Trump Wants Immigrants to Fight

Biden wants them to thrive.

Sulan, a migrant woman from Venezuela, is comforted by her daughter as she cries while retelling her journey to reach El Paso, Texas on April 2, 2024. (Photo by Christian Monterrosa/AFP via Getty Images)

IN 1835, P.T. BARNUM BOUGHT an enslaved black woman named Joice Heth and marketed her as George Washington’s 161-year-old, forty-six-pound nurse—“The Greatest National and Natural Curiosity in the World.” She was “the first human oddity” his circus ever exhibited, but far from the last.

Nearly a century later, circusgoers could see spear-carrying men in loincloths; Clicko, “the wild dancing bushman” of Africa; and “Genuine Ubangi Savages” with “mouths and lips as large as those of full-grown alligators,” also advertised as “monster-mouthed” savages and the “World’s Most Weird Living Humans From Africa’s Darkest Depths.” There were Asians, Africans, and Native Americans—actual human beings—on display at fairgrounds, theaters, and zoos across America and Europe.

These were the types of images that jumped to my mind with Donald Trump’s suggestion—twice in one day—that migrants fight each other for the entertainment and profit of others. “These people are tough, and they’re nasty, mean,” he told Christian conservatives at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event Saturday in Washington. “They’re going to start hitting us very hard. These people are bad.” He added: “We have probably close to 20 million people [actually, more like 11 million] that came in from all parts of the world and they’re going to have to be gone. They came illegally. Many, many people coming in from prisons and mental institutions.”

Trump floated the “migrant fight league” again in Philadelphia, as well as the slurs, generalizations, conflations, and exaggerations he’s been pounding at since 2015: Undocumented immigrants are not wonderful people, they are “drug dealers, gang members, killers in so many different ways. . . . On Day One I will seal the border, stop the invasion, and send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens the hell back home.”

The reality is that Biden was ready to tighten the asylum system and border security months ago. But on Trump’s command, conservatives abandoned the tough bipartisan package negotiated by one of their own, Sen. James Lankford, and backed by the Trump-friendly border patrol union. The former president said he wanted to campaign on the issue—and that is one promise he’s kept.

Biden risked the wrath of the left early this month by authorizing easier removal of undocumented asylum seekers and closing the border when it was overwhelmed—as it is now. Last week, he balanced that by allowing certain noncitizen spouses and children of U.S. citizens to apply for lawful permanent residence without leaving the country (as is now required) and with legal permission to work. The order also adds stability for some undocumented young people, including those protected by the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which is facing legal challenges.

Immigration policy is one tightrope of the many Biden has to walk this year, and his paired executive orders might work. Most Americans support their goals, according to new Equis Research polling of seven swing states and four that lean Democratic. “Americans prefer a both/and approach to immigration,” Equis cofounder Carlos Odio told journalists last week. “They want to see order at the border, but they also want to see something done for those who have been here a long time, like the families that we are talking about today.”

When I asked if Biden could or should have protected these families earlier in his term, Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA, an organization that provides services to immigrant families, summed up his reaction this way: “It’s late, but it’s super welcome.” Andrea Flores of the progressive group Fwd.US, noting it was left out of the Senate package, called it the “biggest win for the immigrant rights movement” since DACA.

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BIDEN FRAMED HIS NEW POLICIES as keeping families together, consistent with the Equis research and a stark, unavoidable contrast with Trump’s almost unbearable family separations. His administration removed over 4,000 children from their parents, infants to teens, in a chaotic process with no plan or system for reunification. A Biden task force and other efforts have returned about 3,200 to their parents, but 1,400 were still separated as of last month, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Biden’s new policies make human, economic, and political sense, especially compared with Trump’s past cruelty and future plan to deport millions. That may be what sent Sen. Lindsey Graham, a faithful Trump disciple, into a tailspin on Fox News Sunday. Lawless, disastrous, and “beyond reckless,” he said of Biden. “He took a gallon of gasoline, and he poured it on fire.”

The reality is much more mundane. The new Biden policy will affect about a half million people (not millions, as Trump said in Milwaukee) who were married by June 17, at least a day before this June 18 policy took effect, and had been in the United States for at least a decade by June 17. Those eligible have been here an average of 23 years, the administration said. This is what House Speaker Mike Johnson calls “amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.”

Who are we really talking about? One story I have never forgotten is about an Indiana family torn apart as a result of an unforgiving, illogical immigration policy at the beginning of the first, and hopefully last, Trump administration.

On a sightseeing trip to Niagara Falls in 2000, a young couple took a wrong exit and ended up at the Canadian border. The husband, who had illegally entered America from Mexico two years earlier, was arrested and ordered to leave the United States within sixty days. But his wife was pregnant, so he stayed and tried to fix his status.

He got a driver’s license, a Social Security card, and a work permit, all in cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He worked at a restaurant and eventually bought it. He checked in with ICE annually. And his wife voted for Trump in 2016 because she thought he would only deport “bad hombres.”

Instead, three weeks after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, when her husband walked into an ICE office for his yearly check-in, the agents for the first time acted to enforce that 2000 removal order. This time, under a new president, he was detained and sent to Mexico—so quickly that a judge did not have time to stop it. His attorneys had planned to argue that he never should have had a final order of removal, and they kept filing in different jurisdictions as ICE moved their client from place to place. But they were too late.

His wife and three younger children initially joined him in Mexico, but I don’t know how long they stayed there; the family’s fate is unclear, at least to me. I have tried to get basic information from his lawyers: Are they together? What country are they in? Did he ever get that green card? Is he a permanent resident, or maybe even a citizen? If not, might he qualify for Biden’s new policy on undocumented spouses married to U.S. citizens?

I didn’t get answers, but I’m betting that at some point in the last seven years, this story had a happy ending. Otherwise, this family—the Beristains—might be willing to once again risk the spotlight in hopes it might help them. That spotlight would certainly help anyone deluded about what Trump intends and might just pull off: Branding all undocumented immigrants as criminals who must be detained and deported as quickly as possible. The dads and moms, the business owners, the employees, the doctors and nurses and lawyers and truck drivers, the grandparents and children and students. Millions of them gone, along with my America, and probably yours, too.