Barely two months into the second Donald Trump presidency, the campaign promise of “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants who are violent criminals seems to have become a policy of simply kicking out any immigrants deemed undesirable by the White House. The Trump administration is currently trying to deport several green card holders for taking part in antiwar protests, revoked several visas over their holders’ political views, and refused a visa holder entry for content contained on his phone, including private messages criticizing Trump policies.
It’s easy to see why this has already been compared to past Red Scares and episodes like the Palmer Raids. But there’s also a more recent era we can point to: George W. Bush’s “war on terror” a quarter of a century ago.
We usually think of Bush’s war on terror policies as a series of foolish, destructive, and often lawless invasions and foreign policy decisions. But it was also a sweeping curtailment of the rights of US immigrants that saw noncitizens — and sometimes, even citizens — of the United States questioned, rounded up, deported, and in some cases detained for as long as months, often on false suspicion.
Not So Permanent Residents
Shortly after Bush made a now-famous speech insisting the United States was not at war with Islam, his administration began rounding up roughly 1,200 mostly Arab and Muslim immigrants, most of whom were charged and deported for minor immigration infractions. Some were told to simply report themselves or at most come in for simple questioning by immigration officials only to be arrested, while others were arrested for no crime other than being Muslim or Arab in a climate of fear and hysteria.
Take Ansar Mahmood, a legal permanent resident who was detained for, at first, four weeks, then spent three years in prison before being expelled from the United States and barred from ever coming back — all for taking a picture.
About a month after the September 11 attacks, Mahmood, a pizza delivery driver who had won the green card lottery in 1999, drove up to the highest point in Hudson, New York, to have his picture taken to send back to his family in Pakistan. But that lookout happened to include the town’s main water treatment plant, leading guards to call the police on him, and the opening of a federal terrorism investigation which found nothing — except that Mahmood had helped a Pakistani couple on expired visas get a house and car, leading the federal government to charge him with the felony of harboring undocumented immigrants.