Federal immigration agents in an armored vehicle near MacArthur Park on July 7. (Carlin Steihl/L.A. Times via Getty)
There is nothing new about mass deportations in the US.
This week, I learned that for a few decades, Ellis Island was temporarily not an entrance to America, but an actual detention center for migrants waiting for an immigration hearing. Yes, you read that right. After the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that all but shut down immigration until 1965, there were so few new applicants on American soil that they used the place as a migrants’ prison.
And it was pretty much hell on earth, as Tara Zahra’s riveting book on interwar populism, Against the World, explains. About 2,400 people were crammed into a facility with just 350 beds, the rest “condemned to bunks in wire cages ... arranged in double tiers, without mattresses, and crowded into a room with unsatisfactory ventilation ... The living conditions are abominable and the sanitary arrangements are beyond description.”
Compare that with Nick Miroff’s description of ICE detention standards today:
The agency is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, but it has been funded for only 41,000 detention beds, so processing centers are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells with nowhere to shower.
If anything, a little better than the 1920s. Deportations? They increased six-fold between 1920 and 1930. The same happened after the Second World War, according to Zahra:
The postwar years saw a massive rise in deportations from US soil, particularly of migrants from Mexico. Many of those deportations were carried out under the euphemistic rubric of ‘voluntary departure.’ Tens of millions of migrants were bribed, tricked, or coerced into signing their deportation agreements.
The charmingly named Operation Wetback sent up to 1.3 million people back over a decade or so in the 1950s. So a little perspective on today’s numbers helps. (Zahra will be on a forthcoming Dishcast on her book.)
Even the “invasion” rhetoric is nothing new. Here is Trump in 2023: “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.” And here’s Stephen Miller on the recently passed budget bill: “BBB will liberate America from invasion. Occupied towns will be freed.”
Now listen to Hiram Wesley Evans a century ago: “There is a conspiracy of alien races and religions to overwhelm and destroy America by hordes of invaders ... we must get rid of the undesirable aliens, of the foreign criminals ... who are a social cancer.” Sure, Evans wasn’t president; he was merely the Grand Wizard of the Klan, which boomed in the anti-immigrant 1920s. But hey, for Trump, Klan rhetoric is in the genes.
And let us not forget Barack Obama’s one-year record of 438,421 removals, with a majority of them — 240,000 — without criminal records.
I cite all this not to diminish any of today’s awfulness, but to see it more clearly. We have been a brutal deportation nation long before our Trumpian 21st Century gambit. What’s different now, it seems to me, are four things: the sheer scale of it; the frantic pursuit of quantity over quality; the relative paucity of resources for courts and judges; and the fact that the enforcers are anonymous, masked, and unknowable — and will soon be on every street in America.
ICE will now have more resources than all but 15 countries’ military budgets, and is set to grow from an annual budget of $10 billion to $150 billion over four years. This is a ramp up of mind-boggling size and speed. Some of it will be helped by deputizing the military to some tasks, including, as we saw in Los Angeles this week, performative acts of intimidation. Garrett Graff notes the inevitable result of such spurts:
Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. ... [We’ll likely see] a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.
And indeed the evidence of such recruits exists. From a recent ICE jobs fair:
I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.
And the order is now a simple one: arrest and detain as many as you can: old, young, criminal, lawful, children, those who have lived here for decades with no incident — alongside drug traffickers. Child rapists alongside landscapers. Gang members alongside church regulars. And the percentage of violent criminals is quickly dwindling — only 8 percent of all detainees this year, according to CBS.
Miller is demanding that ICE beat Obama’s record of 438,421 removals in one year, by any means necessary. In fact, he wants Operation Wetback’s numbers in one year rather than ten. Trump’s daily quota was initially 1,800; then Miller pushed it to 3,000; and now Tom Homan says, “Do the math, we have to arrest 7,000 every single day for the remainder of this administration just to catch the ones Biden released into the nation.” And that’s a sky-high goal made much, much, much harder when there are so few deportations at the Southern border. No wonder ICE officers are drained.
Resources to speed up trials and shorten detentions by adding more immigration courts and judges? A mere $3.3 billion. A 2023 analysis by the Congressional Research Service found we need more than 1,300 judges to make progress on the backlog of cases. But the bill actually caps the number at 800. You mean we could process deportations too quickly? E-Verify is off the table. So what this policy represents is actually a dramatic increase in the backlog of cases, meaning ever-more arrests, and ever-more people in custody, for ever-more years. Why, one wonders? Why not make real progress on the backlog in the courts, and leave less need for mass detention?
And those tasked with enforcing all this will be anonymous. That is utterly new — and a deeply authoritarian and un-American development. Thousands of men and women with the power to seize anyone off the street will have no faces, no badges, no identification, and often no uniform. We are told the reason for this is that the families of the “brave” ICE officers can be doxxed by enraged citizens and potentially harassed or threatened. In the words of one officer:
We wear masks not to scare people, but to protect our families. If our faces are known, our children and spouses could be threatened at school, at church, or even at the grocery store.
But this logic applies to every single law enforcement officer anywhere — to anyone in public anywhere — and yet only the ICE officers get to look like Putin’s thugs. If cops can’t wear masks, and must have ID, neither should ICE cops. Threats to and assaults of them — 79 incidents this year out of a workforce of 20,000, we’re told — can and should be strongly prosecuted. But masks have to go. If we’re going to call ICE officers brave, then showing their faces in public is the least they can do.
With masks, we unleash thousands of unaccountable, unknowable, and armed figures on the streets of America, breaking down doors, scaring kids, raiding Home Depots, SWATing car washes, evoking what can only be called random acts of state terror. And this, we discover, is the point. The whole purpose is to engender so much fear that migrants self-deport and potential migrants never come. The latter is an important tool for border control, as far as Miller is concerned. It’s the new wall.
We’re told only the guilty need be afraid — the usual menacing excuse. But the effect of all this performative (and real) authoritarianism is that everyone — citizen and non-citizen — will become used to masked men with the power to arrest walking the streets of the country. We will become used to policing our words so we are not bundled into a van by mistake. We will carry passports to avoid being thrown into jail by mistake. That is not a free country. It is not America. And on this scale, it has never been done before. That is why Americans will turn on this — as, in fact, they already are.
We also have a president unique in our history in his contempt for the rule of law, who abuses the pardon power to empower lawlessness from his subordinates, deploys a rhetoric designed to encourage thuggery among the ICE rank and file, and who makes memes mocking the detained. He and his minions have also now designed a system that will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants, will not target employers, but will fill our streets with a new stormtrooper army and build super-size detention camps — some surrounded by gimmicks like gators or sharks — to generate sufficient state terror to deter anyone from coming to this country.
America not as a shining city on a hill, nor as a republic diligently enforcing its immigration laws as humanely as possible. But as a potential gulag for the ages.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my chat with Ed Luce on geopolitics and America’s self-harm; discussion of various pod episodes; dissents over my latest piece on Israel; seven notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award over the Texas floods; 21 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break merging Ray Charles and Van Halen; a placid window from the canals of Venice; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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New On The Dishcast: Edward Luce
Ed is the US national editor and columnist at the Financial Times. Before that, he was the FT’s Washington Bureau chief, the South Asia bureau chief, Capital Markets editor, and Philippines correspondent. During the Clinton administration, he was the speechwriter for Larry Summers. The author of many books, his latest is Zbig: The Life and Times of Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. We cover a lot of geopolitics — past and present.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how China played Trump on rare minerals, and Europe’s terrible bind over Russian energy. That link also takes you to commentary on the pods with Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Batya Ungar-Sargon on the mikvah ritual, Paul Elie on the Catholicism of Andy Warhol, and Carl Trueman debating gay marriage. We also hear from readers on Israel — both for and against.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Scott Anderson on the Iranian Revolution, Shannon Minter debating trans issues, Thomas Mallon on the AIDS crisis, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Your repeated insistence that Israel is going to theocratic-hell in a handcart ignores the fact that this far-right government (your assessment of which I broadly agree with) is deeply unpopular in Israel, and started trailing in the polls within a month of its formation at the end of 2022 — a decline accelerated by October 7 and not arrested even by the military achievements over Hezbollah and now Iran. Unfortunately elections are not due until November 2026, and though it could theoretically collapse before then, Netanyahu’s great talent is in keeping his coalitions together at all cost. I am increasingly aggravated by your refusal to see the Israel beyond its noxious government.
Another writes:
You referring to Israel as an “ethno-nationalist country” is over the top. Serious pollsters have repeatedly shown evidence that the views of the militant settlers, for example, reflect a very small minority of the Israel population. Even among the broader “settler” community (that is, including the settlements along the border near Jerusalem), the militants are highly unpopular. Similarly, the share of Israelis who support claiming and resettling Gaza is tiny.
And yet that appears to be happening. More dissents are over on the pod page. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And you can follow more Dish discussion in my Notes feed.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as OBBBA, the surge of interest in socialism, and renewed scrutiny of Russiagate. Some examples:
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a sneak peek of one entry that translates the VFYW to IRL:
I know I’m too late this week, so I’m not going to bother with the window for an official submission, because we have been actually traveling too much to focus on the substitute travel of VFYW. We just returned from Ireland, which included a trip to Dingle — where I did seek out contest #249 window IRL. I explained my find to our day-trip guide, and she remembered quite well how during the pandemic, the window had caused a good bit of excitement.
By the time we made it to Bloomsday in Dublin, I had forgotten to look for the spot in contest #376, but here’s a rare sunny shot I took by bike at the end of the bike lane from across the water:
