There’s a video circulating on social media of a Latino man walking into a Target store with a US passport glued to his forehead. “Me walking around with my passport to avoid ICE questioning me,” the caption reads, a laugh track in the background.
It’s dark humor, for sure, and the comedy only works because it’s true. Now more than ever.
On February 25, the Trump administration issued its latest guidelines on immigration enforcement, creating a national registry requiring the estimated 13 million undocumented immigrants now living in the country to register or face criminal prosecution.
“They are reanimating a provision of US immigration law that has been dormant for decades that requires certain groups of non-citizens to register with the government,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director with the American Immigration Council.
That provision, the Alien Registration Act of 1940, passed on the cusp of WWII and the onset of the Cold War, targeted with a broad brush any non-citizen for suspected ties to communist or fascist groups. It cast a shadow of fear in immigrant communities across the country.
“This will force many people… to make a very hard choice between two options that carry serious risk,” Gupta explained. “Either register as required and be subject to removal, or don’t register to avoid mass deportation and then be subject to criminal prosecution.”
She added, “It leaves non-citizens between a rock and a hard place.”
Gupta spoke during a virtual press briefing hosted by the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice looking at the latest steps taken by the Trump administration as it pursues its campaign of mass deportations.
Under the new requirements, all individuals who entered the country without a visa—regardless of how long they have lived here—will be required to register and carry proof of that registration at all times.
Immigrant rights groups say the language of the the current measure is a draft and that further amendments or changes could be made. In the meantime, Gupta warns it will likely lead to cases of racial profiling.
“If you are a federal agent and asked to find people in violation of this requirement, you are being incentivized to profile,” she said. “And that will be targeted toward citizens, non-citizens with status and the undocumented.”
Carlos Guevara, senior director of policy at the Immigration Hub, described the measure as a “nationalization of the ‘Show Me Your Papers’ laws,” first passed in Arizona and Texas in 2010, authorizing law enforcement to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of not being in the country legally.
While the ACLU and others sued to block implementation of the Arizona law, known as SB1070, arguing it violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the Supreme Court has largely left it and similar legislation untouched.
Any litigation around the current measure would come once the language is finalized and issued, explained Gupta, noting several organizations are already considering filing suit.
According to Guevara, children are increasingly vulnerable under these new regulations.
“We have six million American kids who live with an undocumented loved one,” he noted, adding the “climate of fear and uncertainty” is driving families to keep their kids home from school, the hospital, church, all places no longer seen as off limits to federal immigration agents.
Reporting out of San Diego recently noted the presence of ICE vehicles outside a local clinic, with health care providers attesting to a subsequent drop in the number of patients they are seeing.
Guevara said these moves are in synch with Trump’s broader “deportation agenda,” including a reduction in the number of immigration judges and a recently passed house bill that threatens to strip public funding for vital health care programs.
The goal is to make conditions such that migrants will opt to self deport, said David Leopold, former president and general counsel with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, an unlikely option for many, if not most migrants here.
“We are dealing with folks who have been here for decades. They’ve raised their families here. Self-deportation or just going back to a country you have no memory of, is not as easy as it sounds.”
An estimated 80% of undocumented immigrants in the US have lived here for 15 years or longer, data show.
Pointing to the economic harm Trump’s policies could inflict given the pivotal role immigrants play across a number of vital sectors, he adds, “This policy is about self-deporting our own economic advantages.”
The number of deportations during Trump’s first month in office are in fact lower than numbers seen during former President Joe Biden’s final months in office. But the panelists agreed the administration is actively taking steps to bolster infrastructure—including through the expansion of private detention centers—to house an expected increase in the number of migrants detained.
“The administration is trying to rapidly expand its infrastructure to carry through on its threat of mass deportation,” Gupta said. “They are asking congress for money to set this up, to expand detention capacity.”
With the new registry, the government can also now rely on federal prisons. “They can prosecute someone put them in federal prison for 6 months before initiating a removal process.”
With that expansion into private prisons comes a loss of accountability, transparency, and access by legal aid providers, something Gupta said is already being seen in places like Maryland, where lawyers struggled to meet with clients detained for a prolonged period.
According to Leopold, when it comes to immigration, media needs to help the public better distinguish fact from fiction, including the fact that being undocumented is not a criminal act warranting imprisonment but a civil violation.
“Pick any term you want from 1930s Germany and replace it with immigrant,” he said, describing the current atmosphere. He added, “It is going to get much worse than we see today… This is just the beginning.”
Image via Picryl
