Trump’s Politically Driven Deportations Are Quietly Rising

Branko Marcetic / Jacobin
Trump’s Politically Driven Deportations Are Quietly Rising Donald Trump’s administration is still trying to deport its noncitizen political opponents for speech and other First Amendment–protected activity it doesn’t like. (photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s street-level ICE surges and deportation obsession are wildly unpopular. That isn’t stopping the administration from continuing to target noncitizens over constitutionally protected free speech, including green card holders.

Donald Trump’s approval on immigration is so deathly low, and his ongoing deportation raids so unpopular even in red states, that you’d be forgiven for thinking his administration has pumped the brakes on the issue. Instead the White House is advancing a radical agenda that is increasingly targeted not at criminals or even law-abiding undocumented people but at legal immigrants.

Pro-Palestinian activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil may have staved off his politically motivated deportation, but the Trump administration is only expanding its targeting of permanent residents. It just got the go-ahead to deport an Israel critic and leader of the largest mosque in Wisconsin, Salah Sarsour, based on decades-old convictions in Israel — namely, that he threw a rocks at members of the Israeli military while living in the West Bank and that he tried to own weapons, actions the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calls terrorist activity. A Trump-appointed district judge had previously ruled that he had presented a “substantial” case showing the administration was going after him over his pro-Palestinian speech.

Mohsen Mahdawi, the fourteen-year-long permanent resident who became an early flash point in the Trump administration’s free speech crackdown after he was arrested at his citizenship interview, remains at risk of deportation. This past June, a judge ordered that Mahdawi, who alongside Khalil cofounded Columbia University’s Palestinian Student Union, be deported to Jordan.

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