Originally published in Hankyoreh.
The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get rid of what it considers to be “undesirable” people.
The administration has removed temporary protected status (TPS) for more than a million people from over a dozen countries. It is sending people back to active war zones in Sudan and Somalia. It is deporting people to Myanmar, a country under a military dictatorship. In the case of Venezuela, it is returning people to a country struggling to deal with the after-effects of an earthquake.
Some holders of this status have been in the country for a long time. Nearly 90 percent of the 170,000 Salvadorans who have TPS, first granted 25 years ago, participate in the U.S. labor force, contributing over $5 billion to the U.S. economy.
The president makes no exceptions in its campaign to deport anyone and everyone. Even as it has promised to fight a war on behalf of the people of Iran, it has reportedly provided information about Iranian asylum-seekers to the Iranian government. These details about their lives, such as their sexual preferences and religious beliefs, make it even more likely that they will be persecuted on return. Dozens of Russians, who don’t enjoy TPS, were flown back to Russia, where several were immediately slapped with draft notices. Over 4,000 Cubans have been sent to Mexico where they languish in a cruel limbo.
There is no length to which the administration won’t go to deport people, even American citizens like the children born in the United States who were kicked out of the country along with their parents. So far, the Supreme Court has blocked the administration’s attempt to overturn the “birthright citizenship” clause in the U.S. Constitution. But Trump is still pushing his allies to take up the fight in Congress to change the law.
The administration even tried to add 2.7 million living people to the “Death Master File,” which is a database of dead people maintained by the Social Security Administration. Trump’s plan was to make life so difficult for people declared “dead” that they would self-deport or, if they showed up to dispute their “death,” to detain them in preparation for deportation. It was only because of a whistleblower that this plan didn’t go into effect.
But the most visible effort by the U.S. government has been to target the approximately 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” who, as of 2023, constituted over 4 percent of the U.S. population. Such immigrants keep the American economy afloat by picking fruit, slaughtering cows, building houses, and taking care of the elderly.
Trump’s mass deportation campaign, in other words, would wreck the U.S. economy. The undocumented don’t take away jobs from native-born Americans because the latter generally don’t want the jobs that immigrants fill. But the administration is willing to risk economic disaster in its effort to keep America a predominantly white country.
Trump’s anti-immigrant plan has not just evicted people. It has not just locked them away in detention centers.
It has killed them.
In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were involved in two killings. Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national living with his wife and young daughter in a small town in Maine, was not the subject of an ICE raid, but ICE agents killed him anyway. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant, was a businessman and father of three on his way to work in Houston when agents stopped his car and shot him.
More than a dozen people have died in these kinds of interactions with ICE, including two U.S. citizens—Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good—protesting ICE actions in Minnesota.
The number of detainees who have died in custody is even higher. Tens of thousands of people are being held in detention facilities that the Trump administration has established around the country. Despite administration claims that it is only deporting dangerous criminals, more than 70 percent of those detained have no prior criminal convictions.
More than 50 people have died in the detention facilities, a rate that is more than twice as high as Trump’s first term. They have died because of conditions inside the facilities or because they didn’t receive sufficient medical care. Several have committed suicide—or their deaths have been reported as suicides. Here’s what fellow deportees reported about the supposed suicide of Geraldo Lunas Campos:
Santos Jesús Flores, a Salvadoran who was in the SHU that night, said in a declaration that Lunas Campos’s hands and feet had been cuffed. He’d heard Lunas Campos begging for his medicine, followed soon afterward by “the sounds of the guards punching Geraldo, the clanking of Geraldo’s handcuffs, the sounds of shoes scraping against the floor. Then I heard Geraldo saying, ‘I have asthma. I can’t breathe.’” Flores’s account is consistent with that of Ricardo Andrade Mosquera, a twenty-nine-year-old from Venezuela, who was in another nearby cell. “They were on top of him,” he told the El Paso Times. “He screamed horribly as they hit him.”
The Trump administration has pledged to deport a million people a year. It hasn’t quite reached that benchmark, with the administration itself claiming around 900,000 deportations as of mid-May. It has also claimed that more than 2 million people have self-deported. However, without transparent data from the Department of Homeland Security, it is difficult to verify the administration’s claims.
These numbers are critical to the administration’s approval rating. On virtually all other policies, Trump is losing popularity. Inflation numbers remain high, and the economy is failing millions of Americans. The war in Iran continues to push up gas prices. The administration is still dogged by controversies around budget cuts, corruption, anti-vaccine policies, and connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The overall approval rating for the administration is around 37 percent, with a large percentage of independent voters now adopting negative views of the president.
The one issue where a sizable number of Americans still approve of administration policies, however, is immigration. Compared to the economy at 33 percent and the war in Iran at 29 percent, 40 percent of Americans approve of his immigration policies. But even here the numbers are declining, since half of Americans supported his approach to immigration when he took office in 2025.
The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and non-citizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive. The detention and deportation of key members of communities—hard workers, religious leaders, even those espousing the same conservative family values of the administration—have led to a significant decline in anti-immigrant sentiment among Republicans.
Still, with the economy on the rocks and the war in Iran nowhere near an end, the Republicans will likely try to emphasize the “success” of the administration on immigration policy in the upcoming midterm elections in November. It will be a desperate strategy. As more information comes out about lives lost, communities harmed, and an economy hobbled by the loss of critical workers, the administration’s deportation strategy may turn out to be a failure politically as well for the president and his party.