No, Not All Undocumented Immigrants Are 'Criminals'
Mass deportation is a dog and pony show serving as cover fire for the rising kleptocracy
In college, I was arrested for throwing an off-campus toga party. My roommates and I were charged with “keeping a disorderly house,” an old Massachusetts law originally intended to prosecute brothels and gambling rings. Today, it’s typically used to punish college kids for throwing loud parties.
About a third of American adults have a crime on their record, but would you call a third of Americans criminals? Would you compare party-throwers to murderers? No sensible person would.
Therein lies the reckless insincerity of labeling all undocumented immigrants “criminals,” as the White House press secretary asserted in a press conference last week. It conflates those who only have immigration violations on their records with those with serious criminal histories.
To better understand where undocumented immigrants sit on the continuum of criminality, we must understand where an immigration violation sits on the same continuum.
The following are a couple of the most common immigration violations: overstaying a visa and entering the U.S. without authorization. The former is a civil violation adjudicated in an immigration court, and the latter is a misdemeanor, which rises to a felony on a subsequent offense.
A civil violation is not considered a crime, resulting in no jail time. It is punishable by fine or other penalty. Examples of civil violations include jaywalking and illegal parking. These are as minor as legal infractions come.
A misdemeanor is a minor criminal offense. Examples include shoplifting, vandalism, and, in Massachusetts, throwing a loud toga party.
Whether a civil violation or a misdemeanor, an immigration violation does not equal the severity of criminality that the Trump administration routinely levels at undocumented immigrants: rape, murder, drug trafficking, etc. Those are all serious felony violations.
Why might the Trump administration paint immigrants with a such broad brush? To reach their publicly stated detention and deportation targets, of course. There simply aren’t enough undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions to make good on those promises.
, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University, does a superb job breaking down the numbers in his evidence-backed article, “Will Trump's Immigration Enforcement Policies Target Dangerous Criminals? - A Close Look at the Data.” I highly recommend that you read the piece in its entirety to appreciate the context and nuance, but this is the crux of it:
“A review of the available data reveals a simple empirical reality: the only way for the Trump administration to increase all of its immigration enforcement numbers (arrests, detentions, deportations, etc.) is to target people who have no criminal convictions.”
Unfortunately, mass deportation comes with a heavy human toll. As , a former Border Patrol agent, frequently reminds us on her Substack:
“There is no such thing as a humane mass deportation. There will be concentration camps on military bases, separations, assaults, sexual assaults, child molestation, human trafficking & deaths that this administration, Border Patrol, ICE & CBP will attempt to hide.”
To make mass deportation palatable to the American public, this administration prioritizes depicting all undocumented immigrants as “criminals,” willfully omitting the critical distinction between immigrants with serious criminal histories and those who only have immigration violations on their record. Putting them all in the same bucket is not just deceptive, it’s morally bankrupt.
The dehumanization of undocumented immigrants hinges largely on their perceived criminality. If one allows room for nuance, it becomes harder to justify the miseries they endure. If they’re all killers and rapists, however, Americans have no problem looking the other way as ICE, CBP and Border Patrol carry out unspeakable cruelties.
What’s worse, all that suffering is for naught. Mass deportation hardly makes this country safer, and in some cases may even make communities less safe. That’s because the majority of undocumented immigrants don’t have criminal convictions. There’s even evidence suggesting that undocumented immigrants are more law-abiding than the U.S. born.
Mass deportation is a dog and pony show meant to widen divisions and stoke outrage, selling a fantasy of law and order in exchange for the abnegation of our humanity, tolerating and, in some cases, championing the persecution of mostly brown people who braved treacherous byways in search of work or relief, all while the surging kleptocracy robs us blind.
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Well said. If this administration was concerned about public safety and preventing crime, they would have kept the thousand or so J6 convicts in jail, many of whom had prior violence and sex crimes before the failed insurrection.
THIS. 100%.
Cruelty is the point. My heart is broken over this needless cruelty.
In solidarity.