I. Introduction: Rhetoric of the 2024 Election and Trump’s First Year

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s political career, he has worked to dehumanize immigrants, both documented and undocumented. Throughout his 2024 campaign, he made multiple disparaging comments about American immigrant communities, going as far as claiming that Haitian immigrants were eating “cats and dogs” and South American immigrants were drug dealers, turning immigrants into invasive monsters in the eyes of his audience. 

Even after being elected, President Trump and his administration continue to propagate hateful rhetoric regarding immigrants. In the first White House press briefing of his second presidency, when asked what percent of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests under the Trump administration have been criminals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “all of them,” stating that they were all criminals because they “illegally broke our nation's laws.” [1] The problem here lies in the fact that undocumented immigrants are, in fact, not all criminals, because being in the United States without documentation is not a crime. 

1. What Does it Mean to be Undocumented? 

Being in the US without proper documentation is not a crime and has never been. In fact, there have even been unsuccessful attempts at making it a crime, such as in the “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005,” which the Senate refused to pass into law. [2] As it stands, while being undocumented in the U.S. is not a crime, entering it unlawfully is; under 8 U.S.C. § 1325, unlawful entry constitutes a misdemeanor offense, while unlawful presence remains a civil violation. [3] In recent years, though, sociology research has shown that “growing numbers of undocumented immigrants now either directly approach immigration officials at airports or land-border crossings and seek asylum in the U.S. Others are initially admitted to the country legally on a temporary tourist, student, or work visa – but then overstay the time period for which they have permission.” [4] Both of which are legal means of entering the U.S. Still, public conversation often overlooks these distinctions, framing undocumented presence as implicitly criminal. 

However, regardless of citizenship status, the Fourteenth Amendment ensures that everyone in the U.S. has the right to due process under the law. This principle has been upheld multiple times by the Supreme Court. Under ​​Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Supreme Court of the U.S. held that the protections of the U.S. Constitution “are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality.” [5] In 1982, the Supreme Court of the U.S. went even further, holding in Plyler v. Doe that, “the Fourteenth Amendment applies to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality.” [6] Most recently, in Zadvydas v. Davis (2001), they clarified that, “the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the U.S., including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” [7] What this means is that, under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, anyone in the United States, whether they are considered undocumented or not, has the right to defend themselves in a court of law. While undocumented immigrants are not entitled to a trial in front of a jury of their peers, they are entitled to a trial in front of a Judge and have the right to hire an attorney if they please. [8]

    2. Undocumented Immigrants are not All Criminals. 

Undocumented immigrants are responsible for the least amount of crime in the U.S. As a 2024 report by the National Institute of Justice explains, “Undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime… and violent felony crime… compared to other groups.” [9] Moreover, as a report for the American Immigration Council details how, “The myths that immigrants increase crime and that sanctuary policies lead to lawlessness are not well supported, and on the contrary, research shows that immigrants, particularly first-generation immigrants, are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens.” [10] 

Despite these facts, President Trump and supporters of his mass deportation plans cling to any instances of criminal activity by immigrants to justify mass deportations and immigration “crackdowns.” Proponents of mass deportation often reference the Laken Riley case, in which a 22-year-old girl was killed while running at the University of Georgia by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, when defending the exclusion of immigrants from our nation. What’s important to recognize is that this case is not a representation of all undocumented immigrants in this country, as they are not a monolith. Reducing millions of lives into isolated incidents builds policies on fear instead of evidence in addition to misrepresenting and distorting the truth. 

II. Actions of the Trump Administration

Regardless, the Trump administration continues to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into supporting ICE raids and agents, claiming that they’re doing so in the name of national security. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “Although the administration repeatedly said it is deporting the ‘worst of the worst,’ its enforcement efforts are sweeping in many people with no criminal records to meet the White House goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day.” [11] In addition to not meeting this goal, ICE has already made multiple procedural errors while also taking increasingly violent actions in major US cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles. These tactics illustrate a significant escalation in immigrant enforcement tactics.  

As a PBS News report from October 2025 explains, “more than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since an immigration crackdown started last month in the Chicago area… But U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status, and children have been among those detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters that pop up daily across neighborhoods in the city of 2.7 million and its many suburbs.” [12] The article also highlights how many of these arrests have been unnecessarily violent, with ICE agents using excessive physical force, smoke grenades, and tear gas on unarmed people.

III. Is this Legal?

Despite the controversy surrounding ICE agents' actions during raids, the courts have made multiple rulings in favor of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Most recently, in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo (2025), the Supreme Court held that ICE agents are allowed to use a “totality of the circumstances” standard while making arrests from “reasonable suspicion,” enabling them to racially profile people based on their “apparent” race or ethnicity, the language they’re speaking, and the location in which they’re found. [13]

Despite this expanse of power, ICE is not allowed to detain people using violence or deport them without first providing them with their right to Due Process under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the Trump administration and ICE have repeatedly violated these protections, even going as far as deporting “alleged criminals” to mega-prisons in El Salvador.

An article about these mega-prisons, written by Michael Rios for CNN, describes these horrific conditions. 

The CNN team that visited in late 2024 described the deprivation as deliberate, noting the men were allowed out of their crowded cells for just 30 minutes a day, that there is no privacy here, no trace of comfort, and the lights are on 24/7. They do not work. They are not allowed books or a deck of cards or letters from home. Plates of food are stacked outside the cells at mealtimes and pulled through the bars. No meat is ever served. The 30-minute daily respite is merely to leave the cell for the central hallway for group exercise or Bible readings, wrote CNN’s David Culver and his team. [14]

Immigrants being sent to this “mega prison” have not had their due process. When the U.S. sent hundreds of alleged criminals to a prison where they have no jurisdiction without notifying their lawyers, they sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has never been convicted of a crime, to this prison. The Trump administration “claimed that Abrego Garcia is a ‘convicted’ member of MS-13 who was ‘engaged in human trafficking,’” without providing any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. [15]  In Noem v. Abrego Garcia (2025), the U.S. Supreme Court told the Trump Administration to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia back. [16] He was wrongfully deported in March of 2025. The Supreme Court ruled on this case in April 2025, yet Garcia was not returned to the U.S. until June 2025, three months later. 

IV. Give us Your Tired

Immigrants do not come to the U.S. just to commit crimes. Millions do not abandon their home, families, and friends to go to a strange place and start over just to break the law. They do it because they have no other choice. They do it because they are tired and want to create a better life for themselves and the people they love.

The conditions that the Trump administration has placed both documented and undocumented immigrants in the U.S. under are terrifying and unprecedented. President Trump not only does not refer to immigrants as people, but he also refuses to treat them as such. Immigrants have been a central part of our nation's ethos since its inception. The U.S. calls itself a place where anyone can come, work hard, and become a part of a 200-year-long dream. Our Statue of Liberty reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” For centuries, immigrants have been regarded as part of the nation's backbone, but why have they now become an American nuisance? 

As an article about the poem by ABC News notes, when Emma Lazarus wrote this poem in 1883, she “was involved in charitable work for refugees and was active in aiding Russian Jews who were trying to escape to the United States,” and so “immigration and freedom of the oppressed was very much on her mind when writing this poem.” [17] The poem was placed on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty about twenty years after her death. That statue soon became a symbol for immigration, often one of the first sites immigrants saw upon arriving in the U.S. Between “the 1880s through the early 1920s, there was ‘a peak period of immigration,’” where “23.5 million immigrants seeking religious and political liberty and economic opportunity traveled to the United States.”[18] Maybe for them, Lazarus’ poem held true, but while those words are still alive, scrawled at the base of the Statue of Liberty, for most in Trump’s America, the promises are not. Until the prose laid at the feet of liberty rings true again, the “American Dream” will remain an exclusive fantasy.