Patrick McCormick: Protecting the innocent – The need to oppose Trumps mass deportations

By Patrick McCormick

In his second inaugural address the president who promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it declared, “We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” deporting immigrants “at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

But nobody has ever seen a U.S. mass deportation the size of the one President Donald Trump is promising, because it is folly, in part because, as former Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Immigration and Naturalization Service directors noted in the Irish Times, the federal government lacks the personnel, funds, facilities or authority to carry out the “identification, apprehension, detention and expulsion” of 11 million people, which would take a decade and cost over $1 trillion. It is also folly because, as reported in Politico, Trump’s “indiscriminate mass detention … has been declared illegal by dozens of federal judges, who have described it as a flagrant perversion of long-standing law, policy and common sense.”

Still, the real crime of Trump’s deportation folly is that you cannot rid America of 11 million undocumented immigrants without punishing tens of millions of innocent people. This includes millions of undocumented immigrants without any (or any serious) criminal records, tens of millions of documented immigrants and citizens whose only crime is looking like undocumented immigrants, and countless others with the audacity to protest mass deportation.

The problem is nobody can find Trump’s “millions and millions of criminal aliens” because they don’t exist. ICE reported last year that only 662,566 of America’s 22 million noncitizens have criminal records, and less than a quarter of these have convictions for violent crimes. Comparing these numbers with FBI statistics indicates that while 29.5% of U.S. adults have criminal records, only 6% of undocumented immigrants do.

ICE raids catch so few criminal immigrants because, since the 1870s, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than native-born citizens, and today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated. As the immigrant share of the U.S. population more than doubled between 1980 and 2022 (up from 6.2% to 13.9%), America’s crime rate plummeted by 60.4%. And as the share of undocumented immigrants in Washington jumped 56% between 2017 and 2024, (according to reporting by the Olympian), the serious crime rate dropped 18.6%.

So, while claiming to target the 148,000 undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records, ICE raids aim to arrest 3,000 mostly innocent immigrants a day by focusing on locations and opportunities with lots of immigrants but few criminals. That is why in June, 71.7% of ICE’s nearly 60,000 detainees had no criminal conviction, and 91.3% had no history of violent charges or convictions. It is also why, though ICE arrests in Washington state were up 65%, only 31% of detainees here had criminal convictions, or why only 25% of recent arrests in Seattle had criminal convictions. Meanwhile, ICE arrests in Idaho climbed 924%, but the share of detainees with criminal records dropped by 17%.

But millions of undocumented immigrants are not the only innocents punished by mass deportation. Five million citizen children throughout the U.S. and over 130,000 in Washington could lose one or both parents in an ICE raid. And of the tens of millions of Hispanic immigrants and citizens exposed to increased stress and fear because ICE and the Supreme Court think they look like undocumented immigrants, over 1 million live in Washington. Which explains the recent cancellation of Latino cultural events throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Folklorico Festival, Central Oregon’s Latino Fest and Latinx Fiesta Celebración and Spokane’s Tacos y Tequila Festival. People fear being arrested in public gatherings for looking Brown.

And then there are the casualties of Trump’s war on anti-ICE protesters. In June, his DOJ ordered federal prosecutors everywhere to make cases against and examples of anyone opposing mass deportation. In Spokane that led to a conspiracy indictment of the “Spokane 9” for trying to defend the rights of legal asylum seekers snatched by masked ICE agents. And in supposedly war-torn Portland, where Trump ordered troops to suppress a rebellion of anti-ICE inflatable frogs, the city attorney has complained to the DOJ about multiple instances of unnecessary or excessive force used on protesters.

It took America five decades to recognize the folly of a mass incarceration that built the world’s biggest prison system and largely filled it with low-level offenders. We need to see and stop the folly of Trump’s mass incarceration before it punishes millions of innocent Americans and Washingtonians.

Patrick McCormick is a retired Gonzaga University professor of Christian ethics.