The incoming administration of Donald Trump has vowed to purge the nation of undocumented immigrants and others, using unprecedented strategies. It’s promised to implement mass deportations, threatened a little-known concept of “remigration,” and even called for expanded efforts to denaturalize some groups of U.S. citizens.
Trump’s pick for “Border Czar,” Thomas Homan, for example, recently said in a “60 Minutes” interview that one way to carry out mass deportations without separating families is to have families of mixed immigration and citizenship statuses “deported together.”
And Stephen Miller, who is set to become Trump’s policy chief, has promised to “turbocharge” so-called denaturalization efforts.
For perspective on what Americans can expect starting Jan. 20 and in the years following, Sampan interviewed immigration attorney Eric Lee of Diamante Law Group. Lee helped represent U.S. citizen Sandra Muñoz and her husband, Luis Asencio-Cordero in the Supreme Court case of “Department of State v. Muñoz.”
That case centered on Muñoz’s years-long efforts to sponsor her husband from El Salvador to live with her and their child in the U.S. but was thwarted by a consular official. Supreme Court justices sided 6-to-3 with the U.S. government in a ruling some advocates and legal experts said had links to legal precedents built on anti-Asian discrimination of the 1800s. After the ruling, Lee had said the Supreme Court’s decision had “thrown another shovel of dirt on the coffin of American democracy. It is a milestone attack on the right to marriage, the rights of immigrants, and the Due Process Clause.”
Now Lee paints a dire picture of what to expect under Trump, and for the future of our democracy.
“An administration that is willing to denaturalize, is willing to do anything,” said Lee. “By their own admission, they are going to try and enact broader denaturalization policies and there is no reason why anybody should not take those claims seriously. … It is, in fact, extremely dangerous.”
And Lee argues that this effort and others promised by Trump would come at a time when the Supreme Court has “indicated, time and time again, that it is really not beholden by the Constitution – in terms of (how it has upheld) executive power on immigration.” It’s also a time when Republicans will dominate Congress and when federal courts are populated with a number of Trump-appointed judges.
Lee emphasized that a major risk to mass deportation is that those who get booted from the U.S., even unlawfully so, in these sweeps would have a much harder time returning. And once out of the country, the immigrants will be left without the protection of the Bill of Rights.
But Lee is also critical of Pres. Joe Biden’s administration on how it has handled immigration, including the Muñoz case. Throughout his conversation with the Sampan, he slammed Vice Pres. Kamala Harris for saying “everything is going to be OK” during her post-election-day loss speech.
“I don’t think that is true. There is absolutely no guarantee that everything is going to be OK,” he said.
Lee does, however, believe Americans still have a say in how our future is written, through both legal challenges and peaceful activism.
The following was edited, and some parts rearranged and some questions shortened, for clarity and length.
Sampan: … About mass deportation… I think someone could argue that we saw some of that in the Eisenhower administration, during what was called “Operation Wetback.” … Could you just briefly compare that to what’s being talked about now … ?
Lee: …. What should really be concerning about the Trump administration’s references to “Operation Wetback” is that there are these forces – people like Stephen Miller, Tom Homan – who are very keenly aware of the type of really reactionary, anti-democratic historical traditions into which they’re tapping. Because, yes, what they are proposing is to go into major American cities, place them under martial law, and start rounding people up, including American citizens, and deporting them from the United States without due process. Whether that’s legal or not is not going to be a barrier to the Trump administration’s efforts to carry out such policies. That may slow them down here and there, but ultimately, we know that Trump is willing to disobey court rulings when he finds them inconvenient, just as he’s willing to ignore election results when he doesn’t find them convenient. So, I mean, anything is possible. That’s the danger.
Sampan: I’m not trying to ask these questions to scare people, but … if this mass deportation looks anything like how it’s characterized it in their campaign rhetoric, it almost sounds like you could get to this extreme where people who are American-born citizens or green card holders, would have to have identification on hand – almost have to carry their passports around or some other sort of documentation – so that they are not swept up in this….
Lee: To even hear your question is chilling, because what you’re describing is police-state dictatorship, where police can go around asking, “Show me your papers,” and if you don’t have them, you go to a detention center. Is that what it’s going to look like in January of 2025; I don’t know. Is that what it’s going to look like in 2026, 2027? I mean, there’s going to be a lot of opposition to this. You know, this is a country in which the vast majority of undocumented people have American citizen children, spouses, co-workers, etc. And a lot of what you’re asking is going to be determined by the response of the population as a whole. Because that’s what’s going to – much more than the Constitution – determine what the Trump administration is able to carry out. Certainly, Stephen Miller would like to have the exact situation that you talked about. That’s why they are trying to pull federal funding for police departments that don’t work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. That’s the future that they want. The question for the American population is whether that’s a future that we are going to allow.
Sampan: … What would you say are some of the ways people could advocate for immigrants …?
Lee: Civil society must respond forcefully to defend democracy before it is too late. Lawyers, academia, teachers, labor, all must coordinate not only to fight Trump in the courts but to mobilize the schools and workplaces and the population in defense of immigrants and democratic rights. There was a time when the labor movement undertook such work. Whether Trump succeeds in his plan to deport millions and deploy troops to cities will depend on the response of the people of the country as a whole.
… The critical aspect is going to be that communities have to be prepared for things that have not ever happened in American history before, and that means that they’re going to have to get organized. They’re going to have to be ready to stand up and defend their neighbors, their coworkers, their families, their fellow students, wherever they may be, and from whatever walk of life, that is going to be the determinative factor. We’ll use, as attorneys, every legal option that is available to us to defend democracy and the rights of immigrants, but it is the right of the people to stand up to defend democratic rights and prevent this administration from carrying out the types of nightmarish policies that it says it plans to carry out. And we have to take them at their word when they say they’re going to do these things. We cannot be complacent and assume that things will be OK. And when Kamala Harris said in her concession speech that things
will be “OK,” this is an attempt to lull the population asleep.
Sampan: … In the “Department of State v. Muñoz” … what really struck me is that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in her favor, but then it was actually the Biden administration that requested the Supreme Court reverse that lower court’s ruling. And it almost sounds like the Biden administration’s language was kind of similar to what the final decision was: That, well, if they want to be together, they can be together in another country, right? Could you talk about that aspect of the case?
Lee: As a preliminary matter, if anybody believes that the Biden-Harris administration was a pro-immigrant administration, they need to read the facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways, this was an administration which attempted to echo, or even enact, Trump’s policies on immigration, as some sort of … absurd effort to win electoral votes by essentially packing to the far right on immigration.
To the specific question, American citizens have the right to live in the United States. Period. End of story. The government cannot banish or expel a citizen. This is not medieval lordship. This is supposedly a democracy. Every single American citizen has the right to live in the United States; their government can’t force them to live outside of the protections of the Constitution. So when the Biden administration made that argument in the briefings at the Supreme Court, it was a shockingly anti-democratic argument with vast implications, and now the Trump administration is going to be making the same argument when it deports citizen children of undocumented parents as part of these mass raids that Tom Homan and the incoming administration have promised.
Sampan: So it almost, in some ways, sounds like it legitimized in advance some of these strategies that we could see happen under this new administration….
Lee: Absolutely.
Sampan: You know, it seems that if you kind of look back in history – at Operation Wetback, at the Japanese internment camps, and, going back further, at the Chinese exclusionary laws and policies, you kind of get this idea that immigrant rights, and by extension, a lot of civil rights are, in a way, somewhat fragile, are they not? And they need to be upheld, because there are a lot of examples in history of things that if they were to happen today, people probably would not be able to comprehend it….
Lee: Well, I mean, it applies far beyond the immigration situation. Look at what the Supreme Court did last term, in holding that the president essentially is above the law, as long as he is able to say that his actions were somehow official. Donald Trump has said he’s going to be a dictator on day one. He said he’s going to deport millions and millions of people. He’s talked about, you know, removing Palestinian protesters from the country. And they speak openly about, as we’ve talked about already, removing U.S. citizens from the United States as part of these raids. So to the extent that one can even really call it a democracy anymore, will be determined by how the population responds to the policies that this administration tries to enact.
