THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN WAS FESTOONED for the past week with mugshots of supposed illegal-immigrant criminals the administration has arrested or deported. It formed a backdrop for “Border Czar” Tom Homan’s threats from the briefing room that every illegal immigrant within our borders needs to register immediately with the Department of Homeland Security and carry documentation at all times. If they fail to comply, he advised, that itself will be treated as a criminal offense.

Homan is, to put it politely, winging it. This isn’t Russia yet. The “czar” cannot simply declare something to be a crime. Congress decides what is and what is not a federal offense and Congress has decreed that merely being in the country without documentation is not a crime. Certain other acts—such as returning to the country after being deported—can be prosecuted, but just being here without authorization is a civil offense, not a criminal one, as is earning money without a work visa (see, for example, Melania Trump). About four in ten undocumented aliens currently in the United States did not enter the country by sneaking across the border. They entered legally and overstayed.

At its 100-day mark, the Trump administration is touting its immigration onslaught as both a policy victory and a political victory. But neither is true.

The mugshots on the lawn and Homan’s snarling threats are meant to achieve a number of goals, including frightening many illegal (and doubtless some legal) immigrants into self-deportation, but they are also a tell—the administration just hasn’t been able to find those thousands of criminal aliens they claimed were rampaging throughout the nation. Like so many other themes Trump campaigned on, the plague of immigrant crime was a fiction.

This is not to suggest that there are no legitimate arguments against immigration. Trump could have made a case that immigration was placing an unfair burden on border states, that immigrants were driving down wages, that illegal entrants were “jumping the line,” or that excessive percentages of foreign-born people erode a nation’s identity. But that’s not the case Trump made. He and his enablers in the GOP instead smeared immigrants as rapists, drug dealers, pet eaters, and murderers. Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student who was tragically murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela in February 2024, became the symbol of a victimized America besieged by hordes of illegal-immigrant killers and rapists. Congress went so far as to pass the Laken Riley Act, a law whose terms make criminal apprehensions less likely but whose real purpose was just to reinforce the false impression of an immigrant crime wave.

Numerous records from law-enforcement agencies confirm that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Between 1980, when immigrants comprised 6.2 percent of the population, and 2022, when the percentage of immigrants had more than doubled to 13.9 percent, the crime rate declined. States with higher percentages of immigrants showed no greater incidence of crime than states with lower numbers according to data from the FBI and the Census Bureau. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute studied homicide convictions in Texas between 2013 and 2022 and found that native-born Americans were more likely to be convicted for murder than either illegal or legal immigrants.

But demagogues need scapegoats, and Trump relentlessly, grossly vilified immigrants as invaders, criminals, and threats to national security. I remember grandmotherly ladies at the GOP convention holding signs demanding “Mass Deportation Now.” It was a little shocking (even in this awful time). They wouldn’t have held those signs aloft with a clear conscience if they had not been deceived into believing that many if not most immigrants were rapists and murderers.

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TRUMP PROMISED in his second inaugural address that “we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

But there are not “millions and millions” of criminal aliens unless you define criminality as simply being here without authorization, as Homan does. Virtually the entire Republican party has participated in this massive slander about immigrants. It’s a lie, so of course the policy cannot succeed.

They are deporting thousands of people, but how many of them are dangerous? I wonder even about the mugshots on the White House lawn. How many of those are actually guilty and how many have been caught in the heedless dragnet this administration is deploying? About 90 percent of the Venezuelan immigrants spirited off to the Salvadoran gulag had no criminal record, according to Bloomberg. That doesn’t make them Boy Scouts necessarily, but this administration lies incessantly, so we cannot trust its word.

At least one of the deportees (who received no due process) was a father of two who had gotten into trouble in Venezuela for participating in demonstrations against that country’s authoritarian regime. How’s that for irony? His ex-wife reported to the New York Times that he was arrested and tortured with electric shock and suffocation in Venezuela. That’s why he was seeking political asylum in the United States. He followed all of the legal steps to ask for asylum, but at his interview, immigration officials noticed a soccer tattoo (he was a coach) and sent him to Texas and then on to El Salvador.

Andry Hernandez Romero is a makeup artist. He has no criminal record, but he does have tattoos. He too was bundled off to El Salvador without due process, and is being held in a prison known for human rights abuses and in the hands of a regime that prides itself on its cruelty. Well, two regimes really, if you count the United States.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report that fewer than 50 percent of those arrested between January 20 and February 2 have criminal convictions. During Trump 1.0, 60 percent of those the administration labeled as criminal aliens had committed only minor crimes like immigration offenses or traffic violations. They are sweeping up so many non-criminals because the whole thing is based on the lie that millions of illegals are responsible for a massive crime wave.

So the immigration crackdown can in no way be called a success. It has depressed tourism, made a mockery of the rule of law, and tarnished our global reputation—and for what? Most of those removed were probably no threat to anyone, but they were working, paying taxes, caring for children, and going to church. Sure, a few were doubtless criminals. But as Judge Terry Doughty put it in a ruling in one Trump deportation case, “The Government contends that this is all okay. . . . But the Court doesn’t know that.”

This is a shameful, scandalous policy implemented in the most obscene fashion. The White House released videos of immigrants being chained and loaded on planes with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Immigration Deportation Flight.” Even if it were true that they were guilty, encouraging pleasure at another’s misery is depraved.

AS FOR THE POLITICAL WIN, where is it? The most vicious of Trump’s supporters may delight in this theater of thuggishness, but most voters are dismayed or worse. Some 52 percent say he has “gone too far” with deportations, while 53 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration generally. Majorities oppose sending undocumented immigrants “suspected of being gang members” to El Salvador without a hearing. Trump is underwater on the issue that is usually considered his greatest strength next to the economy (I know what you’re thinking).

Border apprehensions are way down. If that were all, Trump’s immigration policies would probably receive broad approval. Instead, Trump’s shameful, reckless, and lawless approach is creating a long-overdue backlash. At some point, newly disabused voters may be ready to learn that Trump’s claims about other topics—tariffs, NATO, vaccines, DOGE cuts—were also lies.

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