In its merciless pursuit of people without papers — most of them Latino — and its demonization of asylum seekers, refugees, holders of temporary protected status, Muslims and Palestinian rights activists, the Trump administration is accelerating toward a new, modern nadir of Juan Crow, just downstream of Jim and Jane.

When a sitting U.S. senator refers to New York immigrants as “inner-city rats,” when a Florida governor waxes rapturously about the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center, when a presidential administration takes two months to dismantle decades of civil rights law, we must admit that these are acts in a feature presentation of neo-Confederate revanchism targeting brown and Black people. The targeting of the undocumented has a name, after all, based in ugly history and shameful tradition: Juan Crow.

The phrase was popularized by the journalist Roberto Lovato to describe the “matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems” that isolate and control undocumented immigrants. The domestic policies of the Trump administration have taken this legacy to a more dangerous place.

The policies of this administration reinstate an era in which the rights conferred to all people in the United States by the Constitution are subject to a sliding scale of extralegal violability depending on one’s race, ethnicity or assumed immigration status. Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents don’t “need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them and question them.” The administration has created a hostile, systematic stripping of basic dignities that works in concert with stymying official methods people are meant to use to seek relief and redress for governmental abuse.

A familiar, if not altogether new, dawn of racialized mistreatment is being enacted by imposing daily ICE arrest quotas. The claims in a Human Rights Watch report on three Florida detention facilities read like a nightmare mash-up of Guantánamo Bay and American mass incarceration: freezing, overcrowded facilities; routine denial of medical treatment; shackling the hands and wrists of detainees; feeding detainees meager amounts of rotting food or forcing them to eat it “like dogs,” with their hands behind their backs; forcing detainees to sleep on concrete floors.

The White House is attempting to rewrite the constitutional order via executive fiat, spreading terror through immigrant communities by reportedly subjecting detainees to callous, inhumane and even deadly treatment. The senior adviser Stephen Miller routinely conflates immigrants with criminality even though the majority of those detained by ICE have no criminal convictions or have committed no violent offenses.


The administration’s zeal to meet its deportation quotas has even made it willing to put the denaturalization of U.S. citizens on the table. At a recent news conference, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt coyly giggled with approval as Peter Doocy of Fox News asked if the president would approve of an investigation aimed at denaturalizing and ultimately deporting Zohran Mamdani, the candidate who won the Democratic primary in New York’s mayoral race. (Mamdani was born in Uganda and lived there until he was 5.) The president now speaks openly of his desire to deport U.S. citizens, and announced on July 1: “We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time … many of them were born in our country.”

The administration won’t stop there. Birtherism, the conspiracy theory born out of Donald Trump’s baseless questions about Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, was a mere curtain raiser for today’s campaign of racialized delegitimization aimed both at nonwhite elected officials and journalists as well as nonwhite immigrants, regardless of status, along with U.S. citizens and U.S. military service members. This was not a hidden campaign, but one formalized into policy and execution within Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, ahead of Mr. Trump’s second election victory.

While the courts continue to block Mr. Trump’s attempt to withhold U.S. birthright citizenship to children in 28 states, that is just one effort by his administration to redefine U.S. citizenship along racial lines.


The 14th Amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Additionally, the amendment builds upon the tradition of federalism by asserting that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That language applies to every person born on U.S. soil, with limited exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and children of Indigenous nations, which have their own sovereignty.

Birthright citizenship “was meant for the babies of slaves; it was not meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference last month in which he explained his interpretation of the 14th Amendment and the reasoning behind the country’s birthright citizenship case, apparently enlisting a magical line-item veto to disappear that nettlesome language known as the equal protection clause. “It was the exact same date, the end of the Civil War, and it was meant for the babies of slaves and it was so clean and so obvious, but this lets us go there and finally win that case.”

It was not. It did not.

In 2017, nine months into Mr. Trump’s first term as president, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates presented an argument that remains a skeleton key to how we arrived at our present discontent: Mr. Trump is best understood as the nation’s first white president. His election was a repudiation of the legacy of President Obama. This was a man whose path to the presidency started with his notorious birther crusade against Mr. Obama.

Mr. Trump’s crusade was a specious and racist effort to delegitimize the election of the nation’s first Black president. “For Trump,” Mr. Coates wrote, “it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a Black president, insulted him personally.” Having witnessed how Mr. Trump has wielded power during the first six months of his second term, swiftly moving to institute this MAGA version of Juan Crow — now with a supersized ICE budget that rivals what some nations spend on their entire militaries — I think we can safely dispense with the word “almost.”


It’s instructive to look at a previous moment when white supremacy was welcome at the White House. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson hosted a special screening of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” Less than 50 years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment (prohibiting the denial of the vote based on race, color or having been enslaved), Griffith’s blockbuster cinematic argument for the necessity of Jim Crow was released. The film (based on the 1905 novel “The Clansman,” written by Thomas Dixon Jr., a classmate and friend of Wilson) is chiefly notorious for promulgating a fiction of Black men as marauding rapists obsessed with gorging themselves upon the carnal altars of white virginity. In the film, a white victim, Flora Cameron (played by Mae Marsh), jumps off a cliff to her death to avoid marrying, and thus consummating with, a freedman and veteran Union captain named Gus (portrayed by Walter Long, in blackface). That is only one of the film’s expressions of displeasure with the changes Reconstruction brought about.

Griffith’s film spoke to the reactionary, bristling rage of white people witnessing Black men serving in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, exercising the right to vote and holding positions of local authority. Newly enfranchised Black men throughout the South voted in the 1868 election, helping make Ulysses S. Grant president. For those who needed the false supremacy of whiteness to be real, this was unconscionable. Offscreen, that rage famously resulted in the only successful coup d’état on American soil: the Wilmington Race Massacre of 1898.

For Mr. Trump, returning the country to greatness involves stopping an invasion that is about as real as Griffith’s projections. When Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, visited the Salvadoran prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, over which the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, presides, she shared images seemingly engineered to alight the same synapses that brought Griffith so much fame and praise. The policy works hand in hand with the spectacle, much like lynchings, which followed trials in Jim Crow kangaroo courts. The Trump administration’s elastic incursion into habeas corpus and due process rights wouldn’t be complete without intimidating images burnishing its will and ability to abuse with impunity.

Griffith’s order-restoring Ku Klux Klan night riders bring to mind some aspects of today’s professionalized “immigration enforcement.” ICE officers are permitted to mask their faces, to engage in profiling as they snatch people off the street and hustle them into unmarked cars, disappear them into overcrowded, filthy oblivions, execute cruel and inhumane family separations and trample upon the rights of U.S. citizens. Desperate ICE detainees have used their bodies to form SOS signals and, more recently, to break through a wall and escape a facility in New Jersey.

The Trump administration has repeatedly obstructed elected officials from conducting basic oversight. There is a pattern of impunity and contempt in the way the Department of Homeland Security has stonewalled the Newark mayor, Ras Baraka, the New Jersey members of Congress LaMonica McIver and Bonnie Watson Coleman, the New York members Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez and the California members Maxine Waters, Jimmy Gomez and Norma Torres when they have attempted to access federal facilities, as is their right and duty.


Perhaps because frequency and repetition confer dulling effects, Americans seem to have become numb to the dangers of the ongoing shameless, targeted, personal and bigoted diminution of the capabilities, achievements and authority of women and people of color who occupy government. As the transgressions grow bigger and bolder, the effects become normalized, entrenched. We are passively becoming witnesses to near-daily insults, the cumulative effect of which is to make them appear as if they are deserved.

Left unchecked, the currents of autocratic abuse can swell in a flash, allowing the floodwaters of white supremacy to sweep away democracy in America — again.