“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.”—Robert Reich
America, you got fooled. Again.
For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.
If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.
Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.
Different threats. Same playbook.
Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.
Immigration is a perfect example.
A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.
Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.
Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.
A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that undocumented immigrants were incarcerated at a rate of 674 per 100,000 people in 2024, compared with 1,195 per 100,000 native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had an even lower incarceration rate of 303 per 100,000. Cato concluded that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.
So, what is the government’s end game?
We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.
While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.
This is the real power grab.
The government is using its so-called war on illegal immigration to normalize something far more dangerous: a system in which due process can be bypassed, people can be detained and moved beyond easy public scrutiny, government agents can wield extraordinary enforcement powers with minimal accountability, and constitutional protections can be treated as optional whenever the government invokes security.
Immigration is the testing ground.
The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.
We are all at risk.
