“Anti-Immigrant Raids Are a Laboratory for Authoritarianism in the United States”

Journalist and author Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has spent more than fifteen years investigating U.S. immigration policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations, particularly the waves of migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle. His reporting spans from the late twentieth century to the immigration raids launched under Donald Trump’s administration.

His book on the migration crisis at the U.S. southern border, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, was named one of The New York Times’ ten best nonfiction books of 2024.

In a conversation on the program Esta Semana, broadcast on CONFIDENCIAL’s YouTube channel due to television censorship in Nicaragua, Blitzer analyzed Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, which he says represent an attack on legal and democratic institutions. “Anti-immigrant raids are a laboratory for authoritarianism in the United States,” the writer warned.

In your book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, you tell the story of migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—who migrated to the United States during the first two decades of this century. But there was another wave of migrants, mainly from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, which intensified between 2020 and 2024. Are there differences between these two groups of Latin American migrants?

Migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela fit a more traditional profile when it comes to asylum claims. Nicaraguans and Cubans, in particular, are fleeing, in one way or another, state persecution, and technically the asylum system at the border is supposed to function in order to extend protection to that population.

At the same time that there was a surge in arrivals from Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela, there was also a broader wave of migrants coming from all over the world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic collapse affecting both the region and the world. So there was a very complicated moment at the border when the Biden administration took office. It had to do several things at once: manage this new population arriving at the border, rebuild what the first Trump administration had dismantled, and figure out how to keep the asylum system functioning.

People from Cuba and Nicaragua, in particular, who could clearly demonstrate forms of state persecution, in theory would have been able to apply for asylum. But what the U.S. government did, at that time, to try to minimize the chaos at the border, was to offer a temporary, provisional, sort of pathway into the country. There was a parole program for Nicaraguans, Cubans, Venezuelans and also Haitians, to first enter the United States and then, after they had entered the country, they could apply for various forms of legal protection.

And what about the earlier migrants from the Northern Triangle—those who left their countries after Hurricane Mitch, the earthquakes, the rise of gangs in El Salvador, and the lack of economic opportunities? Were they able to regularize their status during those years?

During the 1980s, when most asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle were coming from El Salvador and Guatemala, many of them had very strong cases. The reality, however, was that the U.S. government was reluctant to approve asylum applications from Salvadorans and Guatemalans because doing so would have meant acknowledging the abuses committed by its own allies in the region. Eventually, the U.S. government had to admit that it was effectively discriminating against migrants from those countries, and some pathways to legal status emerged for those populations. But what happened at the beginning of this century is that the U.S. immigration system simply failed to evolve.

In the 2000s—particularly around 2010 and 2014—the people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum were mainly fleeing gang violence. Legally speaking, however, asylum law was not designed to address this kind of widespread persecution by the maras (criminal organizations) rather than by governments. It took a long time before U.S. authorities began recognizing the validity of asylum claims from people fleeing gangs. That shift came largely because lawyers worked to expand legal interpretations of protection so they could apply to that population.

There are also many people from Guatemala’s western highlands who were not persecuted by a government or by gangs. They left because they simply did not have enough food, and extreme desperation drove them to migrate. The U.S. government could acknowledge that migration from the region had multiple causes, but the legal tools available through the asylum system did not apply to that population. There was simply no mechanism to absorb an exodus of that scale from the region.

Can we estimate the size of these different migrant populations, and what their situation is today? Are they part of the pool of people who could potentially be deported under the current Trump administration?

It is very difficult to determine exactly how many people might have qualified for asylum but never had the opportunity to apply successfully. It is estimated that there are at least eleven million undocumented people in the United States. This population is extremely diverse and reflects a wide range of circumstances. Some people entered the United States legally with a visa, but their visas later expired. Because of legal or practical barriers, they were unable to leave and re-enter the country to regularize their status. As a result, there is a very large population living without legal documentation and in a highly precarious situation.

Democratic administrations generally tried to limit mass deportations, although they often maintained harsh enforcement measures at the border. During Obama’s second term and throughout Biden’s presidency, the approach was to prioritize the deportation of certain categories of undocumented immigrants. For example, someone who had committed a crime might become a priority for removal. But for many people who had no legal pathway because Congress had failed to pass immigration reform—people with families, decades of residence in the United States, and steady employment—the idea was generally not to target them aggressively.

Now, however, we have a much more punitive government that is trying to arrest virtually anyone it can, leaving many people in an extremely vulnerable position. Moreover, we are now documenting cases in which this administration is arresting and attempting to deport people who actually do have legal status. In other words, we are entering an unprecedented phase marked by the government’s indifference to the legal system itself.

Trump campaigned on building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but during his first presidency it did not stop migration. What is the situation at the border today after this deportation campaign and the ICE raids? Has it stopped the flow of migrants?

It’s true that there is very little activity at the border right now, and that reflects several things. On the one hand, it reflects the brutality of this administration and migrants’ recognition that this is not the right moment to try to cross the border. But at the same time, this migration flow was being minimized, even, at the end of the Biden years. So Trump, in a sense, took advantage of a change in the dynamic. It took Biden quite a while to figure out exactly how to handle the situation at the border, but by the end of his Administration, at the beginning of 2024, the numbers were starting to go down in terms of border arrivals. It is interesting to note that one Biden policy that did affect these numbers at the border was to create legal avenues for people from Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and could enter the country in a more organized way.

The humanitarian parole program?

Exactly, the humanitarian parole program. Arrivals from those countries dropped by 90 percent after those legal pathways were created. People preferred to migrate to the United States through a more organized process rather than having to travel to the border and wait.

The suspension of humanitarian parole left this population in a state of complete limbo and vulnerability. The same is true for people who had already begun the asylum process. Is it still possible to obtain asylum in the United States today?

It is very complicated because there is a huge queue of more than a million cases in the asylum system. In other words, if someone is filing an application, you have to wait a long time. And what is going to happen during this waiting period? Well, the government is sending federal agents to immigration courts in the U.S. to make arrests of people who are in compliance with the requirements, that is, people who are showing up in court, as required, to explain their case before a judge.

In the first Trump administration, the legal advice that newly arrived migrants used to receive was to initiate a legal process, precisely because if there was a pending process, the government typically could not try to arrest you. With a pending process, the government was not going to identify you to arrest and then deport you.

Now, trying to comply with the requirements, whether it’s attending an appointment with the U.S. immigration agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, or appearing in court before a judge in connection with an asylum case, is turning people into easy targets for the government.

And the same is true for people who entered through the parole program. The authorities know where they live because they entered legally through a sponsor.

Exactly. So it’s kind of a government scam. It was always predictable that if there was a change of government, a Trump-style government was going to try to suspend these particular programs. What the Trump Administration has done is to suspend the programs and go arrest people before their work permits even expire. But it’s horrible, the logic of these humanitarian parole programs was to incentivize a more organized form of entry, and they could anticipate a certain order, a certain regularity. Today the principle of law in the United States has become a kind of vulnerability, and it’s inexplicable.

During the campaign, President Trump equated what he called illegal immigration with serious crimes and organized crime. But what we are seeing seems more like indiscriminate persecution. Or is there a distinction being made between people who have committed crimes and those who have no criminal record?

This administration has tried to blur legal distinctions.
A violation of immigration law is not the same thing as committing a crime. The immigration system is a civil system. What the government is trying to do is turn every migrant into a kind of criminal and then claim that it is arresting criminals. During the campaign, most people who voted for Trump believed that mass deportations would focus on securing the border and identifying criminals. Now we have data showing that more than 70 percent of those arrested have no criminal record whatsoever. But by now this confusion has become embedded in the public consciousness, especially when someone like Trump is constantly lying.

The cumulative effect of so much misinformation has been to confuse the public. In official government statements, they talk about “criminals,” but they no longer make any distinction between someone who has a pending legal case in the immigration system and someone who has actually committed a crime.

Do migrants have any protection from local courts or from the federal courts that have intervened in this process?

It’s very difficult to say because the government is increasingly disregarding court rulings and judicial orders.
In the past, when a federal judge issued an order, the federal government respected it. Now we have well-documented cases involving more than 200 federal court rulings that the government is simply ignoring, and that has very serious implications for migrants.

Migrants in immigration detention centers are increasingly turning to federal judges instead of immigration judges. This administration has fired a lot of immigration judges from other administrations, and they are trying to install judges who are loyal to this administration’s agenda.

The government is trying to detain people for an indefinite period. The logic is to force people to abandon their legal cases because the conditions in detention centers are horrible. And there are many people who make the decision to accept deportation, even deportation to a third country, simply to get out of such dangerous conditions.

So people are now turning to a new legal tool in the immigration context: habeas corpus petitions, which are more commonly associated with federal courts. In other words, migrants are asking federal judges to intervene in their individual cases because the current government is trying to hold people indefinitely without bond. During that time, people often have little or no regular contact with their lawyers and little or no regular contact with their families. Meanwhile, the government is moving people around, transferring them from one detention center to another.

What impact does this kind of “cruelty” policy against migrants, which has even led to the execution and murder of Americans who were not even migrants, have on the U.S. electorate and particularly on Donald Trump’s base?

Among Trump’s core supporters, no one is going to break with the president. There is complete loyalty among his most hardline voters. But among the broader public, what we’re seeing is having an effect. People are reacting against the senseless cruelty of this government’s actions. For example, agents operating in masks, detaining people in unmarked vehicles, even targeting citizens.

What was particularly striking about the deaths of those two women in Minnesota was that the individuals responsible were immigration agents. What role did immigration agents have in harassing and attacking citizens? What stands out in all of this is that, for Trump and his administration, immigration has become a kind of laboratory for government authoritarianism. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is the administration’s approach, and I believe that there is going to be a strong rejection by the population.

We have seen a tipping point in what happened in the state of Minnesota. Let’s see if it has consequences in the midterm elections. Democrats need to speak out about these abuses.

What can we expect over the next two and a half years of the Trump administration when it comes to immigration policy? Will it achieve the goals it set for mass deportations?

I think there’s another story unfolding that has received much less attention. The ideologues inside the White House are reshaping the U.S. immigration legal system itself. And that is going to leave a very significant legacy in the United States. They are literally trying to redefine who can be considered a legal immigrant in the United States. They are trying to change the definitions of key legal terms. The government is even looking for cases of supposed “fraud” among naturalized U.S. citizens.

The government is trying to discriminate between U.S.-born and non-U.S.-born citizens. In other words, we are seeing a total change in terms of how the government thinks about the issue of migration. If control of Congress changes and Democrats win back the House of Representatives, we will likely see more investigations, and they may be able to curb some of the administration’s more visible abuses. But they will not be able to change the ideology that continues to operate uninterrupted inside the White House.