By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has enacted sweeping legislation targeting immigrants.
Even though at least some of this legislation has been ruled unconstitutional, and several other pieces are currently facing legal challenges, that has not stopped the Trump administration from ramping up legal action against immigrants—regardless of their documentation status—in a wholesale circumvention of constitutionally protected due process.
And because of the way the administration is going about targeting immigrants, explained Ethnic Media Services (EMS) panelists during a March 28 briefing, the rights of all U.S. residents, including citizens, are in jeopardy.
Martin Kim, the director of Immigration Advocacy at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, shared with attendees how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been given permission to greatly expand their nets. Agents are arresting immigrants in all sorts of spaces, including when immigrants are going through their usual immigration appointments, English language education, citizen workshops, and more.
This includes green card holders who have valid, unexpired green cards.
Here in Seattle, for instance, longtime University of Washington employee and Filipino immigrant Lewelyn Dixon was detained by ICE agents upon her return to the United States from a visit to the Philippines. Dixon has been living in the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident for 50 years. She was detained for embezzlement, a non-violent conviction, from 2001. She received no jail or prison time, and instead paid a $6,400 fine and spent time in a halfway house.
“These attacks, these tactics, they’ve existed before the Trump administration,” Kim explained. “We’ve really seen an escalation under Trump in a way that has created fear and confusion in our communities.”
The deportation attack net has also descended over students with valid visas. On Thursday, March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. had revoked the visas of at least 300 foreign students over alleged “pro-Hamas” leanings. If true, this is more than was previously known or reported.
“What they’re doing is punishing people, punishing immigrants for having a political opinion by taking away their visa or their green card,” Kim said. “What is the slippery slope here? Where can we go?”
Kim’s question highlights concerns about a potential broader erosion of constitutionally protected rights for everyone, including U.S. citizens.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student from Turkey, was one of those students detained for her political views. In an arrest that made national headlines, Ozturk was swept up off the streets of Somerville, a Boston-adjacent suburb, by what appear to be masked ICE agents. Ozturk was detained on grounds that she had publicly posted support for Palestinian causes.
The AP story notes that Ozturk “was swiftly moved out of Massachusetts, another case of [ICE] sending immigrants taken into custody to detention centers or deporting them altogether before a federal judge has a chance to weigh in and possibly halt the actions.”
Such moves are a further chill to constitutionally protected free speech, a right that extends to everyone in the U.S., including immigrants. Panelists explained during EMS’s March 28 briefing on green cards, that actions like these are how everyone—citizen or not—begins to lose their constitutionally enshrined rights.
These crackdowns not only create fear and a reluctance for immigrants to speak out and exercise free speech, they also create a precedent by which the administration can begin to chip away at the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens.
But they also present another alarming issue, panelists said. They demonstrated that Trump has appointed himself both “judge and jury,” and that his administration is effectively doing away with due process, a right guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment.
For instance, the administration is using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against people he claims are Venezuelan gang members.
The last time the act was used was during WWII, when the U.S. government used it to incarcerate Japanese and Japanese Americans as alleged enemies or suspected enemies of the country.
“We all heard that rhetoric [about removing Venezuelan gang members] during the campaign. So, now we see immigration policy by rhetoric,” Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us and the FWD.us Education Fund, said during the EMS briefing. “Effectively, what this does—and the reason due process is so horribly implicated here—is that it completely bypasses, it completely cuts off … the … administrative removal, deportation apparatus that we have in the United States.”
And “as flawed and as imperfect as it is,” Schulte said, the country’s deportation process is designed to protect due process.
“So if it’s a gang member or somebody who’s been convicted of a gang-related crime, they’ve got to prove the crime” under normal due process, Schulte continued. “They’ve got to prove membership. They’ve got to go into court with proof.”
But “when the Alien Enemies Act is invoked, all that’s got to happen is somebody’s got to be Venezuelan and a member of the gang. Then they’re liable to be removed. That’s how simple it gets. … There’s no due process. There’s no right to contest.”
Despite the fact that the actual invocation of the act requires a declared war or an invasion by the country against whose citizens it is invoked—and we are not in a war with Venezuela, nor have they invaded us, Schulte said—Trump decided to do it, anyway. Several judges have issued restraining orders and rulings in an attempt to stop him.
Trump is also involving other legal institutions, like the Internal Revenue Service. He recently empowered ICE agents to seize tax records, to weed out undocumented immigrants—which, if anyone is paying attention, Schulte said, is the height of irony.
“The rhetoric has always been during the campaign before that undocumented immigrants are taking advantage of Americans living off the country, not paying their tax,” Schulte said. “The screaming headline from this last week should have been ‘Immigrants pay their tax. Government admits it.’ Because why else would they be going to the IRS to get the information? So, logically, it doesn’t even make any sense.”
Undocumented immigrants contributed just shy of $90 billion dollars in tax revenue to the IRS in 2023 alone.
“From a privacy perspective, it’s devastating, not only to the immigrants, but to everybody, lawful permanent residents, anybody who pays taxes, because all of a sudden, we’re going to have bureaucrats going through our tax files,” Schulte continued. “And how do they know whether John Doe A is different [from] John Doe B? People have the same names across the board. So, inevitably, we’re going to have problems, just like we’re going to have mistakes. We’re going to have people who are victimized by this enforcement mechanism.”
It is immediately unclear whether such a strategy could be used in the future against U.S. citizens who are dissidents.
Immigration lawyer and past general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers Association David Leopold warned that Americans are swiftly coming to see or will swiftly come to see that the actions the administration is taking will hit very close to home, and that those who voted for Trump will not see the changes they envision.
“I think it’s pretty clear that what the American people voted for in November last year was a secure border and to lower the price of milk and eggs,” Leopold continued. “People are going to be surprised … when they see their next door neighbor being picked up or when they hear that their doctor has been removed, can’t get back in the country, or the person that takes care of their mom in assisted living has been deported or detained. … It’s a shock. And that’s how this hits home with the American people.”
Leopold also drew the connection between the Trump administration’s actions and propaganda tactics and Nazism in the 1930s.
“This reminds many of us of the darkest moments of the 20th century in the 1930s, where people were targeted that way,” Leopold said. “And we know where this can lead. We know where this can lead.”
Leopold said that he “was chilled to the bone,” upon seeing what appears to be an AI-generated image the Trump administration found fit to post on X. The image is a cartoon of a woman of color wearing a cook’s hairnet being placed in handcuffs by a man in military fatigues. The cartoon was posted in concert with the real-life arrest of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, an undocumented immigrant who re-entered the country at an unknown date, following her deportation in October 2020 for dealing fentanyl. When ICE agents arrested her this week, she was working as a restaurant cook.
The cartoon, Leopold said, reminded him of “some of the darkest cartoons that came out of Germany in the 1930s.”
Leopold is the descendent of Holocaust survivors. He said that while he has “never been anxious about speaking publicly,” the Trump administration’s recent directive targeting immigration lawyers has changed that.
“I’ll admit I’m anxious now,” Leopold said. “But … my father fled the Nazis as a Jew. And … my grandfather didn’t outsmart the Nazis to get to the United States so that I could cower in fear. And I think the best sunlight, the best remedy to this kind of thing is sunlight and speaking out and being public. That’s the best protection. I have worked with people in totalitarian regimes. And that’s always been the best.”