Trump’s Immigration Arrests Are Seeing A Wave Of Resistance

The mass deportation agenda relies upon some key choke points.

Recent weeks have seen the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” program kick into overdrive.

Militarized federal agents are working hard to meet the White House’s sky-high arrest quotas, and the number of people in immigration detention is surging past record highs. That means focusing even more on otherwise law-abiding people who happen to have irregular immigration statuses ― people who pay taxes, show up to court dates and check-ins, work hard to provide for their families, and followed previous administrations’ rules to apply for humanitarian protections. It also means interrogating people at swap meets, and underground parties, or those who just have brown skin.

The nation disapproves, polling shows. Massive protests around the country ― in both large urban areas and small towns ― have showcased Americans’ fury at having their loved ones and neighbors ripped out of their communities at random.

Across the country, people are also taking action to slow down what they see as the egregious over-enforcement of immigration law, attempting to starve Trump’s mass deportation machine of fuel and to throw sand in its gears.

It’s a tall order. Donald Trump’s deportation apparatus is a bipartisan creation that’s been decades in the making. Over time, the legal process has exerted more and more control over immigrants’ lives, and Congress has failed to do anything to help out-of-status immigrants in recent years except further criminalize them, and write enormous checks for immigration detention and enforcement. As Stephen Lemons observed in the Phoenix New Times recently, “Trump didn’t create America’s deportation machine. He’s just revving the engine.”