Some of the most ostentatious implementers of Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda have left or been forced out of the administration in recent weeks.
In January, the president removed Greg Bovino – the border patrol commander who was the face of the immigration crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis – from his front-line role. The Department of Homeland Security’s top spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, who had become famous for her bombastic and blatantly false press statements, left her position last month. And on Thursday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem was fired.
However, human rights advocates and organizers across the United States do not expect the government’s immigration enforcement tactics to change on the ground.
“We forced the Trump administration to fire Kristi Noem,” said Erika Zurawski, co-founder of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (Mirac), a group that helped organize large-scale protests against the administration’s immigration operation in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
The public outcry against the so-called Operation Metro Surge, which was led by Noem and resulted in the murder of two American citizens and the seemingly indiscriminate snatching of immigrants from city streets, undoubtedly led to the secretary’s downfall, he said.
“This was a victory for the people. But the problem is that we cannot celebrate the victory because the violence continues and the kidnappings continue.”
Hundreds of immigration agents remained in Minnesota weeks after the administration announced a reduction. Even as Democrats in Congress attempted to block funding for DHS (demanding restrictions on how immigration agents operate), enforcement continued across the country. At least two immigrants have recently died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
The National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy group, called the Trump administration’s decision to replace Noem with hardline Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin “the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.”
“I hope that neither the American public nor our elected officials will be distracted by today’s personnel change at the top of DHS, or the internal changes that preceded it,” said Faisal Al-Juburi of Raíces, a nonprofit legal services and advocacy organization. “Mass deportation remains central to the Trump administration’s agenda. That has not changed, and that is why we have every reason to believe that interior (immigration) law enforcement will continue to target people based on race and regardless of their status in all of our American cities.”
In the congressional hearings that preceded Noem’s ouster, it became clear that lawmakers—including Republicans who broadly supported Trump’s immigration agenda—had grown tired of Noem’s theatrical approach to her role, especially since most Americans seemed unimpressed by Noem’s penchant for pageantry.
“We are starting to make the American people think that deporting people is wrong,” outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said at a congressional hearing on Noem’s tenure this week. “It’s exactly the opposite. The way they are deporting them is wrong.”
It was about a woman who traveled to El Salvador to pose in front of the inmates of a huge megaprison to which the DHS had sent more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants in violation of a directive from a federal judge. She traveled the US border on horseback and in an all-terrain vehicle, and cameras followed her as she participated in violent immigration raids. In the Florida Everglades, she appeared, camera-ready, to gleefully showcase the brutality of a detention camp called “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“Noem brought public performance and spectacle to her tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security. That’s what sets her apart from her predecessors,” Al-Juburi said.
But it’s not clear that Noem’s firing — or any of the other personnel changes — means the administration will abandon the show. Mullin, Al-Juburi noted, is a former MMA fighter who gained national attention after threatening the Teamsters president during a congressional hearing.
Trump’s immigration agenda was the center of his presidential campaign, and throughout his second term his administration has openly promoted even his most extreme immigration actions, both through social media memes and press releases.
He has abandoned the claims he made in his first term, when officials insisted for a year that there were no family separations at the border, even as journalists and advocates began raising the alarm that hundreds of migrant children were being forcibly separated from their parents.
This time, the administration has highlighted its brutality against immigrant communities.
Democratic leaders in Congress have continued to resist funding DHS, demanding reforms that include requirements that immigration agents wear identification and body cameras, and stop operating near schools, medical facilities, churches, polling stations, day care centers and courthouses.
But the agency is still expected to use its growing budget to acquire warehouses that it will transform into detention centers and mobilize an array of surveillance technologies against immigrants and American citizens. The administration has already gutted the agency’s oversight bodies.
“By its very design, DHS is shielded from scrutiny and not controlled by oversight,” Al-Juburi said. “That was true yesterday. It’s true today. It will be true tomorrow.”
