Last week, Buona Forchetta restaurant, in San Diego’s South Park neighborhood, was raided by dozens of heavily armed officers from ICE’s investigations unit on a grab-and-snatch mission against suspected undocumented immigrants. The raid, which occurred mid-afternoon while diners were eating their meals, led to all of the staff being handcuffed, their IDs demanded, and the detention of at least four workers. Outside, on the street, as crowds gathered to protest and to try to block the ICE vans from leaving, officers deployed stun grenades against residents before speeding off with the detained. The imagery was entirely shocking, and yet, at the same time, given what is going on in the country, entirely unsurprising.
In deep-red Missouri, the New York Times reports, a community is wrestling with the loss of a respected member, a mother of three who has worked for years in a local waffle house; she, too, is now detained, in a county jail, and awaiting deportation for overstaying her visa. The family of a four-year-old girl receiving life-saving medical treatments in the US had their humanitarian parole status terminated, meaning they face possible deportation and the girl faces death.
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Around the country, such stories are cropping up with growing frequency. Immigration officers—and other federal, state, and local officials deputized to work in the burgeoning immigrant-detention machine—are under orders to triple the daily arrest rate of immigrants. The new goals, articulated by Stephen Miller and the other architects of this monstrous reimagining of the United States, are to detain at least 3,000 people per day. In such a maelstrom, even US citizens are getting caught up—with several instances reported of legal citizens being put into ICE detainment for days on end until they can prove their status. In Alabama, a US citizen was arrested at the construction site he worked at, along with several undocumented immigrants; authorities simply told him his ID was fake. No surprise, the people caught up like this aren’t white.
Thousands of federal troops are already involved, in practice if not in theory, in policing the southern border and helping with the detention of undocumented immigrants. This comes perilously close to breaking the spirit, and, arguably, the letter of the Posse Comitatus law, which prevents the US military from participating in domestic law enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security has requested 20,000 national guard troops also be sent to the border. And last week, the FBI announced that hundreds of its agents would be shifted away from their work on chasing real criminals to instead go after undocumented immigrants—vulnerable men, women and children, who have sought dreams in the US but are finding, instead, an iron fist.
This is all red meat to a particular part of the MAGA base, which wants little more than a rolling war against immigrants and a locking down of America on a historically unprecedented scale; but I do not believe that this is what the majority of Trump voters thought they were voting for when the MAGA leader told them he would clamp down on undocumented migrants, with a particular focus on those with criminal records.
Nor do I believe that most Trump voters realized they were supporting a man who would seek to wall off the international community from American universities, risking America’s status as the world’s preeminent destination for academics—and, in particular, top scientists. But that is, in fact, what they are now getting: last week, the Administration put a hold on the processing of all student visas for overseas students looking to come into the US to study; announced that it would “aggressively” seek to revoke the visas of Chinese students already in the United States; and mandated consular officials around the world to create a regimen of increased vetting for anyone wanting to visit Harvard University—be they students, faculty, staff, academics invited to give a guest lecture, or artists invited to perform at the venerable university. The clear intent is to academically starve Harvard into submission to the feds.
Remove hundreds of thousands of international students from the US, as this administration seems intent on doing, and you will bankrupt many universities and force others to increase by thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of dollars a year, the fees that they charge homegrown enrollees. That won’t make universities more resilient; instead, it will simply price out students from lower income backgrounds, and it will force many higher education institutions into intensely unpalatable choices around shuttering departments and limiting the resources they provide to the young men and women studying on their campuses.
Go after academics and seek to revoke their visas, and you will see a brain drain of many of the best and brightest to other countries—to countries that welcome the expertise and the teaching knowledge that these men and women carry with them. Hong Kong’s universities have begun actively wooing international students blocked from attending Harvard; and Europe has begun overtly wooing disillusioned American scientists and professors. Once gone, these top students and professors won’t return in a hurry to the United States. That is expertise that the Trump administration will have needlessly alienated and squandered.
None of this is how self-confident democracies and cultures behave. It is a paranoia against, and fear of, outsiders redolent of autocracies—led by ostensible strongmen who end up scared of their own shadows. Surely, America, we are better than that.
