Legal today, illegal tomorrow: ICE and immigration under Trump’s administration

By: Iris Tallon 

Editor: Elijah Eaton 

Editor-in-Chief: Grace Samuel 

The views expressed are the author's own and do not reflect the views of the International Relations Society. 

Credit: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement via Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain 

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (hereafter ICE) has taken pride in arresting ‘the worst of the worst’ offenders and protecting Americans from criminal and illegal immigrants. Most recently, ICE agents have flooded into the city of New Orleans, causing fear among the immigrant population who make up most of the workforce in the restaurant industry. Many workers have decided to stay home, restaurants are momentarily closing and food is running out. However, recent data shows that most arrestees have no criminal record and that immigration agents are increasingly relying on racial and ethnic profiling, regardless of immigration status. Large-scale ICE crackdowns are being increasingly normalised by an administration that constructs migration as a threat and encourages its citizens to tolerate unlawful enforcement. Legal protectionsare being eroded, and pathways to immigration continue to narrow every day. In the United States one can be legal today and illegal tomorrow.  

On social media, videos and testimonies of ICE’s arrests are proliferating. Their violence is striking — immigration agents are driving unmarked vehicles, wearing face coverings, entering residences without warrants, kidnapping people off the streets and outside courthouses, leaving teenagers forced to care for their siblings as parents are arrested. How can a country built on immigration and celebrated as the land of the free justify such aggressive immigration law enforcement? Part of the answer lies in Trump’s portrayal of migration as a national security threat, outlined in the 2025 National Security Strategy, which presents mass migration as the West’s main danger, compromising national identity through “a stark prospect of civilizational erasure”. Since the threat of migration is socially constructed, it can be mobilised through dehumanising and alarming language by the Trump administration to present its immigration enforcement methods as necessary.  

After the recent shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, President Trump broadcast the attack as an act of terror and its alleged perpetrator, an Afghan migrant, an animal. This discourse matters because its dehumanising characterisation has real-life consequences. Following the attack, all Afghan immigration applications were suspended, effectively halting Afghans from entering the country, including holders of Special Immigrant Visas issued during the Afghanistan War to individuals who had assisted U.S. forces. The shooting has also motivated the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops in other cities, adecision that is traditionally reserved in American law for risks of invasion or rebellion. Overall, recent developments have shown how dehumanising language and hateful discourse, deliberately utilised to generate panic, function to legitimise large-scale and often violent immigration law enforcement. 

The threat of ‘civilizational erasure’ is not only socially constructed and sensationalised but also empirically unfounded and conceptually unstable. Despite ICE’s claims, more than half of the arrestees in recent major crackdowns have no criminal record; in fact, under President Trump, the share of people without criminal charges detained by ICE has steeply increased. Similarly, the alleged 1,000% increase in attacks against ICE, used by the Trump administration to justify deploying the National Guard in a rising number of cities, has also been proven untrue. Beyond portraying migrants as criminals, Republican political discourse also labels them as ‘illegal’, claiming those with a legal migration status have nothing to fear. This representation is misleading due to the constant redefinition of immigrant legal status, which is a political construct and not a stable protection.  

Since the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, pathways to legal immigration have become increasingly uncertain; asylum applications submitted within the United States have been paused, naturalisation ceremonies cancelled and migrants from the 19 countries subject to the travel ban are expected to have their green cards and citizenship reassessed. As a result, individuals who previously complied with legal immigration procedures and were granted lawful protections, including protection from persecution, can today be reclassified as ‘illegals’. For instance, Vietnamese immigrants who found refuge in the United States after the end of the Vietnam War and who had long benefited from special legal exceptions, such as exemption from deportation and from detention beyond 90 days for those who arrived before 1995, have now seen these policies weakened or removed.   

ICE’s aggressive methods and the breakdown of legal protections for migrants should remind us that crime and legality are ever-changing and at the mercy of administration-led political abuse. In the United States, criminality and illegality have been redefined and weaponised by the Trump administration against migrant minorities. Beyond this discursive power, it is time to acknowledgethe real consequences for immigrants in the U.S., who are facing relentless marginalisation and brutality. Americans must move beyond the terms of ‘illegals’ or ‘aliens’ and advocate for policies that honour the human rights and dignity of migrants as neighbours, friends and family.