Trump Administration Makes a Big Show to Threaten Immigrants with Deportation

Mar 31, 2025

Since taking office, President Trump and his administration have put on a very visible campaign of deporting undocumented immigrants, often in dehumanizing ways.

In numerous cases, it deported immigrants to countries other than their country of origin. In early February, it used military planes to fly 178 Venezuelans to Guantánamo Bay. It later flew 300 people from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to Panama City and 200 others from Asia to Costa Rica.

On March 15, ICE flew 261 Venezuelan men to El Salvador. While those flights were still in the air, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., James Boesberg, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the transfers, yet the Trump administration completed the transfer anyway. Boesberg requested information on the deportations, but Trump invoked ‘state secrets privilege’ under the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify his refusal to provide the information.

The Trump administration claims about half the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador were members of a street gang working under the direction of Venezuelan President Maduro to commit crimes in the U.S. to destabilize the country. Intelligence analysts from the CIA and National Security Agency deny Trump’s claim.

More recently, Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem filmed an ad and posted it to social media showing her in front of a prison cell in El Salvador showing the men with their heads shaved and being held in crowded conditions. In the ad, she issued the threat, “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face.”

Immigration officials are saying that as of April 11 everyone over the age of 14 living in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and provide fingerprints and their address, and parents of those under 14 must register them.

For the moment, another federal judge in Boston issued an order stopping the Trump administration from deporting anyone to a country where they are not a citizen without allowing them a “meaningful opportunity” to obtain humanitarian protection in the U.S. It remains to be seen what the final outcome will be.

In fact though, in terms of numbers of those deported, and numbers of deportation flights, Trump is actually doing less than President Biden carried out in the last couple of months of his term in office.

In the end, the politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties have carried out similar policies preventing immigrants from having full rights in this country. But Trump and his administration are clearly now making their big show in order to scare undocumented immigrants into silence and to simply accept whatever conditions they might face in this country.