In only half a year of Donald Trump’s presidency, he and his allies have turned deportation into an explicitly political threat against opponents and critics. The latest and most high-profile is Zohran Mamdani.
Every country carries out deportations, the end point of a bureaucratic process that determines someone’s eligibility to stay in a country. Sometimes — say, if they’ve committed a terrible crime — that process will play out while they’re behind bars. In many other cases, it’ll be in a series of hearings in front of immigration judges in between the person continuing to live their life. Deportation is the very last stop on the train, the end of the line if someone’s case for staying in the country proves unpersuasive, when all appeals have been exhausted.
What deportation is not meant to be is a punishment or a threat, and certainly not one made against your political opponents. You would struggle to find examples of deportation being treated like this anywhere in the Western world and certainly in the United States in its recent history.
Yet in only half a year of Donald Trump’s presidency, that’s exactly what deportation has suddenly become: a threat that American politicians and their supporters now casually and regularly make against their political opponents, with only the thinnest pretext that they’re motivated by any actual violation of the law. And in fact, it’s gone beyond just a threat and is being actively, explicitly wielded as a form of punishment against people for their political speech.
The latest and most high-profile example of this happened just yesterday, when Donald Trump obliquely threatened to deport the winner of the New York Democratic primary for mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Noting that Mamdani, a US citizen, vowed to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from arresting people in the city, a reporter asked Trump for his “message to communist Zorhan [sic] Mamdani.”
“We’re going to be watching that very carefully, and a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” replied Trump. “We’re going to look at everything.”
To be clear, no people have been saying that: Mamdani, who was born in Uganda before his family legally immigrated to the United States more than two decades ago, has been a US citizen ever since he was naturalized seven years ago. Trump’s made-up reference to Mamdani being undocumented wasn’t just a stray insult; it followed his warnings that, because of Mamdani’s stance on ICE arrests, “we’ll have to arrest him” and cut off federal funds to New York in retaliation. The subtext is so clear it’s barely subtext: Mamdani wants to defy me, so maybe we’ll deport him.
This followed an even more explicit, and overtly racist, threat from Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, who declared two days after Mamdani won that
Zohran “little muhammad” Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York. He needs to be DEPORTED. Which is why I am calling for him to be subject to denaturalization proceedings.
Note that Ogles didn’t even bother to accuse Mamdani of anything to justify this other than the possibility he would become mayor of New York. In Ogles’s letter to attorney general Pam Bondi, the best he could do was cite an eight-year-old rap lyric Mamdani wrote. He then made the threat again a few hours later — amusingly, with an unrecognizable AI-generated cartoon of himself that gave him the square jaw and broad shoulders he lacks in real life.
But this is only the latest incident. What was the first thing Trump and his allies did when billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk had his very public falling out with the president? They threatened to deport him.
“Elon Musk is illegal, and he’s got to go. Deport immediately,” Trump ally Steve Bannon said a few days into the dustup, before calling on the president to “initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status.” Trump himself got in on the action just yesterday (it was a busy day of deportation threats for the president), when he was asked if he would deport Musk. “We’ll have to take a look,” Trump replied.
When the X/Twitter user colloquially known as “the menswear guy” — known for scathingly picking apart the fashion choices and physical appearance of right-wing figures, including Vice President J. D. Vance — revealed last month he was an undocumented immigrant since being brought to the country as a child, several users highlighted it, with one suggesting Vance get the man deported. Both Vance and the official Department of Homeland Security account responded with lighthearted GIFs suggesting they were looking into it.
“Denaturalize and deport Mehdi Hasan,” tweeted Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Article III Project, a sort of Trumpified version of the Federalist Society, about the well-known journalist and Trump critic. Two years earlier, Article III Project’s founder and president had similarly threatened to not just denaturalize and deport Hasan — again, entirely in response to his political opinions — but to have him indicted and detained, boasting he already had “his spot picked out in the DC gulag.”
A Gleeful Threat
What is remarkable here is not just the way that deportation has become a casual threat in right-wing political discourse or the fact that it’s lobbed entirely in response to political speech and activities that Trumpworld doesn’t like. It’s the sheer sadistic glee with which it’s thrown around: with a GIF of Jack Nicholson smiling and nodding malevolently or with a boast of “creating a March Madness bracket to celebrate Mehdi’s imminent deportation.”
It’s a sign of the way that the Right no longer views deportation as just one element of the bureaucratic immigration process but as a tool it can weaponize against its political enemies and use as a tool of repression — a purpose that is far from the original intent of deportation, in either the United States or other like-minded countries.
And make no mistake: it is already being wielded as a weapon of political repression, as part of a whole-of-government assault on free speech by the Trump movement. Most people are familiar by now with Mahmoud Khalil, the green card holder, new father, and pro-Palestinian activist targeted for deportation expressly over his political views. More recently, Mario Guevara, a journalist with a pending green card application who was arrested for covering an Atlanta protest, has now also had deportation proceedings initiated against him.
In fact, after years of threatening to “turbocharge” a campaign of “mass denaturalization,” Trump now appears to be doing just that. On Monday, reports revealed that his Department of Justice is prioritizing stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens who commit certain serious crimes, including terrorism, with one of the aims of the campaign being “ending antisemitism.” Given how liberally Trump and his movement have defined those terms — which at various times they’ve used to refer to critics of Israel or activists and social media posters — it is almost certain that this will be another abuse of the immigration system to punish political foes.
Unfortunately, the use of immigration law to carry out political repression is not unprecedented in American history, having been used as part of the First Red Scare in the Palmer Raids to arrest thousands and deport hundreds of left-wing immigrants for their political views, as well as figuring in the McCarthyite Second Red Scare. But those episodes are widely looked back on today as deeply shameful episodes, stains on American history when the political system failed to live up to the country’s most cherished ethos.
A New Low
What the Trump administration is doing now not just risks repeating those shameful episodes but places the United States shoulder to shoulder with a list of disgraceful authoritarian governments — including ones that Trump himself has criticized for their trampling of basic freedoms.
Last year, Freedom House, which is largely funded by the US government, singled out “revoking citizenship” as one of the main tactics used by authoritarian governments to punish political opponents. Those governments include some of the most dictatorial, despotic names you can think of, about as far from what most ordinary Americans consider good, freedom-loving states as you can get: Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Myanmar, all of whom have stripped citizenship from hundreds of journalists, activists, and other dissidents in the last few years.
One particular name stands out: the Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega, whose officials Trump sanctioned in his first term, accusing them of “undermining democracy” and the rule of law. Deportation and stripping citizenship has been a hallmark of Ortega’s reign: just two years ago, Ortega deported and revoked the citizenship of 222 political prisoners, before stripping a further ninety-four Nicaraguans, including writers, journalists, and religious figures, of their citizenship.
Think about that for a moment: Trump is, by his own standards, acting like a strongman who is undermining democracy and the rule of law.
There is little reason to think Trump’s threats will stay limited to naturalized citizens, who are not a separate class of citizens but have the exact same standing, rights, and privileges as native-born citizens: any argument used to strip one of citizenship can be used against the other. Remember that Trump has already made one cruel move against migrants — deporting them with no due process to a brutal prison in El Salvador — only to privately admit his plan was to eventually do the same thing to US citizens too.
Mamdani himself seemed to acknowledge this in his response to Trump’s threat to arrest him, which he charged didn’t “just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you.” He added that New Yorkers would “not accept this intimidation,” and he may be right — even the conservative New York governor Kathy Hochul, who has declined to endorse Mamdani so far, warned that “if you threaten to unlawfully go after one of our neighbors, you’re picking a fight with twenty million New Yorkers — starting with me.”
Trump and his allies’ threats to deport Mamdani and other political opponents are a shameful new low in recent American politics. Whatever Trumpworld tells itself, the overreaches he has already made on immigration and deportation have not been popular, with a majority of the country believing ICE’s actions have gone too far. There is more than a good chance this latest excess will again be viewed with distaste by a public that still believes in basic American ideals like the right to speak your mind and to not be harassed by a tyrannical ruler.
This post was originally published on Jacobin.