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Trump’s Executive Orders Promise Systemic Detentions, Deportations

Orders Will Ensure the US Violates Human Rights it is Bound to Uphold

Community members march after gathering at a vigil against deportations a day after Trump is sworn in, Los Angeles, California, US, January 21, 2025. © 2025 Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In a nondescript parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, a fifth-grade boy waited in a car while his mom, Natalie Burke, went inside a US government office to sign some paperwork. Natalie, a Black woman from Jamaica with legal immigration status, did not come back to the car. Without warning, immigration officials had taken her to a detention center. She was locked up for more than a year in miserable conditions, all due to 20-year-old marijuana convictions that made her deportable and even though marijuana is now legal in her state.

This was in 2009, sixteen years before President Donald Trump signed the slew of executive orders that will make the situation of immigrants like Natalie much worse.

One executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “take all appropriate actions to detain” immigrants until they are deported, thus increasing the number of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention. Both ICE and CBP facilities have records of abusive treatment and conditions, including substandard medical care.

Another order ends policies that made some immigrants, like Natalie, lower deportation priorities. The order includes an increase in prosecutions for entering or remaining in the US without authorization – prosecutions with racially discriminatory origins that have been carried out in ways that violate human rights. The order also instructs DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to impose criminal and civil penalties on immigrants who fail to register as undocumented. These policies are spreading fear throughout US communities. They will fuel huge increases in detention, deportation, and human rights violations.

All people, regardless of immigration status or criminal history, have the right to fair treatment before the law and a chance to argue for their liberty and rights when they are detained or face deportation. All people have the right never to be forcibly separated from their children or the country they call home without a fair chance to defend their rights. Respect for these rights does not mean banning deportation. But rather, if deportation is imposed, it should be done fairly and with dignity.

Natalie was released from detention and allowed to return to her life knowing deportation was a risk. She went to work and earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees; she proudly sent her son to college. If fully implemented, Trump’s executive orders will make the United States a systematic violator of the same human rights the country is bound to uphold. The orders will also make outcomes like Natalie’s simply impossible.

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