Demystifying the Authoritarian Endgames of Anti-Immigrant Scapegoating Under Trump
April 01, 2025
Since President Trump took office on January 20, he’s issued a torrent of executive orders aiming to criminalize, detain, and deport large numbers of immigrants. Close Trump advisor Stephen Miller promised that “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” and indeed he has. But why?
As of late 2024, more than half of registered voters (and 88% of Trump supporters) wanted to see “mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally,” and 88% of voters wanted improved “security along the country’s borders.” 82% of Trump supporters said that immigration was “very important” to their vote, second only to the economy. 39% of Harris supporters also said that it was very important. But why?
Over his entire political career and during the 2024 campaign, Trump has doubled down on the idea of the migrant threat. The Marshall Project tracked some of his major claims and how often he repeated them: “Unauthorized immigrants are criminals [said 575+ times], snakes that bite [35+ times], eating pets, coming from jails and mental institutions [560+ times], causing crime in sanctuary cities [185+ times], and a group of isolated, tragic cases prove they are killing Americans en masse [235+ times].”
Trump’s own business interests—and those of his backers in agricultural, high tech, real estate/hospitality, and financial sectors—rely heavily on immigrant labor. So does the entire US economy. In our unequal world shaped by 500 years of European colonialism, the wealthiest countries have low birth rates, aging populations, and growing demand for workers, while the poorest have young populations with limited opportunities. Yet the wealthiest countries still cling to colonial attitudes of white supremacy and its civilizing mission. They need exploitable workers, both at home and abroad, to sustain their economic systems, and they need rationales for continuing to exploit these workers and their countries. Demonizing immigrants justifies the system.
Anti-immigrant scapegoating under Trump has other purposes, too. It serves to distract domestic populations from Trump’s pro-corporate Project 2025 agenda, which promises to sacrifice the general population’s welfare to support corporate profits. And it justifies increasing authoritarianism and militarization of society.
While Trump’s executive orders seek to greatly expand the detention and deportation of people living in the United States without legal authorization—“undocumented” people—they also strip the status of millions who are currently here with legal authorization: revoking Temporary Protected Status, parole, work authorizations, student visas, and even green cards. One reason for this is to expand the numbers of people that can be deported, since despite the rhetoric and the spectacle, the administration thus far has struggled to achieve the rates it has promised. Another reason is to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment to justify other goals—like instilling fear, controlling speech, attacking higher education, and promoting the genocide in Gaza in the interests of the administration’s corporate and foreign policy agenda.
The cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Rasha Alawieh, Momodou Taal, and Yunseo Chung show one side of this onslaught; those of the Venezuelans spirited to extraterritorial detention in Guantánamo and El Salvador show another side. Both groups of cases involve attacks on people with legal status in the United States.
Khalil, Taal, and Chung were all non-citizen students, Khalil and Chung holding green cards (that is, legal permanent residents), and Taal a student visa. All have been targeted for speech violations, with the Secretary of State invoking an obscure provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act created at the height of the Cold War Red Scare. The provision authorizes deportation for any “alien” if “the United States Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” This provision is both completely arbitrary—the Secretary of State is not required to provide any evidence of any wrongdoing—and enables the government to claim, as it is doing in this case, that any criticism of US foreign policy could have “adverse” consequences. In these cases, they were targeted for protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Marco Rubio has bragged that he has already revoked the visas of hundreds of others on these grounds.
The case of Alawieh, a Rhode Island surgeon, is somewhat different since she was detained at the border (the airport) when she tried to re-enter the country with a valid work visa. At the border, Customs and Border Protection officials always exercise arbitrary and authoritarian power not constrained by the Constitution, since until they authorize entry, a person is considered to be outside of the United States. Still, her case sends the same message to those inside the United States: your legal rights are under threat if you even hint at opposing US foreign policy. Alawieh’s “crime” was attending the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader assassinated by Israel, while she was visiting her home in Lebanon.
The hundreds of Venezuelans also mostly held legal status in the United States, having entered through Biden’s parole program or with ongoing asylum claims or Temporary Protected Status. They were detained under a different law: the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows mass detention of non-citizens when their country has invaded the United States. It was last—and most notoriously—invoked to justify the mass detention of non-citizens and citizens identified as “Japanese” during World War II. By claiming—without evidence—that the Venezuelans were all gang members and—also without evidence—that, as such, they constituted an “invasion” by Venezuela, Trump justified the applicability of the act. By summarily dispatching parolees and asylum-seekers to extraterritorial gulags, Trump sends a message to anyone hoping for refuge or a better life in the United States—the same message that Kamala Harris conveyed in words: “Do not come.”
And the Trump administration sends a message to everyone in the US and, in fact, to everyone around the world: “Do as we dictate or face the consequences.” The message has clearly been heard by elite universities (Columbia, Harvard, Yale) that are scurrying to take over academic departments and remove or silence faculty, by powerful law firms ingratiating themselves by agreeing to support pet Trump causes, and by countries like Yemen, suffering a hail of US bombardment, or France, facing a Trump ultimatum to eliminate corporate diversity policies there.
Many of us are overwhelmed and bewildered by the daily onslaught. A lot of people are wondering what we can do. I would say, first, look for local organizations that are already mobilizing. Everywhere there are immigrants, there are organizations fighting for their rights. Some are focusing on the legal front: challenging the executive orders, working for local and state protections, raising money for legal aid, defending immigrants caught up in the system, pushing to create better laws. Others work on mutual aid and support for immigrants and their families, including food, shelter, education, transportation, and other basic needs. Some are organizing direct action, including civil disobedience, to impede immigration raids, and protests (including civil disobedience) against unjust laws and policies. Many are trying to do all of the above. There is no single right way to get involved: we need all of the above and more.
We also need massive education and publicity to turn around the national narrative so that people will stop voting for, supporting, and enabling draconian anti-immigrant policies. We need to be much more visible in the public sphere, on social media, in local media, in educational events and public forums, debunking the many myths about immigrants and showing how they are being scapegoated to promote an agenda that harms all of us.
About the Author
Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University. The author of several books including Undocumented and “They Take Our Jobs!”, Chomsky has been active in the Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for over thirty years. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.