They Are Not Coming for “Illegal Immigrants”

The communities most targeted by this administration’s immigration enforcement are among the most contributing communities in the country. The people it is happening to are not abstractions. They are, in the most literal and complete sense of the word, us.

Let me start with a number: 60,000.

That’s the approximate number of people held in ICE detention. More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the previous four years combined. Thousands are being held in hastily constructed tent camps where conditions are, by every account, brutal.

Now let me tell you what kind of people those 65,000 are. By the administration’s own data, the share of ICE detainees with a criminal conviction has been shrinking steadily throughout 2025, even as the administration publicly insists it is only going after “dangerous criminals” and “the worst of the worst.” ICE has been explicitly encouraged to make “collateral arrests,” apprehending undocumented people who happen to be present when agents arrive for a specific target - people in the same household, bystanders, and relatives. The majority of people arrested do not have another criminal violation.

They are, in other words, ordinary people. People who have been here for years, sometimes decades. People who get up in the morning and go to work. People whose children were born here. People who pay taxes - yes, taxes, including taxes supporting Social Security and Medicare - programs offering benefits they will never be able to collect. People who coach youth soccer leagues, attend churches, run small businesses, nurse our elderly parents back to health, pick the food on our tables, and build the houses we live in.

The administration knows this. The cruelty is not incidental. Cruelty is the point.

The Architecture of the Assault

What’s happening to immigrant communities right now isn’t immigration enforcement. It is a campaign of systemic terror, operating on multiple simultaneous fronts, designed to make 13.7 million people - and the families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and communities attached to them - feel that no corner of their life is safe.

The administration ended the longstanding policy barring ICE from arresting people at “sensitive locations” such as hospitals, schools, and religious institutions. ICE now conducts operations at immigration check-ins, where people show up voluntarily to comply with their legal obligations, and at courthouses. It has vastly expanded the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police to function as immigration agents, a model discontinued in 2012 after findings of systematic racial profiling, and now being paid for with federal money: $39 million to Florida partners alone in September 2025.

ICE daily deportations doubled from 600 in January 2025 to 1,200 by June. The number of people being placed in detention without bond has reached historic levels: by September 2025, 90 percent of those in ICE detention were deported directly from custody compared to 63 percent a year earlier. If you’re detained, you’re almost certainly being deported, regardless of how long you have lived here, regardless of what your case might reveal in a fair hearing, and regardless of whether you have U.S. citizen children who will effectively be deported with you or left behind as orphans in everything but name.

But deportations and detentions, devastating as they are, are only part of the assault. The administration is simultaneously attacking the legal definition of citizenship itself, a project whose implications extend far beyond any undocumented person.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship - the constitutional guarantee, rooted in the 14th Amendment, that any person born on U.S. soil is a citizen. The order would deny citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents lack permanent immigration status. Courts have blocked the order, and the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April 2026 in the case Trump v. Barbara, with a ruling expected this summer.

The administration has also made it dramatically harder to become a citizen through naturalization, canceling interviews and oath ceremonies, pausing processing for applicants from “high-risk” countries, and resuming personal neighborhood investigations of naturalization applicants. In June 2025, the DOJ issued a memo declaring denaturalization a “top enforcement priority” for its civil division.

Read together, these policies form a coherent project. They are not about controlling undocumented immigration. They’re about narrowing the legal and cultural definition of who belongs in America - permanently, constitutionally, in ways that will outlast any single administration if they succeed.

The 14th Amendment was written in the aftermath of the Civil War to overturn the Dred Scott decision, which had declared that Black people, enslaved or free, could never be citizens of the United States. The framers chose language deliberately broad: all persons born in the United States. Not some persons. Not persons with the right parents. All persons.

Legal scholars have noted that the framers explicitly intended to include immigrants, many of whom were then targets of intense hostility like the millions of Irish fleeing famine, and the Chinese building the railroads. The current administration is arguing that the 14th Amendment was much narrower - that it meant only the former slaves and their children, and no one else.

That is not a legal argument. That’s a declaration about who counts as a person. And it’s exactly the declaration that authoritarian movements in every country have made about the groups they’re constructing as the enemies of the state.

The Economy We Have Built on Their Backs

Let me say something about the economics of this situation, because the administration is counting on most Americans not knowing what they’re actually doing to the economy of the country they claim to love.

Nearly 31 million immigrants worked in the United States in 2024, accounting for 19.2 percent of the U.S. civilian workforce. The foreign-born population had a labor force participation rate of nearly 67 percent, compared to roughly 62 percent for the U.S.-born workforce. These are not marginal workers. They are, in the most precise sense, the workforce.

Since the start of 2025, the number of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force went down by more than one million. Job growth in industries heavily reliant on undocumented labor has been measurably weaker than the rest of the private sector. The industries most affected are not abstract:

Agriculture

Sixty-eight percent of farm laborers are foreign-born. Immigrants are more than half of all agricultural workers in some states. The food supply - fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat - depends on this labor with almost no buffer. When Georgia passed strict farm labor laws in recent years, strawberry prices spiked measurably within months. This is what’s coming nationally.

Construction

Nearly 30% of those employed by the construction industry in 2024 were immigrants. That’s 3.5 million people, the highest immigrant concentration of any industry by percentage. The Associated Builders and Contractors estimated a shortage of 500,000 workers in construction in 2025 before deportations accelerated. We are in a housing crisis. We need more homes built. We are systematically removing the people who build them.

Healthcare

Immigrants make up 15.6 percent of all nurses and 27.7 percent of all health aides nationally. In New York and New Jersey, more than half of all health aides are foreign-born. In five states, more than one in four nurses are immigrants. In Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, more than one in four physicians are immigrants. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected a shortage of 134,940 healthcare providers by 2036, and that projection was made before mass deportations were declared.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2024 that the influx of immigrant workers would grow GDP by $7 trillion over a decade and increase federal revenues by $1 trillion. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that deporting between 1.3 and 8.3 million undocumented immigrants would reduce U.S. real GDP by as much as 7 percent by 2028.

The administration knows these numbers. JD Vance’s argument - that removing immigrants will raise wages for American-born workers - has been studied extensively. The consensus among economists is that immigration’s adverse effects on U.S.-born workers’ wages and employment have, overall, been minimal, because immigrants increase demand for goods and services, generate business creation, and increase productivity for native-born workers who work alongside them.

What the administration is actually doing is not protecting American workers. It is deliberately dismantling the economic infrastructure of the country in order to perform a show of force against a population it has designated as the enemy.

The Retirement Crisis They Are Building

There is one economic consequence of mass deportation that almost no one is talking about, and it may be the most consequential of all for the broadest cross-section of Americans: the direct threat to Social Security and Medicare.

Here is the structural reality. The Social Security benefits that more than 61 million retired Americans depend on are already in trouble. Without congressional action, retirement benefits could be slashed by 23 percent as early as 2033. In 1960, there were 5.1 workers paying into the system for every beneficiary drawing from it. By 2022, that ratio had fallen to 2.8 workers per beneficiary, and it’s declining further as the Baby Boom generation ages out of the workforce. We are in what demographers call “Peak 65,” the four-year window from 2024 to 2027 in which more than 4.1 million Americans turn 65 annually, the largest cohort in American history, entering the system simultaneously.

The one structural counterweight to this demographic crisis has been immigration. Immigrants are disproportionately working-age: 77 percent of foreign-born residents and nearly 90 percent of undocumented immigrants are between 16 and 64, compared to about 61 percent of U.S.-born individuals. They enter the workforce, pay payroll taxes, and - here is the part that should stop every opponent of immigration in their tracks - most of them will never collect a dime.

In 2023 alone, undocumented immigrants paid $26.2 billion into the Social Security Trust Fund, just one component of the estimated $89.8 billion they paid that year in combined federal, state, and local taxes. They’re not eligible to collect Social Security retirement benefits. They also paid $6.4 billion into Medicare in 2022, a program they cannot access. “The federal government is essentially receiving free money from these undocumented immigrants,” said Marco Guzman, senior analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “They are contributing to a system they will not benefit from. Who is benefiting? It’s American citizens.”

The Social Security Administration has acknowledged this directly in its own analyses. The trustees’ reports show that every increase in net annual immigration of 100,000 people improves the program’s long-term actuarial balance by 0.1 percent of taxable payroll. Conversely, reducing net immigration by around 400,000 people would increase the 75-year shortfall by nearly 11.5 percent. Mass deportation of the scale the administration is pursuing - targeting a population that contributed $26 billion to the trust fund last year alone and will collect nothing - is not an abstraction. It is a direct raid on the retirement security of elderly Americans.

And now the administration is extending this logic to legal immigrants as well. Rosa María Carranza, a childcare worker in Oakland who has lived and worked in the United States legally for 24 years under Temporary Protected Status, has contributed tens of thousands of dollars into Medicare and Social Security over her career. Under Section 71201 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed on July 4, 2025, she and an estimated 100,000 other lawfully present immigrants will soon lose their Medicare eligibility, stripped of benefits they spent decades paying for. She is not an edge case. She is the model.

What’s happening here is a form of theft operating in plain sight. Immigrant workers, including undocumented ones, have been subsidizing the retirement of American citizens for decades, paying into programs that explicitly exclude them, accepting an arrangement that serves the system’s solvency while offering them nothing in return. Now the administration is moving to deport the workers, keep the contributions already extracted from them, and simultaneously cut the benefits of those legal immigrants who did meet every requirement for eligibility but managed to grow old in the wrong political moment.

The Trump administration has claimed, without evidence, that many undocumented immigrants are illegally collecting benefits and has vowed to put an end to the fraud. The fraud, in reality, runs in the opposite direction. It is the system that has taken their money and given them nothing, and it’s the administration that is now compounding that theft by removing the workers whose ongoing contributions are the only thing standing between the current generation of retirees and a 23 percent benefit cut a decade from now.

If you are over 55 and you’re not paying attention to what this administration is doing to immigrant communities, you should understand something clearly: they’re not just coming for your neighbor. They are coming for your retirement.

What They Actually Contribute - and What We Would Lose

The economic argument matters. But it is not the argument that will save us, because it accepts the premise that a person’s claim to belong in a community is a function of their economic utility. That is a premise worth rejecting, firmly and explicitly.

So let me talk about what immigrants actually contribute to American life - to its culture, its science, its civic fabric, and its moral character - in terms that can’t be reduced to labor market statistics.

The standard account of American immigration focuses on the acculturation of immigrants to American society. It ignores the other direction: the transformation of American culture by immigrants themselves. Immigrants and their children did not simply adapt to American life. They created American life and did so through the performing arts, the sciences, the kitchen, and the street. Jazz and blues were built on the cultural inheritance of African people brought here against their will and their descendants’ negotiations with a country that enslaved them. The Hollywood film industry was built by Eastern European Jewish immigrants who understood storytelling because their survival had always depended on it. Silicon Valley was built by people from Iran, India, Russia, Taiwan, and dozens of other countries who came here and found, despite everything, a place where their ideas could find a market. In 2018, over half of U.S. startup companies valued at $1 billion or more had at least one immigrant founder; more than 80 percent employed immigrants in key management or product development roles.

Immigrants represent nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and more than a quarter of the nation’s Nobel Prize winners. While comprising 16 percent of inventors, immigrants were behind 23 percent of all patents issued in the U.S. between 1990 and 2016. And when those patents are weighted by quality and subsequent citation, the share is even higher. More striking: when immigrant inventors die early, their native-born collaborators’ productivity declines by 17 percent - measurably more than when a native-born co-inventor dies. Something about working alongside someone from a different intellectual tradition, a different cultural inheritance, a different set of default assumptions, makes everyone around them think better.

The food we eat. The music we cannot imagine living without. The architecture of our cities. The medicines that keep our parents alive. The bridges and roads and buildings. The research that will determine whether we can survive climate change. The comedy that lets us see ourselves honestly. The literature that makes us recognize each other’s humanity. These are not the products of a monoculture anxiously defending its borders. They are the products of a country that has - imperfectly, hypocritically, often violently, and also genuinely - been shaped by the encounter with everyone who has ever been brought from abroad and forced to labor in American industries, and those who come here seeking refuge or looking for a life worth living.

The communities most targeted by this administration’s immigration enforcement are among the most contributing communities in the country. The Central American families whose children are being arrested in schools, whose fathers are being taken from jobs, whose mothers are being separated from infants - these are the families that built much of the physical infrastructure of this country in the last thirty years. The Haitian communities, the Salvadoran communities, the Guatemalan communities, the Somali and Ethiopian and Nigerian communities, the South Asian and Southeast Asian communities - each has woven itself into the fabric of American life in ways so fundamental that pulling the thread unravels things most people have never thought to examine.

And there’s something else worth saying plainly: the people most targeted by this campaign are overwhelmingly people of color. The mass deportation apparatus has always been a racial project - from the Chinese Exclusion Act to Operation Wetback to the immigration enforcement buildup of the 1990s that was always, despite its race-neutral language, directed at brown-skinned people from the Global South. What’s happening now is not a departure from that history. It is its most recent and most aggressive expression.

A Fight Over What It Means to Be Human

I said at the beginning that this is a fight over who gets to be American. It is that. But I want to end by saying what I think is at stake at a deeper level, because if we stay only at the level of citizenship policy and labor economics, we will lose the argument that ultimately needs to be won.

The administration’s immigration policy is not primarily a policy. It is a claim about the nature of the human community - about what makes someone a member of it, about whose suffering counts, about where the line between “us” and “them” is drawn and who has the authority to draw it.

Every authoritarian movement in history has required an outgroup - a category of people whose designated difference justifies the erosion of the norms and laws and institutions that protect everyone else. The outgroup serves as the site where the regime tests its methods before deploying them more broadly, and as the mirror in which the ingroup is supposed to see itself reflected as superior. The demonization of the outgroup is not incidental to the authoritarian project. It is its engine.

What’s being tested on immigrant communities right now - warrantless arrests, indefinite detention without bond hearings, the dismissal of long-established due process protections, the manufacturing of a climate of fear designed to make people disappear from public life voluntarily before the government has to disappear them forcibly - will not stay contained to immigrant communities. It never has. The legal precedents being established, the enforcement infrastructure being built, the cultural normalization of cruelty being accomplished - these are available to be turned against anyone the regime decides to designate as the enemy next.

More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the four years prior combined. Immigrants are stripped of their chance to ask a judge for release. Tent camps with brutal conditions hold human beings whose only crime, in most cases, is having been born somewhere other than here and wanting to build a life for themselves and their children. This is being done in our name, with our tax dollars, by officials who were elected or appointed by elected officials, in a country that calls itself a democracy.

The question this puts to all of us is not primarily a policy question. It is a moral one: what kind of society do we want to be? What does it mean to be humane? Who counts as a neighbor, and what do we owe our neighbors?

Hannah Arendt, who knew something about being stateless and about what happens when a state decides that certain categories of people are not really people, wrote that the right to have rights - the right to belong to a political community that will protect you - is the most fundamental of all rights, the one from which all others flow. When that right is stripped from a category of people, the damage isn’t only to them. It is to the moral fabric of the community that allows the stripping to happen.

We are in the middle of that stripping. It is happening right now, at a scale and speed that most Americans are not fully tracking. And the people it is happening to are not abstractions. They are the farmworker whose back aches from twelve hours in the sun picking the food you ate today. They’re the nursing assistant who held your grandmother’s hand when she was dying. They are the child who was born here, who has never known another country, who is American in every way that matters, and whose citizenship is now before the Supreme Court.

They built this country alongside everyone else who built it. They are woven into its present at every level. They are, in the most literal and complete sense of the word, us.

The fight to defend them is the fight to defend the proposition that what makes someone a member of the human community is not the accident of their birth coordinates. It is their presence, their labor, their love, their suffering, their hope - their humanity itself. That’s the fight. And it belongs to all of us.