Americans suffered a litany of horrors thanks to the Trump administration during 2025 – refusal to disburse emergency aid, soaring measles cases, collapsing small businesses, vindictive prosecutions, wanton destruction of the federal government, and (soon) soaring health insurance premiums. But few incidents were more shocking than the two-month siege of Chicago, in which America’s third-largest city was terrorized by a gang of violent, sadistic thugs.
The gang members in question were, of course, agents of the Trump administration, mainly although not all from ICE — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If you think I’m being hyperbolic in calling them sadistic thugs, read the Chicago Tribune’s long article about Operation Midway Blitz, which describes scene after scene of what went down:
What happened here for more than two months is unlike anything in recent American history: the federal government sending agents dressed for war into neighborhoods of the country’s third-largest city to arrest mostly people who look Latino and to ask questions later. To target people largely on the basis of their skin color, on the presumption that they may be in the country without documentation, or that they may have a criminal record, or an association with a gang.
Trump officials claimed that they were cracking down on violent crime committed by illegal aliens, but their own operation demonstrated, better than any conventional statistical analysis, that claims of an immigrant crime wave are bogus. The Tribune found that “only about 1.5% of those detained for immigration-related reasons had been convicted of a violent felony or sex crime.”
Or consider the spectacular Sept. 30 raid carried out on a South Side apartment building — a building administration officials claimed was a base for a Venezuelan gang. “SWAT teams,” reports ProPublica, “rappelled from a helicopter, knocked down doors and hurled flash-bang grenades. They arrested 37 immigrants, most of them Venezuelans, who authorities say were in the country illegally. Agents also zip-tied and, for several hours, detained many U.S. citizens.” After all that, Federal prosecutors didn’t file charges against a single resident of the building.
And while the ICE tactics are blatantly illegal according to legal experts, they have been allowed by a corrupt Supreme Court that is clearly more intent on enabling authoritarianism than on than protecting the Constitution.
It’s clear that claims about crimes perpetrated by immigrants are just an excuse to inflict a reign of terror. And they’re also part of a much wider pattern of hostility to mostly brown-skinned immigrants that has nothing to do with the stated justifications. I call this IDS – Immigrant Derangement Syndrome – the syndrome of blaming immigrants for everything bad in America. And those bad things include both actual events – such as soaring housing costs – and fantasies that exist only in MAGA’s imagination, such as a wave of violent crime.
Claims about the harm done by immigrants range from the dubious to the ludicrous. At the dubious end, assertions that immigrants are taking away jobs from native-born workers, or depressing their wages, just don’t stand up under scrutiny. All the evidence suggests that foreign-born workers are complements, not substitutes, for native born workers. And as the native-born population ages, we really need immigrant workers, both directly to care for seniors and indirectly to keep the economy growing as the native-born labor force shrinks.
JD Vance claims that immigrants are responsible for soaring housing costs. Yet academic studies of the link between immigration and rents — studies the Trump team itself cites! — show that such effects, if they exist, are small. And any reduction in housing demand caused by mass deportations is surely outweighed by the fall in housing supply as America loses foreign-born construction workers.
Until a few days ago I thought Scott Bessent would easily win the prize for the most absurd anti-immigrant argument of the year after he claimed that high beef prices were due to migrants bringing sick cows into the country. But then Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar, weighed in, claiming that immigration has stalled U.S. technological progress. As many people quickly pointed out, immigrants played key roles in some of the achievements he extolled as proof that we don’t need immigration, such as the moon landing. A brief examination of the origins of the legions of engineers in Silicon Valley shows how insane Miller’s claim is.
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