Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, went into a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont on Monday for his scheduled naturalization interview. But instead of being granted citizenship, he was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which started the process to deport him. In a memo reviewed by the New York Times, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Mahdawi’s activities — like the protests he helped lead at Columbia — undermined US foreign policy and threatened the Middle East peace process.
What happened to Mahdawi is alarming on many levels. Mahdawi has legal status as a permanent resident and has lived in the United States for the past decade. He wasn’t charged with a crime, but, like Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian Columbia student and green card holder, was detained and ordered to be deported simply for having and expressing views that the secretary of state does not like.
And what’s especially notable about Mahdawi’s case is that he wasn’t arrested at his home or kidnapped off the street; ICE surprised him during a scheduled appointment with immigration services. In other words, he was arrested during a voluntary interaction with the federal government.
This is not the only case where the government has punished immigrants for following the rules. For years, the IRS has encouraged undocumented immigrants to file their taxes, promising to keep their data private so that they won’t be targeted by immigration agencies. But under the Trump administration, the IRS recently reached an agreement to share sensitive data on undocumented taxpayers with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This is just one of many promises that the federal government has walked back since Donald Trump returned to the White House.
The message that sends to immigrants is clear: You have no reason to trust us. Interacting with us might put you in danger. And the result will be more and more immigrants being pushed to live in the shadows.
“Part of the Trump administration’s strategy is to sow as much chaos, fear, and panic as they can in this moment to really make our communities feel as unsafe as possible,” said Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. “While they continue to say that they’re doing all that they can around safety and security, we know that that is not their point. Cruelty is.”
Why the IRS sharing data on immigrants is such a big deal
The IRS promise to undocumented immigrants that their data would remain confidential had been working: Undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in taxes in 2022, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Now, that’s all jeopardized, and the acting commissioner of the IRS is resigning, at least in part because of the deal between her agency and DHS, CNN reported.
Details of the data-sharing agreement are sparse because much of what has been made public has been redacted, so it’s unclear what kind of data the IRS will be passing on to immigration authorities or when. What’s available so far makes clear that ICE can request data from the IRS on immigrants who are under investigation, including those who have overstayed in the country for more than 90 days.
But while attorneys in the Justice Department have argued that the new agreement is lawful and “includes clear guardrails to ensure compliance,” that does very little to assure immigrants that the act of filing their taxes — or putting any trust in the federal government more broadly — won’t come back to haunt them later.
Seeing the IRS break with precedent will only discourage people from filing taxes and puts them at serious risk. “It’s like a broken promise. It’s like a betrayal,” one immigrant told NBC News.
“Instead of being thanked for their contributions and for them actually following tax compliance, now — because they followed the law, because they filed [their taxes] — their data is now being shared to be used against them for immigration enforcement,” Awawdeh said.
It’s not just undocumented immigrants who are worried
The IRS breaking its promise to undocumented immigrants goes a long way in undermining trust in the federal government. But the government is also betraying immigrants with legal status, as Mahdawi’s case shows.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants scheduled immigration-related appointments on a government-issued app during the Biden administration, just as they were encouraged to do. But under the Trump administration, the federal government has targeted those same people who had been legally living and working in the United States. Now, tens of thousands of them have been notified that their legal status is being terminated and that they will have to leave the country within a week.
Since President Donald Trump’s assault on universities and his crackdown on pro-Palestinian student activists, foreign students and legal immigrants have been living in fear of their visas or even green cards being revoked because they support Palestinian rights. Some stories are especially unnerving, like the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student who was essentially kidnapped by plainclothes officers while walking down the street and is now being held in a Louisiana detention facility. The Trump administration has also warned Harvard that it will block the university from enrolling international students if it does not share information about its student body with the federal government, including details on foreign students who have taken part in “dangerous” activities.
Even if immigrants become naturalized citizens, the Trump administration is still giving them cause for concern in what should otherwise be routine interactions with the government. Over the weekend, for example, Bachir Atallah, a real estate attorney who has been a US citizen for 10 years, was detained at the US-Canada border while going through customs, where he says US Customs and Border Protection handcuffed him and looked through his emails on his phone. Atallah says that the officers didn’t give him an explanation for why he was being detained. “Even if you ask questions, they say, ‘We don’t know, it’s the government,’” he told NBC’s Boston affiliate.
The Trump administration is, in other words, targeting people with every kind of immigration status, from undocumented immigrants to lawful permanent residents to naturalized citizens. Refugees are also under threat: A Venezuelan man who had refugee status was deported to El Salvador, where he’s now detained in a notorious maximum security prison, all for having a tattoo that authorities thought signaled gang affiliation. (Trump has even suggested sending native-born American citizens to that prison, saying, “The homegrowns are next.”)
All of these actions put immigrants — undocumented or otherwise — in an impossible position: If they don’t listen to the government, they risk running afoul of the law. But taking the government at its word might be what actually leads to their arrest and potential deportation. That means any contact with the government will feel especially risky, be it visiting the DMV, going through airport security, or reporting a crime to local law enforcement.
“It’s pushing people further into the shadows,” Awawdeh said. “One of our bigger fears, in addition to the way in which we have been seeing the administration targeting our communities, is that when [members of] our communities are actually victims of crimes, that they are not going to step forward, they’re not going to seek help.”
The steps that the Trump administration is taking are part of a bigger push to not only reduce immigration but to further establish tiered citizenship, where immigrants are a permanent underclass who can’t ever trust that the government will respect their rights, even after they become citizens. “This is the country that we’re living in right now,” Awawdeh said, “where the number one focus is to create a second-class citizenry.”
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