Over the last three months, the Trump regime has wielded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to execute a reign of terror across the country. ICE has targeted schoolchildren for deportation, interrogated legal permanent residents at airports, and revoked student visas and green cards for constitutionally protected speech. It has sent immigrants to Guantanamo Bay and to a maximum-security prison and torture site in El Salvador.
As an immigration attorney in New Jersey, I see the impact of these policies every day, not just upon hundreds of our noncitizen clients held in cages in this state or deported from it, but also upon their citizen children, spouses and loved ones. I write not just out of concern for our clients and their families, but for all of us.
It is not just people with precarious immigration statuses, or even just noncitizens, who are getting caught up in this xenophobic dragnet. According to documents produced as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request, the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office asked ICE if the federal agency wanted the sheriff to hold a number of U.S. citizens in custody so that ICE could detain and deport them.
Every U.S. citizen on their list had a Latinx name — a sign of aggressive racial profiling. So far, Monmouth is the only New Jersey county for which we have data detailed enough to reveal this information, raising alarm as to what other local law enforcement agencies are doing.
This revelation is chilling: Even U.S. citizens are being targeted for detention and deportation.
This is not the first time U.S. citizens have been targeted for deportation
Chilling, but not without historical precedent. In 1954, more than a million people were deported en masse to Mexico in a violent federal campaign tragically named “Operation Wetback.” This included non-U.S. citizens, Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens with Mexican ancestry. ICE continues to illegally deport U.S. citizens — as many as 70 between 2015 and 2020 alone. ICE agents even arrested Black Lives Matters protesters in 2020, prompting author and political commentator M Gessen to warn that ICE is poised to become a secret police force.
What is without historical precedent is the federal government grooming all of us to accept the deliberate mass deportation of U.S. citizens. When El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele told Secretary of State Marco Rubio he would happily jail not just noncitizens, but U.S. citizens as well, Rubio described it as a “generous offer” and said “we’ll study it on our end.”
On April 7, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a lower court order that would have halted unlawful deportations to El Salvador. Justice Sonia Sotomayor alarmingly warned in her dissenting opinion that “[t]he implications of the government’s position” are “that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress ...” Days later, after meeting with Bukele in the White House, Trump said of deporting U.S. citizens, “I’m all for it.”
And if deportation will be applied to citizens, why not police state surveillance as well? One has to wonder whether the new requirement for noncitizens to register with the federal government will also not spread beyond noncitizens.
The Trump regime’s incarceration of immigrants in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay, and its detention of a permanent resident like Mahamoud Khalil for his political speech, do not represent the end game; they are foreshadowing the atrocities that are likely to come for citizens as well. In my work, I often think of the words of Indigenous activist and scholar Lilla Watson, who popularized the slogan “Your liberation is bound up with mine.” But I believe that the inverse is true as well: Your oppression is bound up with mine. The legal boundary between citizen and noncitizen is not the firewall we think it is. It is a frail, arbitrary partition that is easily pierced by racism or policing or government rhetoric. Stripping one person’s civil liberties endangers everyone’s liberty.
This is why NJ lawmakers must pass the Immigrant Trust Act
But deportation — and the harm it brings to our families and communities — is not inevitable. Right now, New Jersey legislators have the opportunity to pass legislation that would protect everyone in New Jersey regardless of citizenship status. It’s called the Immigrant Trust Act, and among other things, it would prohibit state and local law enforcement — like the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office — from asking ICE to take people into police custody. The act would make it harder for ICE to detain and deport citizens and noncitizens alike.
In my work with the American Friends Service Committee, we don’t just provide legal services. We also try to change the systems that unfairly target our clients in the first place. That’s why we are doing everything we can to educate our communities and elected officials on the importance of passing that act into law, and on the dire consequences for all New Jersey residents if it fails to pass.
I don’t believe anyone should be deported for any reason, but even if you do, you probably don’t believe it should happen arbitrarily, or because of bias, or that you and your family should be targeted. If so, you may need the Immigrant Trust Act (think of it, too, as a Citizen Trust Act) to protect you and your family. The only way to protect New Jerseyans with U.S. citizenship from deportation is to protect New Jerseyans without it.
To protect any of us, we must protect all of us. Call your New Jersey lawmaker and ask them to support the Immigrant Trust Act today.
This piece was originally published on June 6, 2025 on northjersey.com.