trump’s view that “migrant crime” is coming for us, and they think we need to act fast in order to keep the Latino men in front of Home Depot from going on a rampage. They do not see immigrants as contributors to society, they see them as pet-eaters and rapists. Right-wing demagogues encourage this view by telling stories about atrocities that are either unrepresentative or fabricated. (Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem has lately taken to claiming that ICE recently deported a psychotic cannibal, a claim that ICE itself refuses to back up.) Right-wing politics is fundamentally based on fear of terrifying enemies, and I think irrational paranoia is basically the core of what’s going on with Trump and immigration.

The results of this are tragic. There is, of course, the direct consequence in cruelty. People who have been here for decades, who are pillars of their community, will be rounded up, placed in detention, and then deported, sometimes to their deaths. Families will be broken apart. People who have committed no crime beyond crossing into the wrong country will end up in an “Alcatraz” like facility as if they are hardened violent criminals.

Then there’s all the harm done through spending money on ICE enforcement rather than on anything socially worthwhile. With the money Trump is giving to ICE—more than $45 billion for “detention facilities” alone—we could end homelessness in America, a project that’s estimated to cost anywhere from $11 billion to $30 billion. In other words, we are choosing to have a homelessness crisis so that we can deport your neighbors. This is how warped the administration’s priorities are! And as Don Moynihan documents: 

The ICE detention budget is larger than the total budget for USAID used to be. The ICE detention budget increase is larger than cuts in education, or for SNAP in the BBB. It is larger than cuts to NIH, CDC and cancer research combined. It is on the scale of the type of supplemental budgets that the US passed when engaged in foreign wars

The gutting of USAID by Trump and Elon Musk is itself a crime against humanity, as I have noted before, taking medication and food from some of the poorest people on earth. The whole Republican agenda right now is a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, kicking millions off Medicaid and giving rich people enormous permanent tax cuts. But the building of a massive new ICE police state is so cruel, so pointless, so costly, especially considering how bad ICE is already, that it is difficult to understand how any person could possibly support the new Republican plans.

And yet the right are determined to get this through. JD Vance recently declared that the massive cuts to Medicaid are mere “minutiae,” their cost dwarfed by the enormous benefit that will come from the huge ICE budget. (“the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”) MAGA influencers are delighted with “Alligator Alcatraz,” despite its resemblance to an Alligator Auschwitz. Personally, I find it hard to understand how anyone could lose their soul to this degree. How can you so dehumanize our undocumented friends and neighbors that you relish the idea of putting them all in cages? Truly we are in dark times.

We need, now more than ever, an opposition that will fight back hard. Trump promised to build concentration camps. Well, now he’s getting the budget to do just that, and he’s trying to ram it through very quickly without much discussion, while the Supreme Court gives him greater power to do whatever he wants. We're not talking enough about how the Republicans are set to spend tens of billions of dollars building a vast network of new concentration camps. If you think ICE cruelty is bad now, wait until they have billions more dollars, tens of thousands more staff, and megaprisons.

This is the time: if we don’t resist now, we’ll look back later and wish we’d fought harder when it counted. I am encouraged by Mamdani’s example. He is someone who, despite death threats, had been unwavering in promising to defend immigrant New Yorkers from Trump. (Brad Lander, too, put his body on the line.) But we cannot rely on lone politician heroes. We need mass resistance and non-cooperation as this regime tries to build its deportation army and its vast network of brutal prison camps.