Shock and awe
On the morning of January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, through the windshield of her SUV in south Minneapolis. Good had just dropped her six-year-old son off at school. She died at the hospital. The Department of Homeland Security called her a “domestic terrorist.”
It was the ninth time federal immigration agents had opened fire on someone since September—and the most incendiary. In October, a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot Marimar Martinez, also a U.S. citizen, five times. DHS called her a “domestic terrorist” too, and charged her with assaulting federal agents—until prosecutors dropped all charges in November after evidence emerged contradicting the government’s account. Text messages showed the agent who shot her bragging to colleagues: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to conduct large-scale immigration raids, and over the last several months, they’ve carried them out with overwhelming force. In late September, federal agents rappelled from helicopters into a Chicago apartment building, breaking doors, throwing flash grenades, and zip-tying residents. According to locals, they dragged people naked from the building and held them in custody, including U.S. citizens. This summer, Trump said he’d ordered “the single largest mass deportation program in history.” His immigration-policy advisor Stephen Miller has pushed ICE officers to conduct sweeping raids instead of targeted arrests, hitting housing blocks and workplaces—convenience stores, restaurants—where undocumented migrants might work.
Trump says he wants to go further than any other president in American history—but that would be further than presidents who also firmly enforced immigration laws. Pro-immigration critics nicknamed Barack Obama “Deporter in Chief.” So how much is Trump’s enforcement push a break with the past—and how much is built on it?
Austin Kocher is a research assistant professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Kocher says it’s true that Trump’s enforcement regime is unprecedented in a lot of ways. Every key indicator of immigration enforcement has increased massively since his inauguration a year ago. In the first five months of his second term, arrests tripled. ICE officers now conduct massive street-level sweeps—something they rarely did before. And the administration keeps trying to circumvent, and sometimes break, laws that might restrain it.
Still, Kocher says, Trump’s enforcement push couldn’t have happened without the apparatus successive U.S. governments—Republican and Democratic—spent decades building. President Bill Clinton prepared the ground with his immigration reforms in the 1990s. Every president since has added new mechanisms of control. And even in the months before Trump’s return to the White House, the Biden administration was seeking to expand detention facilities. Now, Trump is testing the limits of executive power over immigration—and finding how few hold …
Gustav Jönsson: What did U.S. immigration policy and enforcement look like before last year?
