The Big Lies at the Heart of Trump’s Mass-Deportation Campaign
Trump conceals how immigrants help the economy and commit relatively few crimes.
Watching masked ICE paramilitaries shatter car windows, abuse peaceable immigrants, and shoot protesters dead, millions of Americans wonder: How did we get here?
Cratered support for Donald Trump’s immigration policy makes it clear: Most of us do not want to be here. Anxiety about the changing face of America is one thing, dystopian street violence quite another.
We got here because of two Big Lies that Trump and MAGA allies tell. One casts immigrants as violent criminals; the other depicts them as welfare chiselers bankrupting the government at the expense of American taxpayers.
Trump has slung the former smear from the day in 2015 when he first infected the body politic by condemning Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime.” By the fall of 2024, he had escalated the demagoguery to cartoonish levels, falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating the household pets of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio.