Commentary: Don’t succumb to Trump’s immigration fearmongering

President Donald Trump has long relied on the power of the simple message: We will cut government waste, prices will come down, we will root out corruption, we will deport undocumented immigrants, and so on. Reality is, of course, much messier than these slogans can capture, and a cursory look under the hood often reveals that they are at best incomplete or at worse entirely unsupported, but that simplicity of the message itself holds power.

That is true when it comes to the administration’s promise of mass nationwide deportation operations that will ostensibly capture tens of millions of immigrants, a feat that was considered, and seems still to be, logistically impossible. So far, any given undocumented immigrant in New York City has only a marginally higher chance of being detained and deported than they did weeks ago, MAGA rhetoric notwithstanding.

Yet the terror is real; entire neighborhoods like Little Haiti as well as Corona and Jackson Heights have seen a sharp downturn in civic life as fear reigns among immigrant communities. Families are reportedly keeping kids home from school and adults are reticent about going to work. Rumors and false reports of raids are spreading like wildfire. This is the second-order effect that the Trump administration has deliberately engineered in lieu of its actual ability to carry out its designs to the hilt. After all, if Trump had one indisputable talent throughout his business and political careers, it’s been a flair for the theatrical, a skill that eventually made him a household name and then, improbably, president of the United States, twice. It’s the same strategy now deployed to mass effect to keep millions of people around the country in a state of fight or flight.

None of this is meant to minimize the real and acute impact felt by New Yorkers who are subject to these enforcement efforts, for whom the fear is real and ever-present (a fear with which I can, candidly speaking, personally sympathize). As I and others wrote even before his inauguration, Trump’s fixation on huge arrest numbers and his rhetoric around going after so-called criminals were fundamentally incompatible concepts; at lower rates of criminality than U.S.-born citizens, there just aren’t that many violent immigrants for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pursue.

Instead, we figured they’d go after the easy targets, people who are not trying to hide or are even actively checking in with ICE, and unfortunately this seems to have panned out. Among Trump’s first executive actions was an order for ICE to scrap its prioritization framework, which had put public safety threats at the top and disincentivized enforcement against people living in the community without incident. ICE reversed its stance against so-called collateral arrests – those of people who are not the primary focus of an operation but are encountered by chance – and scrapped its sensitive locations policy.

While the administration has touted climbing arrest numbers, it’s pointedly refused to fully disclose the extent to which those detained had criminal records. NBC News recently reported that, of nearly 1,200 people detained during a Sunday late last month, only about half were considered criminal arrests, of which some unknown number could well be minor offenders.

All in all, there is real cause to fear that any given undocumented or even documented immigrant in the city will be at greater risk in the future, especially as New York City Mayor Eric Adams seems far more comfortable with the scope of this enforcement than his predecessor was under Trump’s first term. Adams said almost a full year ago that he wanted to expand the city’s cooperation with ICE, has met twice with border czar Tom Homan and reportedly told top staff not to interfere with immigration enforcement right before the administration issued revised guidance to city agencies on how to handle immigration visits from the feds.

Yet the sense of risk and ICE’s omnipresence is itself a huge part of the objective, and a greater risk does not mean the same as a great risk. Even at the surge level of 800-1,200 arrests per day that ICE was reporting toward the end of last month, most of these seemed to be outside of the New York City metro area, in jurisdictions that were more collaborative with immigration enforcement, and any given undocumented immigrant of the roughly 11 million nationwide would have a relatively minute chance of getting picked up. Assuming ICE could maintain an arrest level of 1,200 per day for a year, that’s roughly 4% of the existing undocumented population, and there are good reasons to think that figure is unsustainable.

Already, there are signs that ICE is running into obstacles keeping up the level of arrests that Trump wants, with two top officials reassigned as arrests have dipped in recent days. This was, to some extent, inevitable. The agency has been quickly burning through the lowest-hanging fruit of people that had, for example, existing orders of removal or who were already under supervision, not to mention that they’re running out of viable detention space, which has led them to begin releasing some of the people detained. It will no doubt try to expand detention capacity – including through the stunning effort to host a large detention center at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base – but Trump can’t snap his fingers and multiply ICE’s capacity overnight.

In cities across the country, legal efforts and know your rights campaigns have had concrete impact. A series of flashy raids in Denver involving heavily armed federal agents in camouflage fatigues and carrying combat gear was allegedly seeking 100 members of a Venezuelan gang, but ended up detaining only 29 people, of whom only one was a supposed gang member. This was at least in part due to the refusal of many residents of the targeted buildings to open their doors or engage with the officers, who despite going door to door lacked judicial warrants. Despite what seems like an operational failure, though, the effort was successful at scaring and confusing local residents, which is, of course, exactly the point.

These efforts don’t have to be strictly successful in their putative objectives to be good marketing. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t show up in the Bronx in a bulletproof vest, stage makeup and carefully curled hair because that operation needed her to be personally in command. She did it because it’s good TV, and she could post videos of herself warning immigrants to be afraid. I won’t tell them not to be, but I do want to implore those of us with public platforms not to inadvertently assist with Trump’s messaging push by overstating its current capacity. They want us all to be terrified; we don’t have to help.