The Trump administration is often most shocking when it disregards rights many Americans have blithely assumed to be universal. Of course you can’t be punished for writing an opinion essay, because the United States has freedom of speech — except the Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested by masked agents in broad daylight after adding her name to an opinion essay for the student paper. Of course you can’t be imprisoned indefinitely or banished without trial, because the United States guarantees due process of law — except that the administration did just that to more than 200 Venezuelan men this spring.
Of course law enforcement can’t tear-gas you for protesting an immigration operation. Of course the military and the National Guard can’t be deployed to your street when your local authorities say the situation is under control.
It’s not a coincidence that all of these shocks to the conscience are tied to President Trump’s efforts to carry out a mass deportation immigration agenda. Almost five months into his term, the administration has struggled to make good on the “mass” part, but we are now getting a glimpse into how it might do so. It was never going to be possible to deport millions of people, as he promised, without stomping through American communities. This remains both the administration’s signature political issue and the lens through which Trump officials appear to see the world: rights for some and a show of force for others.
The rights to free speech, due process, habeas corpus — these have never been as robust for noncitizens as they have been for citizens, and it has long been disputed exactly how far they extend. The administration has taken advantage of that vagueness, advancing the radical notion that noncitizens simply do not have these rights at all.
The executive branch does not get to impose its will on the law by fiat, and the courts have attempted to hold it in check and, in some cases, have succeeded in doing so. But the administration’s reaction to any setback has been to impugn the idea that it can be challenged at all — by courts, by elected officials, by ordinary citizens assembling in protest.
All this adds up to an insistence not only that noncitizens do not count as “persons” with the rights the Constitution guarantees but also that no one can hold the government accountable for what it does to noncitizens.
The administration’s actions last week, calling the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from overwhelmingly nonviolent protests, are the culmination of months of efforts to deny that immigration enforcement can be criticized or even scrutinized. The confrontation with Americans exercising their First Amendment rights was inevitable. It is impossible to act as if immigrants have no rights without, eventually, infringing on citizens’ rights to stand up for them.
To demand both absolute power and absolute impunity is the demand of a tyrant.
It has long been easy for citizens to ignore the ins and outs of immigration policy when they are not personally affected by it. That ignorance was cushioned by the unspoken assurance that the people running America believed in the myth many of us were taught in school: that there was something aspirational about being an American, a country founded on universal rights, and that America had drawn generations of immigrants to its shores. If America is both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws, as we’ve so often been told, the government could be trusted to respect both.
But this administration doesn’t believe in our nation-of-immigrants identity. And it turns out that a government with that predilection has a lot of tools at its disposal as it tries to curb the rights of noncitizens. Take the invocation of Title 42, a public health emergency measure passed in 1944, which was imposed in 2020 by the first Trump administration and continued for some time under President Joe Biden to keep out asylum seekers during the Covid pandemic. More recently, the Trump administration has attempted to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 (last used in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor) to justify expelling people accused of being gang members and sending them to Venezuela.
Much of modern immigration law was written during the Cold War. The Cold War ended, but the government’s power to exclude persists — partly in the form of a provision that allows the secretary of state to unilaterally strip a visitor’s legal status if that person might endanger the United States’ foreign policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked this phrase punitively against both student-visa holders like Ms. Ozturk and permanent residents who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, including Mahmoud Khalil.
For nearly 60 years, since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, the Sixth Amendment guarantee to the right to counsel has been interpreted as the right to a government-appointed lawyer. But because immigration proceedings are civil rather than criminal, noncitizens facing deportation have never had the assurance that a lawyer would be found for them if they could not afford one. Hundreds of thousands of people are deported each year from the United States, and many face their case without counsel. This has begun to raise concerns among progressive Supreme Court justices, but it remains the standard.
Since January, administration lawyers have spent week after week in court arguing, not always successfully, that there is no obligation for the government to correct an erroneous deportation or even to tell judges when flights departed or might depart for other countries. Federal judges have repeatedly had to order the administration not to hold or transfer detainees because the government is violating its obligation to honor writs of habeas corpus — that is, the right to be brought before a court to challenge one’s detention. In response, administration officials have threatened to suspend the writ of habeas corpus entirely.
Immigration hearings are generally open to the public, but ICE agents have begun to deny admission to anyone who lacks an appointment and to arrest advocates reportedly attempting to exercise their rights to observe court proceedings. When staff members for Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, met activists in his district office after observing officers detain migrants in the building, federal agents handcuffed one of his aides, accusing the office of harboring rioters — as if monitoring the government’s compliance with the law were something only the lawless would do.
The president of the Service Employees International Union of California, David Huerta, was federally charged with conspiracy to impede an officer, accused of blocking a gate at a protest. And Representative LaMonica McIver, Democrat of New Jersey, was federally charged for “forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers” during an altercation in her state outside an ICE detention facility, where members of Congress are supposed to be given free entry to monitor detention conditions. Members of Congress were blocked from entering buildings in Los Angeles and New York this month while attempting to do the same.
And in a dramatic scene last week, federal agents forcibly removed and handcuffed Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, from a news conference where Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, was discussing the troops that were sent in to L.A. The senator had introduced himself and was trying to ask the secretary a question when he was shoved out of the room.
The federal response in Los Angeles is not merely a Trump administration provocation. It is consistent with the administration’s insistence that for citizens to oppose the government’s actions toward noncitizens is to threaten the safety of government agents and perhaps amount to insurrection against the government.
You can see why people have taken to the streets; this is not the America many of us believe in. We believe in an America founded on the guarantee of inalienable rights that cannot be given or taken away. In that America, the government cannot use unaccountable force — that means insisting that ICE agents be identifiable when conducting public arrests and disciplined when they act abusively.
It is an injury for a U.S. citizen to watch what is being done to noncitizens in the name of the United States. It is an additional injury to be rebuked by our government when we attempt to do something about it.
I will not be arrested and deported for writing this essay. In that respect, the legal value of my citizenship remains secure. But what that citizenship is worth, on a deeper level, feels imperiled.
Dara Lind is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
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