When liberals denounce Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, they often cast his immigration agenda as a case in point.
Back in June, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee decried the president’s “mass deportation operations” as the “stepping stone” to his “radical attempts to seize absolute power.” In the same statement, they condemned the administration’s deportation of noncriminal immigrants “as cruel,” lamenting the harms that it imposed on “law-abiding families.”
Personally, I agree with both of these indictments of Trump’s policy. But it’s important for Americans to understand that they can accept the first one, even if they reject the second: In other words, you don’t need to share liberals’ moral objections to large-scale deportation in order to accept that Trump’s handling of that task is intolerably authoritarian.
For many liberals, the most morally horrifying aspect of Trump’s immigration agenda is its consequences for the undocumented and their loved ones. Armed agents forcing children from their homes, breaking up families, and exiling hardworking people pursuing the American dream — all this seems needlessly cruel.
For precisely that reason, it strikes many progressives as evocative of fascism: The government appears to be tormenting a vulnerable minority population for the sake of tormenting a vulnerable minority population. Thus, from the left’s vantage point, the humanitarian critique of deporting non-criminal immigrants — and the anti-authoritarian critique of Trump’s approach to deporting them — can look like one in the same.
But not all Americans share these intuitions. A significant segment of voters (in some — though not all — polls, a majority) favor large-scale internal immigration enforcement. To them, liberals may sound as though we are equating “authoritarianism” with “the implementation of policies that I don’t like.”
Indeed, some voters may feel that large-scale deportation efforts are the opposite of undemocratic. After all, immigration laws are the byproducts of democratic governance: Our elected representatives chose to put certain restrictions on migration. When people violate those laws, they undermine the electorate’s sovereignty over an issue of public concern. From this viewpoint, deporting law-abiding immigrants may generate sad stories and ugly scenes. Yet were America to adopt the rule, “if you make it past the border, you can stay forever, so long as you don’t commit any crimes,” it would only encourage further subversion of its laws.
I think this line of thought puts too little weight on the welfare of the undocumented, the economic benefits of immigration, and America’s capacity to deter unlawful inflows through border enforcement. But voters should know that they don’t need to agree with liberals about all that in order to reject Trump’s immigration policies.
The case for deeming those policies authoritarian does not hinge on the righteousness of cosmopolitan moral assumptions or economic theories. Rather, that case rests on the myriad ways that Trump’s immigration agenda is egregiously undermining Americans’ civil liberties and democratic freedoms.
Below, I will detail five reasons why even conservative voters should consider Trump’s handling of immigration anti-democratic.
1) The administration is openly flouting due process
Even those who favor strict immigration enforcement should support immigrants’ due process rights. After all, it is due process that prevents the government from deporting lawful US residents (either by mistake or design).
Yet Trump has explicitly called for ending due process in immigration cases and taken various actions consistent with that authoritarian ambition.
During his first term, he declared that the government should be able to deport undocumented immigrants “with no judges or court cases.” Since taking office a second time, the president has sought to curtail legal protections for those accused of being in the country illegally.
First, the Trump administration has expanded the use of “expedited removal” — a process that allows immigration authorities to deport the undocumented rapidly, without a full hearing. Historically, this process was used in a narrow set of circumstances: When an immigrant is intercepted near the US border without a valid visa, credible asylum claim, or proof that they have been in the US for longer than two weeks.
The idea here was that migrants who have just crossed the border do not possess the same legal protections as longtime residents. In some sense, they are still seeking admission into the country, rather than permission to remain in it. Therefore, Congress and the judiciary concluded that the government could deny such migrants a full court hearing, in the interests of administrative efficiency, particularly when border agents were overwhelmed by large inflows of asylum seekers.
But Trump has sought to authorize expedited removal throughout the United States. Under his guidance, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a rule that would empower Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to summarily deport any suspected immigrants who can’t immediately prove that they’ve been in America for two years.
The risks of this policy to lawful US residents aren’t merely theoretical. Even in the absence of such broad authorities, ICE and Customs and Border Protection have wrongfully detained or deported legal residents, including American citizens. According to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report, between 2015 and 2020, ICE arrested 674 potential US citizens, detained 121, and removed 70.
Courts have intervened to block Trump’s expanded use of expedited removal, but the administration is appealing those rulings.
Meanwhile, Trump has sought to corrupt the independence of the immigration court system. Since taking office in January, 139 immigration judges have been fired, nudged from the bench with an early retirement offer, or involuntarily transferred. The purge is seemingly aimed at replacing neutral arbiters of immigration law with rubber stamps for Trump’s enforcement agencies.
Finally, and most appallingly, the president has infamously deported longtime US residents — who’d been convicted of no crime — to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where inmates are reportedly subject to torture and indefinite detention. In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the administration deported a resident unlawfully, and then claimed that it was powerless to reverse its mistake, since Garcia was now in the custody of a foreign power. The judiciary eventually forced the administration to return Garcia to the US. But his case illustrates the extremity of Trump’s contempt for due process.
2) Trump is normalizing the use of the military for civil law enforcement
The president has also deployed federal troops to oversee immigration enforcement operations, in defiance of local political authorities.
This is a severe breach of liberal democratic norms. Immigration enforcement is a civil authority. And in the United States, responsibility for upholding civil laws is supposed to lie with civilian officials — not the military — except under the most extraordinary circumstances. This division of powers is codified in the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of armed forces for domestic policing absent explicit congressional authorization.
The administration has flouted this convention by invoking an obscure 1903 law, which authorizes the president to call up the National Guard if there is a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” or “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
Yet Trump has effectively defined such a rebellion as any public protest — even nonviolent ones — against immigration enforcement. In a June memorandum, Trump authorized the Guard’s deployment to any “locations where protests against” ICE functions “are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.” In other words, the president asserted the authority to send the military anywhere in the US where a protest against his immigration policy is happening — or where his administration thinks a protest against its policy could happen.
The danger that this poses to democracy is straightforward. Unlike civilian police forces, the armed services operate at the president’s command. If his use of the military for civilian functions isn’t tightly constrained, there is a risk that he could exploit his martial authorities to insulate his regime from democratic control. Today, Trump is asserting the right to deploy troops to Democratic cities, to preempt protests he does not like. Tomorrow, he could do the same to obstruct the election of politicians he opposes.
Of course, that catastrophic outcome is far from guaranteed. But it is important to maintain institutional obstacles to it. Instead, Trump’s immigration agenda is eroding them.
3) Trump is using immigration enforcement to deter free speech
The president sees immigration policy as a tool for punishing speech he does not like.
This is not conjecture but a description of the administration’s official policy.
Earlier this year, Trump declared, “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” further promising to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”
This stance would be illiberal, even if the president were referring exclusively to genuine supporters of Hamas; the government should not revoke legal status from people on the basis of speech, no matter how reprehensible.
In reality, though, the administration’s complaint was with any immigrant who advocated for a staunchly pro-Palestinian point of view.
In March 2024, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national residing in the US on a student visa, co-authored an op-ed in her university’s newspaper, calling on it to divest from Israel and acknowledge the “Palestinian genocide.” This speech act put Öztürk on the radar of pro-Israel activists.
Upon taking office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Öztürk’s visa. Six masked, plainclothes DHS agents proceeded to abduct her off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, and send her to an ICE processing facility in southern Louisiana.
The ostensible rationale for this was that Öztürk had engaged in pro-Hamas activities. But internal State Department documents, obtained by the Washington Post, revealed that the government possessed no evidence that Öztürk had ever publicly advocated for Hamas or participated in antisemitic activities.
The administration has similarly sought to revoke legal status from two lawful permanent residents — Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi — who participated in pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University.
Federal courts have disputed the legality of all these actions, although Khalil presently faces a deportation order.
4) The government is shielding ICE officers from accountability
A core democratic freedom is protection from abuse by armed agents of the state. The Trump administration has undermined such liberty by insulating DHS officers from legal accountability.
It has done this through both formal and tacit means. On the first front, it has essentially shuttered the DHS’s internal watchdog offices — the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman — which sought to protect detainees against abuse and unfair treatment. The latter office investigated more than 11,000 complaints in 2023.
Meanwhile, the administration has condoned the decision of many ICE agents to operate in masks and plainclothes. This policy enables abuse by making it harder for the mistreated to identify abusive officers and thus hold them to account.
The threat of ICE agents acting abusively is not hypothetical. Recently, an officer was caught on video shoving a woman to the ground inside a New York City courthouse. Initially, he was relieved of his duties pending an investigation. Then, just days later, he was reportedly reinstated after facing no discernible punishment.
Critically, all this is consistent with the president’s own stated beliefs about how law enforcement officers should be allowed to operate. Speaking of his federal takeover of the DC police in August, Trump touted that, on his watch, cops would be “allowed to do whatever the hell they want.” He has also specifically said that when protestors throw rocks at ICE vehicles, the officers become entitled to “arrest these SLIMEBALLS” using “whatever means is necessary to do so.”
5) The pursuit of indiscriminate, mass deportation imposes inherent costs to civil liberties
To this point, I’ve been outlining reasons why one should consider Trump’s immigration policies anti-democratic, even if one regards mass deportation as legitimate.
But it’s also true that any attempt to deport millions of noncriminal, undocumented immigrants is bound to impose costs on Americans’ civil liberties.
The case for concentrating immigration enforcement on lawbreakers is not just humanitarian. Undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes are already known to the government and typically in its custody. As a result, DHS can remove them from the country without conducting sweeps that ensnare legal US residents.
Yet the Trump administration is committed to deporting as many of America’s 14 million undocumented immigrants as they possibly can. And that has led them to embrace tactics like going door to door in a Chicago apartment building, demanding families prove their legal status in the middle of the night; storming car washes and throwing senior citizens to the ground; and fining legal immigrants for not carrying proof of their status on their person at all times.
To refrain from these tactics, and set narrower enforcement priorities, is not to nullify America’s immigration statutes. The rule of law has never depended on perfect enforcement. Most crimes committed in the United States go unpunished, including nearly half of murders. We should obviously try to change that. But the only way to push the rate of unpunished criminality to anywhere near 0 percent would be to embrace gross violations of civil liberties: The government would need to surveil more or less all citizens more or less all of the time.
Most Americans would regard such enforcement as authoritarian. And so we instead accept that the police will prioritize the prevention and punishment of certain crimes, while acquiescing to a great deal of uncensured lawbreaking. Immigration enforcement entails similar tradeoffs.
That doesn’t mean that any enforcement regime broader than Joe Biden’s is fascism. But I would encourage those unmoved by humanitarian objections to mass deportation to consider the inherent, civil libertarian costs of such a policy.
In any event, reasonable people can disagree about exactly how the government should balance the objectives of enforcing borders and honoring civil liberties. What should be beyond dispute, however, is that eroding Americans’ most basic constitutional rights is never legitimate. And Trump’s immigration agenda does precisely that.
The post 5 reasons even conservatives should oppose Trump’s immigration policy appeared first on Vox.
