In Berwyn, Illinois, immigration officers arrested Julio Noriega as he was walking down the street and, without explanation, handcuffed him and pushed him into a van. He was held for ten hours, according to court documents, before agents looked into his wallet and realized they had nabbed a United States citizen. On a Texas highway, border agents detained a Mexican couple as they were rushing their ten-year-old daughter, who has brain cancer, to a hospital in Houston for an emergency visit with her doctors. Because her parents did not have papers, the girl, another US citizen, never made it to her appointment but was expelled with them to Mexico. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in unmarked cars went hunting for criminals but instead busted three Guatemalan workers at a car wash, none with criminal records. Their frustrated boss told a local news site that she recognized one of the agents as a customer.These are some of the people who have been swept up in the early days of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Many Americans who voted for Trump told reporters that they were dismayed by images of crowds of migrants coming across the southwest border and by the soaring costs of sheltering them for some northern cities and states. Those voters often said they expected him to focus on tightening border security and expelling criminals. But that is not what Trump is doing, nor is it what he ever said he planned to do.Instead he is waging an intricately planned assault on every aspect of the immigration system, the broadest and most systematic government crackdown at least since World War II. Since his return to the White House, Trump has been constructing a nationwide enforcement regime to carry out a purge of millions of immigrants, whether or not they have any criminal history; indeed regardless of whether they have an official legal status or protection, even a permanent resident green card. Rather than prioritizing enforcement at the border, he is expanding border enforcement—with its special provisions that reduce due process—across the country. Places deep in the interior are becoming borderlands where virtually any immigrant is subject to suspicion, identity checks, and possibly swift removal. To increase the population vulnerable to his deportations, Trump is seeking to strip hundreds of thousands of immigrants of lawful protections they were granted under Biden or earlier administrations. He is also launching an effort, based on a little-used immigrant registration statute, to identify and criminalize millions of undocumented immigrants, including the large majority of them who have lived in the country for years and never been convicted of a crime. Starting on his first day in office on January 20, Trump has been creating the infrastructure for these deportations with a blitz of executive orders, policy memos, and personnel changes—more than 210 actions to date, according to an archive maintained at Yale Law School. Right away he lifted restrictions on arrests at churches, schools and hospitals; eliminated prosecutorial priorities set by the Biden administration that instructed agents to target criminals and national security threats; ordered more immigrants to be detained during legal proceedings; and cancelled legal aid programs that helped them fight their cases in court, including ones that provide counsel for unaccompanied children. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is suing cities and states to force them to abandon “sanctuary” policies that restrain local police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. On March 14 the Republican-led Congress approved a $9.9 billion budget for immigration enforcement, an increase of about $500 million. Trump’s mass deportation drive could separate families on a new scale: about 9.7 million American citizens, including adults and children, live in mixed-status families with at least one undocumented immigrant. In immigrant communities, social life has gone quiet; people hesitate to send kids to school, to attend church and doctor appointments, to shop for groceries. Workers look over their shoulders on the job. “What we are seeing unfold right now is terrifying,” said Ashley DeAzevedo, president of American Families United, an organization representing some of the more than one million Americans who are married to undocumented immigrants. Anguished group members fearing for their spouses were making contingency plans that, DeAzevedo told me, “should never be necessary for American citizens in the land of the free,” including packing getaway kits of vital documents and preparing small children for hasty departures. Some members compared their preparations to an underground railroad. In his quest for higher deportation numbers, Trump is testing, if not trampling, the outer boundaries of his already broad executive powers under immigration law. On March 14 he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a statute previously activated only in times of declared war—to speed the deportations of 137 Venezuelans accused, based on no evidence known to the public, of associating with a vicious gang called the Tren de Aragua. The following day the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., James Boasberg, responded to a lawsuit by the ACLU and other groups by ordering a temporary halt to the deportation flights. The administration ignored the order and the planes continued to their destination: a notoriously harsh megaprison in El Salvador, which the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, had offered up to Trump to detain gang members. “Oopsie…Too late,” Bukele tweeted in response to Boasberg’s order, with a laughing-crying emoji. In a court filing, Trump officials acknowledged that “many” of the deportees “do not have criminal records in the United States.” Relatives said they had been tagged as gang members based on tattoos representing favorite flowers, the Real Madrid soccer team, and, on one man, an autism acceptance ribbon dedicated to his brother. Now a tense showdown is underway with the judge over the extent of the president’s authorities. On March 26 an appeals court upheld Judge Boasberg’s stay on the deportations. “We’re not stopping,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News as the episode unfolded, summarizing what appeared to be the president’s ongoing position. “I don’t care what the judges think.”*None of this should come as a surprise. During his 2024 campaign Trump repeatedly and unabashedly announced his plans for immigration. In his rallies he described the country in lurid terms as besieged by millions of menacing, homicidal, or mentally deranged immigrants, whom he said Joe Biden had welcomed across an open border. Foreign-born malefactors, he warned, posed a threat to America’s racial stock: they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The solution he insistently promised was “the largest deportation operation in American history” to expel “millions and millions” of immigrants. His supporters evidently agreed. At rallies they cheerfully waved signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.” Once Trump was back in the White House, he amplified these nativist themes. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on March 6, he claimed, once again, that “entire towns” had been destroyed by “migrant occupation and corruption.” He reached for a grand phrase to express what he said his mass expulsions would accomplish: “the great liberation of America.” Alex Wong/Getty Images Attendees at the Republican National Convention, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 17, 2024 Of the scores of edicts the president issued on his first day, one executive order revealed their underlying xenophobic principles especially clearly. Titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” it revoked birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented or temporary legal immigrants. The provision, enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in the aftermath of the Civil War, was originally adopted to resolve the citizenship of the children of freed slaves. By now a cornerstone of American democracy, birthright citizenship has long been held by the Supreme Court to include the children of all immigrants, most notably in an 1898 case involving the US-born son of immigrants from China. Trump’s order was immediately challenged in several federal courts, and for now it has been stayed as it heads to the Supreme Court. One astonished federal judge in Seattle, John Coughenour, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Its ostensible purpose is to discourage expectant foreign mothers from migrating unlawfully so that their children can become US citizens at birth. Trump’s deeper message, however, is that the US-born children of undocumented or temporary immigrants are not really equal citizens. He seems unconcerned about the chaos the order could unloose: it could potentially expose every pregnant mother to a citizenship check and leave countless newborns with no legal immigration status, ineligible for public neonatal health care services and immediately subject to deportation. Other early measures laid the foundations for the deportation campaign by codifying Trump’s dark, bigoted, and largely fictional version of the flows of migration. In another January 20 proclamation he announced that the southern border had been overrun by drug cartels, gangs, and human traffickers who are “terrorizing Americans beyond the control of local law enforcement.” Arguing that the country was facing a foreign invasion, he declared a national emergency. That move allowed him to dispatch military troops to the border (about nine thousand have been mobilized to date); to deputize officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, at the Drug Enforcement Administration, and even at the IRS to enforce immigration law; to rapidly expand immigration detention facilities; to use federal prisons to hold immigration offenders; and to sign up state and local law enforcement authorities to hunt for people to deport. On January 29 Trump ordered the military to prepare the notorious base at Guantánamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 deportees.To facilitate a sweeping dragnet, the president widened a provision for fast-track deportations, known as expedited removal. Conceived in a 1996 law to hasten the expulsion of unauthorized border crossers, it allows immigration officers to deport people without a hearing in immigration court or any opportunity to appeal. Over the years, expedited removal has generally been applied within a hundred miles of land borders. Trump has expanded it to the entire country, for use against any undocumented immigrants who cannot show they have been present in the US for at least two years. For a range of migrants—such as the thousands who, under Biden, were released from the border under supervision but with no formal status or proceeding—there is no time limit at all. Trump had mixed legal success during his first term trying to extend expedited removal across the country, but this time White House officials have fine-tuned the order to preempt such challenges. Now immigrants far and wide are at risk of arbitrary stops and summary deportation if they cannot instantly produce some proof of citizenship or legal status—and if they don’t happen to be carrying around two years of utility bills. *Trump has found still other ways to make more immigrants deportable. The administration terminated a Biden-era program that offered a humanitarian permit, known as a parole, to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which allowed them to enter the country and stay for up to two years. After that program’s end date of April 24, about 532,000 immigrants from those countries will be left with no legal protections. Trump also paused a separate parole program for people from war-torn Ukraine; their fate currently remains uncertain. Department of Homeland Security officials, meanwhile, cancelled the grant to a large group of Venezuelans of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which offers formal legal status and work permits to people from countries devastated by natural disasters and violent conflicts who are already in the US. The officials also shortened the TPS term for people from Haiti, even though the conditions of economic collapse and violent mayhem in those two countries have only gotten worse. Unless legal challenges preserve them, TPS protections will expire for about 100,000 Venezuelans on April 7 and for another 242,000 Venezuelans on September 10, and for about 200,000 Haitians on August 3. In a program that echoes the criminalizing roundups following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, starting on April 11 Homeland Security, or DHS, will require all undocumented immigrants to register with the federal government or face criminal prosecution. Most of those immigrants are long-settled residents with families and no criminal records; under immigration law, which for the most part is civil code, being present in the US without legal documents is a civil, not a criminal, violation. Now they will face a cruel dilemma: they can report and join a line for deportation, or live in bone-chilling fear of any encounter with law enforcement and risk up to six months in federal prison if they are discovered. Officials have been actively propagating this sort of fear, hoping to scare immigrants into leaving voluntarily. “If you are here illegally, we will find you and deport you. You will never return,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says grimly in an ad campaign, which she explained in a press release was “hyper-targeted” at communities in the interior. Immigrants with valid student visas and even green cards—lawful permanent residents on a pathway to citizenship—are not immune. Citing a 1952 immigration law, on March 8 Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a US citizen, who had been a leader of the protests against the war in Gaza at Columbia University while he was a graduate student. Alleging that Khalil was promoting Hamas, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization, Rubio determined that his activities “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” The government made little effort to show that Khalil’s offense was anything other than political speech. But it nonetheless sent him to a detention facility in rural Louisiana, where he remains imprisoned. On March 25 agents in black plainclothes, some wearing face masks, showed no warrant when they apprehended Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student in the Department of Child Study and Human Development, on a sidewalk near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. Öztürk, who is Turkish and according to her attorney had a valid student visa, was quickly transferred to a different but no less remo