The Next Phase of the Immigration Crackdown Is Quieter -- and More Destabilizing

[pat_k]

Source: NYTimes

...
Gone for now are the concentrated surges into American cities leading to dramatic — and sometimes deadly — clashes between immigration agents and protesters. Mass raids of Home Depot parking lots in search of undocumented day laborers are no longer routine. Immigration enforcement officials continue to deport nearly 1,000 people a day, many of them with no criminal record. But the Trump administration is also ramping up another strategy: to take apart immigrants’ lives, piece by piece, until they decide to leave the country altogether.

In February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a new federal rule blocking “mixed status” families from living in publicly subsidized housing, which could cause an estimated 80,000 people to lose their homes, including about 37,000 children, nearly all of them U.S. citizens. March, roughly 200,000 immigrants began losing their commercial driver’s licenses, under a new ban on truckers who are asylum seekers, refugees or undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. The Trump administration has reportedly weighed an order that would require banks to verify their customers’ citizenship status. Access to capital has already been curtailed. Starting last month, noncitizens can no longer obtain small business loans through the federal government, even if they are here legally.

Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, is lobbying Republican-led states to cut off services. In a meeting last month in Washington, he asked Texas lawmakers why they had not already passed a bill ending public education funding for undocumented children.
...
As the Trump administration shifts its strategy away from audacious, citywide raids, it seeks to apply pressure at every point of contact between immigrants and the government, using the country’s vast bureaucracy. But the most important tool for encouraging self-deportation today is the same as it was more than a century ago: fear.


Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/magazine/self-deportation-ice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Z1A._Gx1.4tLPBgBOFHIE&smid=url-share

---

My heart is sinking. I fear the cruelty of these "quieter" tactics is failing to motivate the powerful opposition needed. Lives are being devastated. And not just those of the immigrants that are having their lives torn apart and their legal status stripped.

[CharleyDog]

1. We can only hope

that in the future we have deep empathy, and reparations, for the people we are torturing. The Statue of Liberty stands for immigrants. If they tear it down, WE WILL ERECT IT AGAIN.

[pnwmom]

2. So a noncitizen grandmother can be caring for children, helping the parents to go to work,

and they can all be kicked out of subsidized housing because of that.

[pat_k]

3. That's how I read it. Generally, only citizens and permanent residents are eligible for public housing benefits.

However, if a family member has TPS status, they are included as members of the family who can live in public housing, but benefits exclude them as beneficiaries (i.e., subsidy is reduced or subsidized rent is prorated to exclude them).

Currently, I think undocumented immigrants are also permitted to live in public housing with eligible family, but rent is likewise prorated to exclude them.

At least that's how I understand it.

So yes, if abuela is undocumented or TPS, under the rule change, she won't be able live with eligible family in public or subsidized housing. I guess either they all go (if her presence is essential to the family functioning as a family) or she must go (which is undoubtedly impossible for most).

Add to that the fact the felon's regime is hellbent on stripping legal status from people who are documented as asylum seekers or TPS. As far as I can tell, the goal is to turn these documented immigrants into undocumented immigrants by fiat.

Some, but not all, of these actions to strip legal status are blocked as they work their way to SCOTUS.

Given that the felon's ICE and border patrol are already denying due process (that even SCOTUS affirmed) as a matter of course, we are in a lawless, amoral, and deeply Un-American place.

Tragically, even rights affirmed are denied to all but those who manage to get access to a lawyer (which is also denied as a matter of course). And even the few who manage to secure representation have an obscenely unjust and lengthy process to navigate to even attempt to secure their right to due process.

The point is to render people so afraid of being picked up and sent to detention, or so hopeless and immobilized in detention -- with moldly food, tainted food, and rampant infectious disease -- they don't even try to stand up for themselves.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. Kick!

[Bayard]

5. There is something deeply malignant in trump and Miller's souls.....

[GenThePerservering]

6. Even from a purely mercenary point of view, this is deeply stupid

immigrants of whatever status are some of our most productive people - they work hard, they pay taxes, they do the tough jobs. They're more law abiding than American citizens.

Nothing like kicking out one of the very important economic mainstays of a country rapidly going bankrupt.

Trump treats everything like a casino.

[pat_k]

8. No writer imagining a fictional foe hellbent on sabotaging the U.S. could have come up with a plot as devastating.

Motives of psychopaths may never be understood, but the effects of every action -- every single action -- is sabotage.

Sabotage the rule of law, on which all else depends. Corruption of the DOJ, openly violating the law and the constitution, openly violating civil rights, to the point of murdering people.

Sabotage the economy by destroying the economic driving force that immigration represents.
(Yes, our congress has completely failed to enact the sort of immigration reform that we have needed for decades, including a truly robust asylum system and more legal paths that would undermine the kind of exploitation of undocumented labor this nation has become addicted to, but seeking to purge immigrants -- whether here legally seeking asylum under system so backlogged it is no system at all, under TPS status, or undocumented -- whose labor entire industries depend is an act of sabotage.)

Sabotage entire economic sectors with the imposition of illegal tariffs.

Sabotage research and scientific progress. Cuts and unlawful impounding of NIH and NSF funds, arbitrary restrictions on international students, and political targeting of entire areas of research has created an unprecedented crisis. Over 95,000 employees left federal science agencies by 2025. According to a poll by Nature, over 75% of scientists were considering leaving the U.S.

Sabotage our health by directly attacking a public health infrastructure that needed bolstering, not destruction, making health insurance -- already far too expensive -- impossible for millions, cutting Medicaid, corrupting Medicare, cutting CHIP, cutting WIC, SNAP, and school nutrition programs (with the added benefit of putting farmers out of business), attacking life saving vaccinations, and more.

Sabotage agriculture, with trade wars that are closing overseas markets, ending food bank and school nutrition markets, decimation of the workforce through the cruel and insane attack on both documented and undocumented immigrants, criminal war of aggression on Iran disrupting fertilizer supplies, and on and on.

Sabotage the security and prosperity made possible by more than 75 years of values-based alliances with nations that have a common interest in safeguarding democracy, individual liberty, and a rules based international order. We have never been more vulnerable as the principle source of our security, intelligence from allied nations, has been cut off (you can bet we are getting no warnings from those the felon has told to go to hell).

Sabotage international security, by withdrawing support for Ukraine against Russian aggression -- aggression that will extend to the whole of Europe should Ukraine fail, intentionally alienating nations with whom we share common interests while giving aid and comfort to the illiberal forces and nations who seek to destroy us and our growing list of former allies.

Sabotage everything AI touches (and that is pretty much everything) by dismantling the nascent regulatory framework that could have protected us against the frightening consequences we are no vulnerable to.

Sabotage and corrupt the national information environment by promoting propaganda and lies, taking over major media outlets, protecting social media conglomerates from liability for the damage done by failure to moderate, and on and on.

Sabotage education at all levels with direct attacks on universities, illegally dismantling the Department of Education, diverting funds from public education to privatized and Christian Nationalist schools.

Sabotage everything we stand for by starting a criminal war of aggression, targeting schools and hospitals in densely populated neighborhoods (see NYTimes) and unleashing all the terrible consequences of attempting to destroy a country that has more that twice the population of California and more than for times the land mass of that state. The world, and as the aggressor, our nation in particular, will be suffering consequences of this for decades.

And so much more. The sabotage in one area has tentacles of destruction that reach into, and beyond, so many other areas.

[yellow dahlia]

7. They stay up nights putting together new plans to be cruel,

and to satisfy their demented agendas.

I'm not licensed to diagnose, but - Stephen Miller (et al) need an evaluation.

[fujiyamasan]

9. This evil is learning to adapt

They didn’t see the intended rally around the gestapo effect they thought they would after Minneapolis. Maybe they assumed the public would cheer on the thugs… or just wilt away in fear.

They also seem likely to lose the birthright executive order case, which was likely one of the most pathetically argued cases before the court. And like a mob boss he sat there trying to intimidate the justices.

These new tactics are quieter but may be more effective. Democrats will have a lot of shit to clean up.