Disappeared Without Due Process: How Mass Surveillance and Indiscriminate Arrests Target Families, Refugees, and American Democracy
Trump is targeting immigrants in the U.S. while signaling support for deporting and imprisoning Americans citizens, revealing a broader agenda to erode democracy
American families are being separated, children are being detained, and loved ones are disappearing to dangerous foreign prisons without a trace as the Trump administration escalates its effort to turn millions of vulnerable people into deportable targets. In recent weeks, the administration has revoked student visas at several colleges and universities nationwide, stripped humanitarian protections from 850,000 Haitians and Venezuelans, ended parole for over 500,000 CHNV parolees, and canceled the legal status of 900,000 individuals who legally entered the U.S. through the CBP One app.
Recent polling confirms public outrage: 60% of Americans oppose deporting migrants who haven’t been convicted of a crime to El Salvador without due process, according to YouGov, including nearly half who say they “strongly” oppose it. A separate Pew Research Center poll found that very few Americans support deporting long-settled immigrants with family ties and no criminal record.
But now, following a recent Supreme Court decision to continue allowing Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act and a new deal allowing ICE access to sensitive IRS data, the administration is emboldened to defy more court orders, more basic rights, and disappear more people–even U.S. citizens–to dangerous conditions with no promise of return—all while demanding an additional $350 billion from Congress to supercharge the operation.
Weaponizing Government to Punish, Not Protect
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The Trump administration’s policies are not isolated acts of enforcement—they are erasure, part of a deliberate effort to blur the lines between legality and control, bureaucracy and brutality. The decision to grant ICE access to IRS data is especially dangerous. It effectively arms the administration with private financial information from immigrants who have long lived, worked, and paid taxes in the U.S.—many of whom contribute more in taxes than some of the largest corporations.
This is not simply a data-sharing agreement—it’s a betrayal of trust. Immigrants who have followed the rules, paid their dues, and relied on the integrity of federal systems now face the very real possibility that the information they provided in good faith will be used against them:
“The digital and physical dragnets Trump is building mean millions of immigrants—many of whom have followed the law and paid their taxes for decades—are now vulnerable to indiscriminate brutality and quiet erasure with little opportunity for redress. By weaponizing private taxpayer data, the administration is shattering what little trust remains between immigrant communities and the government and putting critical revenue streams at risk.”
Beatriz Lopez, Co-Executive Director of the Immigration Hub
And DHS has wasted no time operationalizing this dragnet, as 60 Minutes recently revealed the hasty brutality of these removals. The report found that 75% of Venezuelan deportees held in a Salvadoran megaprison had no criminal record, 22% were charged with nonviolent offenses, and merely a dozen were charged with violent crimes. Reporter Cecilia Vega documented men violently handled, shaved, and profiled based on decades-old social media posts and family tattoos—like that of Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay asylum-seeker whose disappearance shocked his loved ones when they saw his image in the press. Legal experts cited in the report warned that due process for these men has all but collapsed, with one judge saying, “Nazis got better treatment.”
What’s more, the administration is actively stripping humanitarian protections from 850,000 Haitians and Venezuelans, revoking legal status from over 900,000 migrants who entered the U.S. through Biden-era programs like CBP One and 500,000 who entered through the CHNV parole initiative, and targeting foreign students and professors across the country–with Ukranians and other vulnerable communities likely to follow. Many of these migrants arrived through official ports of entry, underwent screening, and were granted work authorization and protection from removal. They now face impossibly short deadlines to self-deport or risk arrest, enormous fines, and permanent banishment.
The administration’s sweeping authority is also being used to block entry en masse, with a potential global blacklist restricting or banning travel from over 40 countries under consideration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio already announced the blanket revocation of all U.S. visas for South Sudanese nationals, a move that could leave people like Duke basketball star Khaman Maluach stranded and separated from their families. And in a now-infamous case, the administration deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia—who had legal status—to a Salvadoran prison in violation of a court order. The Supreme Court recently paused an order to bring Garcia home. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, hardly a liberal institution, called this “a path to perfect lawlessness.”
With the CBP One app that once helped migrants schedule legal entry appointments rebranded as “CBP Home,” repurposed to facilitate self-deportation, these developments illustrate the broader shift: programs designed for humane processing are being hollowed out and retooled as tools of authoritarianism.
The Reality: Immigrants Are Essential to America’s Future
While Trump wages war on immigrants, the data tells a different story. America is aging rapidly, and our workforce cannot sustain itself without immigration. As Washington Post columnist Philip Bump recently noted, many states—including Michigan and Connecticut—have seen population growth only because of immigration. In red states, the foreign-born population has grown more than 300% since 1990.
Foreign-born workers—most of whom are in their prime working years—are essential to the U.S. economy, powering critical sectors like healthcare, construction, and food service. Yet in states like Florida, where harsh anti-immigrant laws have driven thousands of undocumented workers to leave, lawmakers are scrambling to fill the void. One proposal would allow children as young as 14 to work overnight shifts without breaks—even on school nights. Estimates suggest the immigration law has already cost Florida’s economy up to $12.6 billion in just its first year.
If Trump realizes the full extent of his mass deportation agenda nationwide, the American Immigration Council estimates that the U.S. could lose up to $1.7 trillion in GDP and nearly $1 trillion in enforcement costs over the next decade—crippling the economy, decimating key industries, and hollowing out entire communities. And that’s just the cost of targeting immigrants. Trump’s growing desire to use these tools against dissenting U.S. citizens carries even more devastating implications for democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.
So we must continue to push back on the idea that immigrants are a drain on the system or a threat to public safety, because it is not only false—it’s existentially ruinous. By targeting immigrant communities and sympathetic dissenters, this administration risks breaking the systems that make our country work and undermining the values that will keep us prosperous in the future.
And as the Wall Street Journal put it in its rebuke of Trump’s latest legal overreach: mistakes happen. But refusing to fix them—refusing to even acknowledge them—is a sign of something far more dangerous.
 | A guest post by
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So tragic. A man whose only crime was to seek a better life for himself and his family in America is now at great risk of never being allowed freedom the hell he has found himself in due to the abject cruelty practiced by President Donald Trump.
🥲🥲🥲