Blame Bush for Trump’s deportation lies

Virtually everyone understands the real reason why Donald Trump is sending ICE agents to round up immigrants who have no criminal record and then send them to a gulag in El Salvador. Trump is a lifelong flat-out racist who is being steered by deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, a guy who virtually inhales white nationalist conspiracy theories. But there’s no law that gives the president unilateral authority to deport or imprison people without due process just because he dislikes nonwhite people. He needs some kind of legal justification, so Trump is claiming — don’t laugh! — that the U.S., without knowing it, is at war with Venezuela. 

Trump has dredged up a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president broad powers during a “declared war” or “invasion” to detain immigrants from an enemy nation. Government prosecutors claim, on no real evidence, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is sending members of the gang Tren de Aragua into the U.S. as a de facto military invasion aimed at “harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas.” This argument is a joke on its surface. Few of the people arrested so far, if any, are clearly members of Tren de Aragua, and that criminal organization is not invading the U.S. in any normal sense of the word. Maduro is no doubt a bad guy, but he isn’t sending a covert military force to attack the U.S. 

Trump’s lies are especially obnoxious, because the press keeps getting hold of memos circulated by U.S. intelligence agencies that make clear that no part of Trump’s conspiracy theory is true. A leaked Feb. 26 memo featured CIA analysts, among others, arguing, as the New York Times reports, that Tren de Aragua “was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders.” Another declassified memo released this weekreaches similar conclusions in even more straightforward language: “[T]he Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with [Tren de Aragua] and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” MAGA loyalists will no doubt cling to that “probably” like a life raft, but if you’re making an extraordinary claim you need solid evidence, not a report that everything you’re saying is most likely made-up nonsense. 

Trump, of course, lies about everything all the time, but this particular case has strong echoes of a previous Republican administration’s attempts to bamboozle the public about foreign intelligence: George W. Bush’s lies about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” the pretext for the 20-year disaster that was the Iraq war. 

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Former Bush officials like Ari Fleischer have pushed the self-serving myth that Bush “faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded,” and that it came as a shock when no WMDs were found in Iraq. That’s a lie. David Corn of Mother Jones has been a real hero in resisting this false claim, which gets invoked to this day by never-Trump Republicans seeking absolution. There’s ample evidence that Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials flatly contradicted the intelligence they were provided and claimed to have imaginary evidence of these imaginary weapons. In August 2002, Cheney said there was “no doubt” that Hussein had these weapons, although he had seen intelligence reports that there was no credible evidence they existed. 

A handful of prominent Bush-era Republicans, including Cheney, have publicly rejected Trump, but most of the GOP has simply gone along with our would-be dictator. It’s logical enough that MAGA forces would import Bush’s tactics to bolster Trump’s lies. That’s especially true on the issue of immigration, which resembles war in that public opinion can swing wildly back and forth, depending on the level of perceived threat. Republican operatives learned from Bush that falsified evidence is an excellent way to manufacture public consent, to use a hoary academic term. Sure, most Americans turned against the Iraq war a few years later, but by that time it was far too late to do much beyond mourn the losses. 

It’s clear from the Trump administration’s legal gamesmanship that its officials see their main goal as deceiving the public just long enough to get lots of people deported and imprisoned in ways that can’t be undone. But it’s starting to look like they have less time than the Bush administration did to execute their plan to outrun reality. Blitzing the public and the compliant media with scary foreign-sounding terms like “Tren de Aragua” or “MS-13” worked at first, but polling data shows that the public is already souring on Trump’s immigration policies. 

Trump has two things going against him that Bush didn’t. With the 9/11 attacks not far in the past, Bush enjoyed months of credulous press coverage for his lies. But in the second Trump term, even mainstream media outlets have worked to expose the illegal deportations people who are likely innocent of any crime. Indeed, perhaps the biggest reason Trump officials wants to evade due process is because they’re afraid that most deportees would be proven innocent in court. Trump is a known liar who lies all the time about literally everything, even in routine legal filings, as was abundantly demonstrated during his attempted coup after the 2020 election. Bush didn’t have that reputation for dishonesty, although maybe he should have. His unearned post-9/11 goodwill also made it tougher for the press to approach his lies with the skepticism they deserved. 

Bush had another important advantage: His Iraq lies didn’t need to be adjudicated through the courts. Congress authorized his war powers, and, sadly, most of the members who did so were only thinking about their own political futures rather than the facts. Despite the Trump White House claiming that deportations are a matter of foreign policy — and as such the president’s responsibility — the reality is that immigration law is a domestic concern regulated by American courts.

Trump has certainly done his best to flood the federal bench with right-wing hacks, but even Republican judges are struggling to pretend that Venezuelan immigrants fleeing political persecution are secretly working for Maduro as covert mercenaries. Or at least they’re asking the question that all Americans should be asking: if Trump is sure these guys are criminals, why not prove it in court? In fact, Trump’s team keeps on losing legal challenges to its immigration policies, even before the Supreme Court. That hasn’t yet been enough to free the men Trump illegally sent to El Salvador or hastily deported elsewhere, but at least it’s slowing down the efforts to target more innocent people. 

The Iraq war killed 4,000 Americans and at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians, but its true impact was much more devastating than that. It destabilized the entire region and triggered a cascade of wars leading to at least 4.5 million deaths. Trump and aides like Miller openly fantasize about inflicting that kind of suffering with their promises to deport 20 million people. Since there are no more than 11 million undocumented people in the U.S.., Trump will have to start deporting legal immigrants and, quite likely, “denaturalizing” citizens to get anywhere close to that goal. His scheme is so illegal and so unpopular that he would need Bush’s post-9/11 levels of approval to pull it off. The bad news here is that Trump’s team learned dire lessons from the Bush administration about manipulating public opinion with falsified intel. The good news is they are nowhere near as skillful, or as lucky, as Bush was when he lured America into two decades of destructive war.