I can understand the desire that most Americans have to want non-citizens who commit violent crimes to be removed from the country. Indeed, I agree that the focus of immigration enforcement should be in that arena. But it is clearly the case that this is not what the current administration is doing. Instead, as Axios noted back in May, Stephen Miller, Noem tell ICE to supercharge immigrant arrests. The reported goal has been to deport at least 3,000 a day, which requires lots of arrests.
The problem is that there aren’t that many violent criminals to apprehend.
Nonetheless, it has been a hallmark of Trump’s rhetoric to paint immigrants as dangerous. His infamous Golden Escalator speech included the following lines that will go down as helping to define an era in American politics.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
I could spend all morning, and perhaps well into the afternoon, detailing example after example of how he constantly paints immigrants as being part of an “invasion” of gang members and/or terrorists. He calls them disease-ridden, vermin, and/or duplicitous venomous snakes ready to bite the American people, and who “are poisoning the blood of our country.”
It is truly relentless. And it feeds into preexisting fears and prejudices about foreigners that already lurk in the broader American psyche. A leader can either try and draw out the better angels of our collective thoughts or they can try and call forth dark, demonic forces.
It is not hard to document Trump’s clear preference for stoking the dark side.
And all of this is Trump and his cohorts building unreality.
But the reality isn’t that immigrants are a bunch of disease-ridden, gang-affiliating terrorists who commit violent crimes. And we are not rounding up and deporting the worst of the worst.
Instead, our government is pepper-spraying gardeners. And speaking of “unreality,” the video that DHS posts to purportedly show him attacking ICE officers is just a guy running away from a clearly frightening situation, reportedly after he was pepper-sprayed. They don’t want us to believe our lying eyes.
The man weed-eating the IHOP parking lot is 48-year-old Narciso Barranco. He is undocumented, although he has lived in the US since the 1990s. He has no criminal record.
Now look, I get it, he lacks a legal basis for living in the US. But first, he is far from the “worst of the worst” and does not fit, at all, into the way Trump describes immigrants. Second, is this the appropriate way for our government to deal with someone like Barranco?
Who is safer as a result of this action?
What is made better by this action?
Was this the best expenditure of federal resources?
More from the “Worst of the Worst” file.
- Via Public Notice: Trump’s secret police are terrorizing American streets.
- Via Christianity Today: ICE Goes After Church Leaders and Christians Fleeing Persecution.
- Via The Guardian: Iranian woman, who has lived in US for 47 years, taken by Ice while gardening.
Kashanian arrived in the US in 1978 on a student visa and later applied for asylum, citing fears of persecution due to her father’s ties to the US-backed Shah of Iran. Her asylum request was ultimately denied, but she was granted a stay of removal on the condition she comply with immigration requirements, a condition her family says she always met.
- Another recent example.
ICE deports Florida pastor’s wife—even though judge issued stay of deportation order.
She was denied her medication—shackled by wrist, stomach & ankles—leaving severe bruising.
“We paid everything they asked us, filled out forms, and not skipping anything,” her daughters said.… pic.twitter.com/26wuTthF9V
— LongTime
FirstTime
(@LongTimeHistory) June 18, 2025
Whatever we want to call all of this, it isn’t targeting the “worst of the worst,” and it isn’t making us safer.
It is, however, causing a lot of human suffering. And it costs lots of money and diverts federal resources away from doing things that might, in fact, be a public good. Note that the legislative package that is about to be sent to Trump cuts Medicaid but funnels billions into ICE.
We need immigration reform in the US, but the debate really isn’t about safety. It is about whether the US wants to make it easier for people to have actual pathways towards legal status or whether we want xenophobic approaches to enforcement, to include anonymous ICE agents grabbing gardeners out of parking lots or middle-aged ladies out of their front yards.
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Author: Steven L. Taylor
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