Trump doubles down on mass deportations that Americans reject

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

Several national polls have reached the same conclusion about Donald Trump’s immigration policy: violent raids and indiscriminate detentions do not enjoy the support of the American public.

The annual Gallup poll on immigration found that the majority of Americans, 62%, disapprove of the president’s immigration policy, compared to 35% who support it. Likewise, 78% of Americans support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who meet specific criteria, and this support is held by majorities across all party affiliations.

And 79% of Americans view immigration as positive for the country, a record high according to Gallup.

Likewise, there are increasing reports of people who voted for Trump because they believed his claim that his plan for mass deportations was intended solely to remove “the worst of the worst” from the country. But in the end, ICE came knocking on their doors, too.

Such is the case of Mercedes Capaz, a US citizen of Cuban descent who voted for Trump, and now her son is detained and about to be deported to Cuba.

“I feel very betrayed because I didn’t think he would do this to me or so many other people,” Capaz told Telemundo 51.

There are many others like Capaz because Trump has gone after everyone—undocumented immigrants, authorized residents, and citizens, even those with no criminal record—in his purge of immigrants of color.

The most disturbing thing is that these operations are becoming increasingly violent.

Last weekend, an ICE raid on a licensed cannabis farm in Camarillo, California, ended with the death of a farmworker who fell from the roof of a greenhouse while fleeing.

During the same raid, ICE agents arrested a disabled military veteran and US citizen, George Retes, who works as a security guard at the farm. Retes was in his car when ICE agents broke the window, pepper-sprayed him, and threw him to the ground before detaining him for three days despite his claims that he was a citizen. He was released without charges.

The border czar himself, Tom Homan, confirmed a few days ago what is an open secret: that ICE agents use racial profiling to determine who to detain.

“People need to understand, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just go through the observations, get articulable facts, based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions,” Homan said on Fox & Friends.

In other words, if you are a citizen but fit the “profile” of an undocumented immigrant, according to ICE, you are likely to be detained.

Homan later claimed that his statements were “taken out of context” and that physical appearance is not the only factor in “raising reasonable suspicion.”

But the reality is that agents do use racial profiling, and their network has taken away authorized residents and US citizens. And the operations are becoming increasingly chaotic, indiscriminate, and intended solely to intimidate and terrorize. This was demonstrated by ICE agents who stormed into MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where a group of children had been playing sports moments earlier.

The worst part is that everything that is happening, not only in terms of immigration but in other areas as well, such as Medicaid cuts that will leave millions without health insurance, food stamp cuts, and the dismantling of the Department of Education, was warned about in the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and yet the people still elected Trump.

The question is how all this drama will end, which shows that elections have serious consequences on daily life and that, as the saying goes, “be careful what you wish for.”

The original Spanish version is here.