Originally published at Project-Syndicate | Oct 25th, 2024
Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged campaign rhetoric bears the hallmarks of a dangerous dictator eager to rule over a weak, divided, and paranoid society. If he is allowed to carry out the mass deportation operation he has promised, undocumented immigrants will be only the first to suffer.
MOSCOW – Vermin. Rapists. Poison in America’s blood. These are just a few of the dehumanizing epithets Donald Trump has used to describe Hispanic immigrants in the United States. Now, he is promising the “largest deportation effort in American history.” His vision of rounding up millions of people is unlike anything seen in a democracy and sounds more like Nazi-occupied France.
Try to imagine what Trump’s plan would entail. Immigration agents raiding farms and factories to haul away workers. School teachers and administrators coerced into informing on students. Covert surveillance of Roman Catholic churches, so that Hispanic worshipers can be nabbed after taking Holy Communion. Families being separated, with parents being sent away and potentially losing contact with their minor children.
Trump says that only undocumented immigrants – who Republicans claim number 20-30 million, far higher than authoritative estimates of around 12 million – would be targeted. But with over 60 million people of Hispanic heritage living in the US (as of 2020), does anyone imagine that his immigrant dragnet would not ensnare US citizens? US Immigration and Customs Enforcement hardly has a spotless record in this area, and it has never carried out anything like mass deportation on the scale that Trump envisions.
Trump would give his operation the patina of legality by invoking an old and obscure law: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which authorizes the president to “apprehend, restrain, secure, and remove” non-citizens within the US who hail from a “hostile” country. The act was supposedly intended for use during wartime, to prevent espionage and sabotage, but that is not why President John Adams enacted it. He wanted to intimidate the followers of his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, whom he believed were excessively influenced by French revolutionaries.
Since the US was not actually at war with France, Adams included a provision that the Act could be used against nationals of a foreign state that threatens an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” But, in practice, the Alien Enemies Act has been invoked only three times, always during major conflicts.
During the War of 1812, all British nationals living in the US were required to report their status. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson invoked the act against nationals of the Wilhelmine, Austrian, and Ottoman empires, as well as citizens of their ally Bulgaria, claiming that these so-called enemy aliens could be treated as prisoners of war.
Most infamously, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the act after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, with Japanese, German, and Italian nationals all being designated enemy aliens. The vast majority of those herded into internment camps were Japanese, but a number of German Jews – who had avoided Nazi death camps by emigrating to the US – were also rounded up and detained.
For Trump, immigrants themselves – not the countries they come from – are invading the US. And, as the Brennan Center for Justice warns, the Alien Enemies Act can be “wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty, and are lawfully present” in the US. There is no reason to think that Trump will not take full advantage of this, especially given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that current and former presidents enjoy near-total immunity from critical prosecution for their official acts while in office.
Discussions about Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have often focused on their economic impact which, according to Bloomberg, could cost the US economy some $4.7 trillion over ten years. Who will harvest produce in California’s Central Valley following Trump’s purge? Who will change the sheets and scrub the floors of hospitals and retirement homes? Who will bury the dead and maintain the cemeteries?
With Trump’s immigrant purge costing the US economy so dearly, the prices of food and other basic goods could skyrocket. Moreover, deportation itself is expensive. According to one estimate, deporting one million undocumented immigrants per year – the rate Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, has suggested – could cost $88 billion annually.
But the economic costs of mass deportation would be dwarfed by the costs to America’s soul. When I moved to the US almost 35 years ago, I thought that my experience growing up in the Soviet Union would be far removed from the ways of this supposed bastion of freedom and the rule of law. Today, I hear in Trump’s shocking campaign rhetoric – his menacing talk of “enemies within” and his utter lack of regard for rights, norms, and the rule of law – the echoes of something familiar: a dangerous dictator eager to rule over a weak, divided, and paranoid society.
What happens if the “sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door” – the terror of my homeland during the darkest years of Stalinist terror – becomes part of American life? Will Americans turn a blind eye to the immigrant holding camps that spring up? Will people become informers, turning in their neighbors and co-workers to Trump’s immigration police?
America is already being terrorized by Trump. That much is clear whenever powerful leaders debase themselves for his favor. Cardinal Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan, who grinned and laughed uproariously as Trump uttered countless vulgarities at a ceremonial dinner, is just one recent and shameful example.
Among some groups – not least the Republican establishment – such cowardice would almost certainly persist in the face of mass deportations. But anyone tempted to vote for a man planning to implement a policy of state terror should remember Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous post-WWII confession: “First they came for the Communists,” he began, “and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.” The same went for Socialists, trade unionists, and Jews. But then “they came for me,” he concludes, and “there was no one left” to speak out.
Nina L. Khrushcheva: Professor of International Affairs at The New School, is the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler), most recently, of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones(St. Martin’s Press, 2019).