On The day he was sworn in to keep the president of the American Constitution, Donald Trump, began the efforts to rewrite it, issuing a predicting decree to put an end to the constitutional guarantee of the citizenship of the right of birth. This unilateral order presumed a series of alarming power captures during the following months, which concerns immigration.
Since the very beginning of his first presidential campaign in his second time, Trump has focused on the issue of immigration, not only test the limits of power, but consolidate it. Indeed, in my opinion, the path of authoritarianism is built on the back of immigrants.
As head of a legal organization which advocates immigrants, I am cursed in a first row vision of the framework which threatens to erode our democracy. While proclaiming immigrants ostensibly, what is constructed is both infrastructure and conformity which will facilitate a broader loss of rights for all Americans.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and the Republicans are methodically immigrant scapegoats, laying the foundations for an assault against constitutional controls and counterweights. Thanks to photos, political waterfalls and germs of fear, they made false crises (such as the baseless affirmation that Ohio Haitian immigrants eat dogs) to convince Americans in difficulty that immigrants caused their economic difficulties and threatened public security.
Taking fear and its mass deportation program when they take office, Trump immediately started to dismantle democratic guarantees. Legal researchers argue that he has violated the rights of the first amendment by arresting and trying to expel demonstrators, academics and immigrant leaders whose opinions with whom he do not agree and that he claims to have made statements or engaged in activities that constitute American interests. Experts also warn that Trump has stripped of these persons protecting the regular procedure for the fifth amendment, revoking their legal status without audiences or possibility of presenting evidence.
In accordance with the models of strong man’s diets, these actions seem to aim to terrorize, silence and even disappear the dissidents, while creating a culture of intimidation which obliges conformity to the public. And although the Trump administration suddenly reversed the plans to cancel thousand visas from international students, this cervical boost made life more difficult and disorienting for many.
Trump has created a new register requiring millions of undocumented people – even those who have pending immigration cases – to provide addresses and fingerprints while transporting recording proof at any time. Officials have owned a wide range of immigrants, especially in certain cases which have legal work status and even citizenship. This dynamic has created a cruel wrestling that requires an impossible choice: to record and risk immediate expulsion, or to refuse and be criminalized for non-compliance, destroying any path to legal status. The strategy deliberately manufactures fear and chaos while criminalizing communities.
This registration policy echoes the historical atrocities that have enabled serious human rights violations. In the United States, forced recording led to American Japanese internment during the Second World War and the profiling of male immigrants from 24 countries with a Muslim predominance after September 11.
Trump invoked powers in wartime to extend his scope and suspend the constitutional protections. Although many Americans can be shocked to learn that we are under “invasion”, Trump invoked the Extraterrestrial Enemies Act of 1798, which authorizes the detention and elimination of immigrants from hostile nations during the declared war. A federal judge appointed by Trump recently rejected the use of the Extraterrestrial Enemies Act to expel Venezuelan immigrants, but it was this legal precedent that facilitated the expulsion of hundreds of people in a notorious prison in El Salvador without regular procedure.
One of these people is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father of Maryland with the legal permission to live in the United States, even if the administration admitted having expected Abrego Garcia by mistake, Trump refuses to take it to bring him back, in open contempt of the Supreme Court and other decisions of the Federal Court.
During a White House meeting with President Salvadoran Nayib Bukele, the leaders of the two countries made it scandalous that they did not have the power to correct this serious error. Meanwhile, Trump is now playing publicly with the idea of expelling American citizens towards this same prison.
It may not be the end of the use by Trump of the excuse of “invasion” to illegally claim extraordinary powers in wartime. In one of his first decrees, Trump suggested that he evaluated the opportunity to invoke the 1807 insurrection law. His defense and internal security secretaries will not recommend, for the moment, to do so, but the potential impact: to mobilize troops to collect immigrants in American districts.
Although the aggression against immigrants requires our concern, we must also recognize it as the opening stage towards the dismantling of everyone’s rights. If we continue to normalize disappearances, silence foreign students and make detention without accusations or trials, applying these tactics to political opponents who are citizens will require little extension. And if the military forces kick your neighbor’s door, the moment to speak without fear will already have passed.
Trump is counting on fear to order our silence. Rather than acquiesce, we have to speak to defend our more and more fragile democracy before it disappears completely.
