The Emperor's New Immigration Policy

Those scheming tailors are getting into everything

Image from The New York Times of the US Navy Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The "Migrant Tent Camp" at lower left is an area that was used to house boat people on their way to Florida, in the days when America used to welcome refugees from godless socialism, and still did during the Biden administration, from around 37 at the beginning of the term to 4 last February; it's theoretically capable of holding 13,000, but for the current exercise they've just assembled a camp of 150 tents. However, the actual 10 Venezuelan migrants sent to Guantánamo this week from America, in one of the first big moves of the Trump administration's mass deportation program, are being held seven miles to the east in the prison complex, not with but not too far from the 15 9/11 terrorism suspects still languishing there since 2002 or 2003.

This from The Guardian is hilarious on first look:

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

It seems in the first week of the Trump presidency when you Googled ICE operations or raids you got the impression of a great big wave of arrests across the country of unauthorized foreigners in the form of ICE press releases, but when you looked at the stories there was something wrong:

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.

They were old stories, some 13,000 of them, all timestamped "updated 1/24/2025", which shot them to the top of the Google and Bing rankings. Some Merry Pranksters (at the White House?) had spoofed us all into thinking Trump was keeping his violent Day One promises.

Two weeks later, of course, that's no longer happening. The press releases are still there, at the ICE website, but you have to look for them, and they're properly flagged as Archived Content and "not reflective of current practice".

On the other hand the front page has a different character; the new press releases are mostly stories of individual perpetrators they helped nab in the past week, most but not all of them undocumented and criminal both: eleven for Tuesday, including a North Carolinian named Bevier and a Texan called Perkins (a martial arts instructor) wanted on child pornography charges, and a Chinese guy wanted in China for embezzlement; nine on Wednesday including seven reputed Hartford gang members said to have been here since 2010, and four unrelated people picked up in El Paso; and there's an extremely vague summary of the previous week's operations, naming four of the cities in which they took place and no numbers at all, let alone numbers for who they picked up that had no criminal record in the US or their home country, whose home country was in fact the US, who were legal residents under the Biden parole of Temporary Protected States programs, or Dreamers under the DACA program, or parents of natural-born US citizens.

Meanwhile there is some reporting coming out about the awful and completely predictable horrors getting inflicted on people who don't quite fit Stephen Miller's playbook, like 18-year-old Carlos and the bike he earned working at a Texas pizzeria:

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Everything for Carlos is pretty new. He came to the U.S. from Venezuela in November through CBP One, a mobile app created by the federal government used by asylum seekers to schedule an appointment in the U.S.-Mexico border. Migrants who secured an appointment were allowed in the country temporarily while they await their immigration hearing.

Wearing a black hoodie, green cargo joggers, and a pair of white slides, Carlos tried a few wheelies in the parking lot of a gas station. Later that day he went to bed, looking forward to an early-morning ride with his cousins.

But that bike ride never happened. In the early morning of Sunday, Jan. 26, immigration officers knocked on the door of Carlos' home. Marian, his stepmother, opened the door and told Carlos to come out of his room. Minutes later, Carlos was in the custody of the federal government.

I mean, I know I'm still a sucker for NPR driveway-moment stories, though I can't imagine I'll ever have a driveway. But this story absolutely enrages me beyond bearing. The kid is such a self-evidently good kid, and his sweet parents are irreproachable. What does ICE want to punish them for?

We have no clue. Maybe they don't hate him at all but are just trying desperately to fill up some quota. In fact that's definitely the easiest explanation. This was always the weak point in Trump's mass deportation program, or its official rationalization, that they were just going to get rid of all the criminal "illegals" terrorizing the country with their rapes and murders, because there aren't enough of them.

That is, of course there are criminals in the unauthorized population, as there are in any population, but proportionately fewer than in the native-born population, if only for the obvious reason that they're more afraid of getting caught. And then far fewer in absolute terms, because it's a total of 12 or 13 million in a general population of 330 million. Even after Stephen Miller redefined "criminal" in 2017 to include people who crossed the border at the wrong place, which had never been regarded as a jailable offense before, and started applying it to asylum seekers whose crime was to throw themselves into the arms of the nearest border patrol agent and beg to be taken to see a judge.

So the ICE press office will do what it can to make it look like they're working the president's will, with these anecdotes, but they won't be doing it, because they can’t. There may be a new illegal prison camp in Guantánamo, but it won't be holding 30,000 prisoners. There will be at least hundreds, probably thousands of stories like that of Carlos and his family, of families ripped apart and kids delivered into chaos to satisfy the vanity of one fool who can't even understand why they're in the US in the first place, or what are the legal reasons for it (even though he apparently hopes to offer Temporary Protected Status to any Dutch-speaking Afrikaners fleeing from oppressive land reform in the Republic of South Africa, where white citizens, Dutch- and English-speaking, represent 7% of the population but own only a little over 70% of the available farmland, leaving Trump worried, presumably at the instance of non-Afrikaner but South African–born Elon Musk, that this is unfair to the whites).

It's going to be horrible, but it's also going to continue to be a total fraud, the Emperor's new immigration policy, which any little kid can see isn't a thing at all; and the ICE press office isn't going to be able to hide its nakedness for long. It will never be a Trump victory: it will just keep exposing some of the worst lies (about the immigration “invasion”) Trump used to propel himself into the White House, twice.