![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Disappearances, continued
Apr. 26th, 2025 10:46 amOn March 31 (less than a month ago), I wrote
"we've come this far in only ten weeks. What's left for the Trump administration to do in the next 3-3/4 years?
Once you realize that you can disappear legal immigrants without evidence, charges, or legal proceedings, the obvious next step is to disappear US citizens."
And right on schedule, the Trump administration has apparently deported a US citizen to Honduras without even a hearing.
Some details: the citizen in question is a 2-year-old girl, born in the US to a Honduran mother; I don't know the father's citizenship/immigration status. The mother, the 2-year-old daughter, and a Honduran older daughter were taken into ICE detention and the administration decided to deport them. The father petitioned to stop the proceedings, at least insofar as the 2-year-old was concerned, on grounds that she's a US citizen and can't be deported. ICE allowed him a 1-minute phone call with the mother, which wasn't enough to resolve anything or reach any agreement about the 2-year-old. The father's petition was heard by a Trump-appointed Federal judge in Louisiana, by which time the deportation plane was apparently already in the air to Honduras. The Justice Department told the judge that the mother had requested that her daughter go with her, but the judge was unable to verify that. The judge tried to call the mother and was told that she had already been released in Honduras, so ICE had no way to reach her. The judge has set a hearing for May 16 to find out whether the US government actually "deported a US citizen with no meaningful process".
There are a lot of complexities here. It's not clear whether the father and mother are estranged, or whether ICE simply caught her and not him, or whether he's a citizen or legal immigrant. Ordinarily when parents are estranged, it's legally problematic for one of them to take their child across state lines without the other's permission, not to mention going to another country without permission; these things are normally resolved by custody rulings from a judge. It's not clear whether she wanted to take the child with her to Honduras, and whether the father and mother really disagreed about this. It is clear that they were deported under "expedited removal" rules before a judge could even weigh in on the case.
Let's imagine a simpler case as a Gedankenexperiment: father and mother are both undocumented immigrants, they've both been caught by ICE, which wants to deport them both at the same time to the same place, but they have a US-born 2-year-old. What are the possible outcomes?
During the first Trump administration, the preferred solution was a variant of #1: separate children from their parents, deport the parents, and don't bother even keeping records of which child belongs to which parents so they can potentially be reunited someday, on the theory that causing as much suffering as possible will discourage other people from coming to the US illegally. (And they didn't try particularly hard to place the children, instead keeping them in ICE detention for weeks and months.)
The new answer appears to be #2: it doesn't inflict quite as much suffering, but it serves as a test case for Trump's long-standing desire to overturn the part of the 14th Amendment that specifies birthright citizenship. If he does that successfully, suddenly there are millions more people he can deport.
Of course, I'm a bleeding-heart liberal who measures the outcomes by how much they harm or help people. By that ranking, #1 is clearly the worst -- it inflicts a lot of suffering on three specific people. #2 is less bad: the family are still together, but they presumably left Honduras for good reasons, and now they're back there against their will. #3 is slightly less bad still: the family are still together, where they've chosen to live, but they're still living "underground", afraid to report crimes or complain about working conditions, wondering every day when ICE will knock at the door again. And their presence causes generalized harm to American workers, who have trouble competing for jobs against illegal immigrants who are guaranteed not to try to unionize or complain about working conditions. (Their presence probably does not cause a generalized harm through crime rates, since undocumented immigrants statistically commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens.) Least bad is #4: the family are together, where they've chosen to live, they're not "underground" so they're not competing unfairly with citizens for jobs, and they can go back and visit their relatives in Honduras without fear that they won't be allowed back into the US. My ranking, coincidentally, is the exact opposite of the Trump administration's priorities.
Options 3 and 4 do raise real moral-hazard questions: if it's US policy to allow people to stay either quasi-legally or fully-legally by having an "anchor baby", the policy encourages people to do exactly that, which really does feel like "cheating" or "cutting the line", as well as being a terrible reason to have a child. But what if it were US policy to allow (law-abiding) people to stay legally regardless of whether they had an "anchor baby"? What if we simply didn't have a category of "illegal immigrant" (as we didn't until 1875)? Then the moral-hazard argument about "anchor babies" disappears.
"we've come this far in only ten weeks. What's left for the Trump administration to do in the next 3-3/4 years?
Once you realize that you can disappear legal immigrants without evidence, charges, or legal proceedings, the obvious next step is to disappear US citizens."
And right on schedule, the Trump administration has apparently deported a US citizen to Honduras without even a hearing.
Some details: the citizen in question is a 2-year-old girl, born in the US to a Honduran mother; I don't know the father's citizenship/immigration status. The mother, the 2-year-old daughter, and a Honduran older daughter were taken into ICE detention and the administration decided to deport them. The father petitioned to stop the proceedings, at least insofar as the 2-year-old was concerned, on grounds that she's a US citizen and can't be deported. ICE allowed him a 1-minute phone call with the mother, which wasn't enough to resolve anything or reach any agreement about the 2-year-old. The father's petition was heard by a Trump-appointed Federal judge in Louisiana, by which time the deportation plane was apparently already in the air to Honduras. The Justice Department told the judge that the mother had requested that her daughter go with her, but the judge was unable to verify that. The judge tried to call the mother and was told that she had already been released in Honduras, so ICE had no way to reach her. The judge has set a hearing for May 16 to find out whether the US government actually "deported a US citizen with no meaningful process".
There are a lot of complexities here. It's not clear whether the father and mother are estranged, or whether ICE simply caught her and not him, or whether he's a citizen or legal immigrant. Ordinarily when parents are estranged, it's legally problematic for one of them to take their child across state lines without the other's permission, not to mention going to another country without permission; these things are normally resolved by custody rulings from a judge. It's not clear whether she wanted to take the child with her to Honduras, and whether the father and mother really disagreed about this. It is clear that they were deported under "expedited removal" rules before a judge could even weigh in on the case.
Let's imagine a simpler case as a Gedankenexperiment: father and mother are both undocumented immigrants, they've both been caught by ICE, which wants to deport them both at the same time to the same place, but they have a US-born 2-year-old. What are the possible outcomes?
- The child is taken away from her parents; they're deported and she's placed with friends, relatives, or a child-protective agency.
- Mother, father, and child are all deported, one of them in violation of US law (and possibly the US Constitution).
- Mother, father, and child are all allowed to stay in the US, two of them in violation of US law.
- Mother, father, and child are all allowed to stay in the US legally.
During the first Trump administration, the preferred solution was a variant of #1: separate children from their parents, deport the parents, and don't bother even keeping records of which child belongs to which parents so they can potentially be reunited someday, on the theory that causing as much suffering as possible will discourage other people from coming to the US illegally. (And they didn't try particularly hard to place the children, instead keeping them in ICE detention for weeks and months.)
The new answer appears to be #2: it doesn't inflict quite as much suffering, but it serves as a test case for Trump's long-standing desire to overturn the part of the 14th Amendment that specifies birthright citizenship. If he does that successfully, suddenly there are millions more people he can deport.
Of course, I'm a bleeding-heart liberal who measures the outcomes by how much they harm or help people. By that ranking, #1 is clearly the worst -- it inflicts a lot of suffering on three specific people. #2 is less bad: the family are still together, but they presumably left Honduras for good reasons, and now they're back there against their will. #3 is slightly less bad still: the family are still together, where they've chosen to live, but they're still living "underground", afraid to report crimes or complain about working conditions, wondering every day when ICE will knock at the door again. And their presence causes generalized harm to American workers, who have trouble competing for jobs against illegal immigrants who are guaranteed not to try to unionize or complain about working conditions. (Their presence probably does not cause a generalized harm through crime rates, since undocumented immigrants statistically commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens.) Least bad is #4: the family are together, where they've chosen to live, they're not "underground" so they're not competing unfairly with citizens for jobs, and they can go back and visit their relatives in Honduras without fear that they won't be allowed back into the US. My ranking, coincidentally, is the exact opposite of the Trump administration's priorities.
Options 3 and 4 do raise real moral-hazard questions: if it's US policy to allow people to stay either quasi-legally or fully-legally by having an "anchor baby", the policy encourages people to do exactly that, which really does feel like "cheating" or "cutting the line", as well as being a terrible reason to have a child. But what if it were US policy to allow (law-abiding) people to stay legally regardless of whether they had an "anchor baby"? What if we simply didn't have a category of "illegal immigrant" (as we didn't until 1875)? Then the moral-hazard argument about "anchor babies" disappears.
