The Secret Weakness of Trump’s Deportations
Pressure can work to bring people home.
IN SPITE OF THE DELUGE OF BAD NEWS about immigration, I was reminded this week that, as a retired farm laborer once put it to legendary Chicago journalist and radioman Studs Terkel, “hope dies last.” Specifically: No matter how far-reaching and unstoppable President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown seems, his administration is still vulnerable to pressure campaigns to release sympathetic immigrants.
Consider the case of a family that was recently detained in Sackets Harbor, a village in upstate New York. A mother and her three children were taken off a dairy farm and sent to a detention center 1,875 miles away in Texas. Local teacher Jonna St. Croix told NBC News that the two older children are students in her classes; she described them as polite and enthusiastic, and added that she gives them a snack when they ask for one. The principal of the children’s school, Jamie Cook, said “this is a carpool town,” and she has driven the kids to and from tutoring.
The community knew this family. And they didn’t take the news about them sitting down.
With signs and shirts that read “Snatching Kids = Lifelong Trauma” and “Stop Pretending Your Racism is Patriotism,” 1,000 protesters took to the streets—an astonishing number considering that fewer than 1,400 people in total live in the village.
Also remarkable is the destination the protesters marched to—because it turns out that one of the Trump administration officials leading the deportations has a home right in Sackets Harbor: “border czar” Tom Homan. “They can protest a vacant house all they want,” said Homan, who was in Washington at the time of the rally.
Still, the main novelty is the local community standing up in defense of its own. “When it happens in your backyard, I think that’s what garners people’s attention,” Jefferson County Democratic Committee Chair Corey Decillis told NBC reporters.
“In this difficult time, the strength and compassion of our community have shone through to support our missing family and the entire school community,” Jennifer L. Gaffney, the superintendent of Sackets Harbor Central School District, added.
Murad Awawdeh, the widely respected president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the incident will cause lasting trauma for the family, school, and community. But he commended the village community for uniting in support of the uprooted family.
“The Sackets Harbor community’s steadfast concern, care, and love for their neighbors is what brought this family home,” he said.
THIS IS NOT THE ONLY TIME WE’VE SEEN a pressure campaign succeed in gaining a person’s release from ICE detention recently. A woman from El Monte, California named Yolanda Perez was detained on February 24 despite being the primary caregiver for her 21-year-old daughter, who has bone cancer. Anger quickly grew over her detention, and this anger gave rise to energetic protests outside the detention center where Perez was being held. The crowd included activist Flor Martinez Zaragoza, who used her popular social media accounts to keep people across the country updated on the legal twists of Perez’s case. The judge eventually set a March 20 court date but then expedited a bond hearing to March 11, according to information Martinez Zaragoza posted to Instagram. The judge ended up releasing Perez on bond that day.
“It’s one less separated family, one less separated girl from her mom,” Martinez Zaragoza said through tears the next day. “Shoutout to everybody that signed a petition, shoutout to everybody that called ICE to free Yolanda, shoutout to everybody that donated to this family, shoutout to the reporters that shed light on this story because this is what it takes. We did it. This is something the community needed to see.”
There’s also Bradley Bartell, who voted for Trump only to see his Peruvian wife, Camila Muñoz, arrested within a month of Trump’s inauguration. While the couple was returning from their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, Muñoz was arrested and shipped to Louisiana. Her case gained national attention after being reported by USA Today, and she was released last Friday after 49 days in ICE custody. Speaking to the immigration judge at Muñoz’s bond hearing, the government’s lawyer noted, “This case has been in the news.”
It’s important to note that this tactic has its limits. ICE has started detaining legal, fully documented, noncriminal residents—people like Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk—but the furor and attention drawn to those cases have not led to their release. It’s becoming clear that those apprehensions are part of a larger strategy to revoke visas and even green cards if the holder has crossed the government; hundreds of such visas have been revoked so far, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed last month. While many people are horrified by this use of government power, Trump’s base, having been treated to years of alarming right-wing coverage of campus protests, might be more comfortable with alleged student troublemakers being grabbed off the street and cast out of the country. The administration’s targets are simply less sympathetic to them.
The political dynamics of the case of the purported Venezuelan gang members sent to a notorious El Salvador prison are similar. 60 Minutes reported that 75 percent of those deportees turned out to not have criminal records. But for the media-fixated Trump administration, the Venezuelan detainees’ rendition to CECOT is a political winner.
But detaining a mother and her three children hundreds of miles away is not, apparently, a political winner. Nor is detaining the caregiver of a girl with bone cancer. Or the undocumented wife of a U.S. citizen.
Some data suggest this isn’t just a vibe, or a series of unconnected local phenomena. A recent Pew poll showed that among immigration moderates—Americans who haven’t gone full MAGA and don’t believe every immigrant should be deported, but who also don’t think everyone should stay—only 5 percent support deporting the spouses of U.S. citizens.
As the grim cavalcade of news about the Trump administration’s mass deportation program continues, it’s worth paying attention to the places where that program appears to be on its shakiest footing. And lately, it’s started to seem as though when Americans stand up for their neighbors through protests, phone calls, and media coverage, they end up delivering a shove that throws the administration off balance—and sometimes people have gone home to their families as a result.
One Last Thing
ProPublica offers a look “Inside ICE Air” with a warning from the flight attendants working on deportation planes. According to them, disaster is “only a matter of time.”
My hope is that we can someday deport Tom Homan to a horrible place, forever. What a monster he is. A hateful piece of toxic garbage. I would rather live in a country of undocumented immigrants and the rare -- rare! -- few who commit crimes than in a country with Trump, Homan, and every last one of the current administration.
Greedy, barbarous and cruel. This is Trump’s vision of America. We cannot accept this.