A PROMINENT AUTHOR REACHED OUT TO ME recently with a disturbing story: The Trump administration attempted to denaturalize her father-in-law. He had become a naturalized U.S. citizen in December, right before Trump took power. Then on February 13, he received a letter from the Social Security Administration (SSA) informing him that he was losing his social security benefits. “We cannot pay you benefits because you are not lawfully present in the U.S.,” the letter provided to The Bulwark stated. He was also informed that he was being disenrolled from Medicare because SSA “reported that you are not lawfully present in the United States.”

The letter was absurd. Because the family had English speakers who could effectively advocate for this new citizen, they were able to appeal the letter and show documents at a Social Security office to get the decision reversed.

But what about people who don’t speak English? What about people who are fearful to advocate for their rights because the government has been ignoring those rights and abusing immigrants? What about U.S. citizens in mixed-status families?

There’s a famous rule of thumb: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe, in the case of the author’s father-in-law, this was just a run-of-the-mill screwup in a big, complex bureaucracy. But that would stretch credulity, especially at a time when the Trump administration’s new policies include the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE enlisting other agencies like the IRS, SSA, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to provide people’s addresses so they can be tracked down and deported—or, short of that, denied basic services like housing.

Just last week, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration—intentionally, erroneously—declared more than 6,300 lawful immigrants dead by putting them on a “death master list,” thereby canceling their Social Security numbers and cutting them off from benefits and bank accounts. The goal is to encourage these people to “self-deport” by enshrining a lie in law. Kafka couldn’t have made this up.

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Now HUD officials are preparing a rule that would ban mixed-status households from public housing, and DOGE is looking to remove current mixed-status households, “vowing to ensure that undocumented immigrants do not benefit from public programs, even if they live with citizens or other eligible family members,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

This would be shocking during any other administration—and really any other week before the president announced that he was interested in finding ways to disappear U.S. citizens to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known for human rights abuses. Still, the new HUD policy is also unprecedented: A woman who is a U.S. citizen, with children who are also U.S. citizens, and who qualifies for public housing, and currently lives in public housing, could be thrown out on the street because her husband, the children’s father, isn’t a legal immigrant (which under this administration means that the government maybe just decided it didn’t want him here, regardless of his actual legal status). Wasn’t this administration supposed to be pro-family?

It’s unclear if such a family would still be thrown out of public housing if the Social Security Administration had decided that their undocumented relative was dead. The courts would probably have to sort that one out.

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This new HUD plan recalls California’s infamous Proposition 187 from 1994. The punitive law sought to use the tendrils of the state to deny immigrants any public services, including health care, housing, and even education. Some now credit the punitive and invasive measure for helping to turn California from a Republican bastion to one of the most Democratic-leaning states in the country.

“It would have turned every school, health care facility, and their employees into de facto immigration agents obligated to report the status of these immigrants to federal authorities,” explains the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which sued to stop the law at the time. “And it would likely have led to discrimination and racial profiling of citizens and legal residents alike, thanks to a requirement that providers question and report anyone they reasonably suspected of being undocumented.”

But in the long term, “the most important effect” of the political and legal fight against Prop. 187 “is that today, California is a sanctuary state that values its immigrant population and leads nationally in the fight against unfair attacks on immigrants and other minorities.”

Republican strategist Mike Madrid had a front-row seat to witness the damage Prop. 187 inflicted on Republicans. At the time Prop. 187 passed, he was a college student appointee on the community college board of governors for California’s Republican governor, Pete Wilson, who was a major backer of Prop. 187. Then, during the late 1990s, as the legal challenges to Prop. 187 reached their climax in the courts, Madrid was political director of the California GOP. He now sees Trump charging into a trap like the one that ensnared California Republicans three decades ago.

“This is not a new playbook, it played out in California for a generation,” Madrid told me. “While 63 percent of whites voted for Prop. 187, ten years later those numbers dropped by about 20 points,” he said, referring to the precipitous drop he saw in support for anti-immigration legislation in polling. “This stuff is fine in the abstract but people started to recognize these were real lives, they’re your neighbors, your kids are in the soccer fields playing with their kids. Like every other cultural issue when it becomes personalized, everything changes. So they’re no longer talking about ‘illegal aliens’—they’re talking about Kilmar Garcia.”

An Opening for Democrats: Will They Seize It?

We have already seen that community and media pressure can work to bring people home. But where, when, and how to organize that pressure when the Trump administration is creating so many problems at one time remains a challenge for Democrats and opponents of the administration. After Trump and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s Oval Office farce this week, House Democrats announced plans to head to El Salvador to check on Abrego Garcia. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who counts him as a constituent (even though Abrego Garcia can’t vote), traveled there on Wednesday and finally succeeded in securing a meeting with the prisoner on Thursday night.

Trump is overplaying his hand. His goal, clearly, is to convince a decisive portion of the population that immigrants are gang members and criminals, or that they otherwise don’t belong here. But Americans have always had nuanced views of immigration and they usually don’t include disappearing innocent men to El Salvador or stripping U.S. citizens of their rights.

Americans also appear to have thermostatic views of immigration—they want more when they think there’s a little and less when they think there’s a lot. The number of people who said they wanted to maintain or increase immigration levels surged during Trump’s first term, and the number of people who said they wanted lower levels surged under Biden.

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Michelle Brané, the former executive director of the Biden administration’s DHS family-reunification task force, said the first Trump administration’s widely criticized “zero tolerance” policy—which led to family separation and kids in cages—was very similar to what we’re seeing now. But his second term represents a level of cruelty and unlawful policy “on steroids.”

I asked her if this is an issue Democrats should fight on.

“Absolutely they should be speaking out on it, there are a lot of issues here Congress should be weighing in on, with the issue of complying with court orders being a key one,” she said. “Everyone involved here is being picked up in the districts of a representative somewhere.”

Madrid said both sides have a propensity to overplay their hands on immigration, but Republicans are the first to “move into the void here,” pushing policies that violate the Constitution and shock the conscience of the country.

He recalled running an assembly race during the Prop. 187 furor and the personal, striking reason the candidate opposed the proposition.

When Nao Takasugi’s family was sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War II, they were in danger of losing not only their freedom, but also their store, Asahi Market, until employee Ignacio Carmona offered to watch it for them until they came back. Years later, when the war ended and the Takasugis were released from the internment camps, Carmona returned the store to them. Nao Takasugi never forgot that deep kindness and maintained a tremendous soft spot for the Latino community in his heart decades later when he ran for the state legislature. (Tom Brokaw told Takasugi’s story in The Greatest Generation.)

“I know what fascism looks like,” Madrid recalls Takasugi saying of Prop. 187. “I’ve seen this before.”

“What Tagasuki taught me is: We’re Republican because of what we believe in, but there’s a propensity for people, including in this party, to go too far,” Madrid said. “These dangers exist on both sides but when they do happen you have to be willing to stand up and say no.”

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One Last Thing

This video really shook me. It shows an ICE agent breaking the window of the car of Juan Francisco Mendez, even though he told agents he was not the person—“Antonio”—they were looking for. He tried to remain in his car with his wife until his lawyer arrived, but that wasn’t enough for the Boston ICE agents, who shattered his window and dragged him out. Illegal immigration is a civil offense, not a criminal one. But now we have an administration that views these people as criminals—deserving of treatment like this. While his wife and 9-year-old have asylum, Mendez was awaiting his documentation for his asylum claim. His lawyer says he’s in a detention center in New Hampshire now.

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