why is this important?

… and that narrative that the administration is only going after “the worst of the worst?” Just another blatant lie.

Most immigration arrests have been parents, students, asylum seekers, construction workers, etc., that have been mainly carried out at street vendor spots, car washes and in Home Depot parking lots.

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When President Trump seized control of the Washington, D.C. police department and deployed the National Guard because of the crime “emergency” that involved “violent gangs” and “bloodthirsty criminals,” over 80 percent of the immigrants arrested had no prior record (and most of the convictions for those who did were for immigration, traffic, or nonviolent offenses). The same pattern emerged during the Chicago, Massachusetts and Los Angeles crackdowns.

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Although the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t publicly released data on criminal records of detainees – surprise, surprise – CBS News obtained an internal DHS document that said less than 14 percent of almost 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the first year of President Trump’s second term had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses. The internal DHS data revealed that less than 2 percent of those arrested by ICE during that time had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions, and another 2 percent of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.

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Hmmm…. Isn’t it weird that the Trump/Vance administration has caught so few hardened criminals? Answer: Not really, because there weren’t that many illegal criminals here to begin with. This is a classic example of how campaign lies can eventually backfire and make you look bad (Epstein files, anyone?).

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Without question, one thing Donald Trump is genius at is tapping into the deep, pervasive fear in some Americans that something catastrophic is going to happen if we allow people into our country who talk, dress, worship or look different than we do. But in the context of immigration – authorized or unauthorized – this makes no sense.

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Lest we forget, millions and millions of undocumented immigrants live here already – and have for decades – and things have been going pretty smoothly between us.

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Obviously, this is not the narrative many Republican politicians sling – where they find the one man from Mexico who murdered someone in the Midwest, then plaster the horrific story all over the television in election years. Okay, maybe that one man did murder someone but, in a broader sense, this narrative is just not true.

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On June 16, 2015, the day he announced his first run for the White House, Donald Trump famously said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Several weeks later, he doubled down on those comments saying, “What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” On the 2024 campaign trail, he said things like undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and that they come “from prisons and jails, insane asylums” and “savage gangs.” He claimed there are probably more like 21 million immigrants that had “invaded” and “occupied” America.

This is just nonsense. Out of the 2,901,142 migrant enforcement encounters by U.S. Customs and Border Protection nationwide in FY2024, 17,048 of them were arrested as “criminal aliens,” meaning they had been convicted of one or more crimes (whether in the U.S. or abroad) before being intercepted. That’s just 0.59 percent.

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It’s also important to remember that the criminal records of these people include both violent and nonviolent offenses, including “Illegal Entry/Reentry” into the United States, which is what 10,935 – or 64 percent – of them had been arrested for. Only 1,084 of them had been convicted of “Assault, Battery, and/or Domestic Violence” and only 29 had been convicted of “Homicide or Manslaughter” – which means that the percentage of these criminals coming into the United States in FY2024 was 0.04 percent and 0.0009 percent, respectively.

** We want to be clear about what we're saying here. Obviously one person who has been convicted of assault, battery, domestic violence, homicide or manslaughter is one too many crossing our border. And without question every single violent crime is devastating. But it’s super important that we keep proper perspective on these things. If we don’t, we won’t be able to distinguish between our various challenges, and they will all blur right into one another. The more tangled and convoluted these issues get, the more impossible they seem to solve. **

Oh! And while we’re on the subject, although we definitely need to keep a close eye on them, there is also no “infestation” of the street gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or other violent street gangs coming through our borders – or even terrorists for that matter.

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In FY2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 523 non-Americans nationwide who were affiliated with any gang, 72 of whom were allegedly affiliated with MS-13. That means that just 0.02 percent of the 2,901,142 migrant enforcement encounters that year were with gang members, and only 0.002 percent were affiliated with MS-13.

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And President Trump was just flat wrong when he claimed on the 2024 campaign trail that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years.”

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In FY2024, there were 410 encounters with people who matched records in the federal government’s terrorist screening database at official ports of entry and 106 encounters between ports of entry – for a grand total of 0.02 percent of total USBP encounters. These encounters involved both U.S. citizens and noncitizens.

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In the 2021 Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department found “there was no credible evidence indicating international terrorist groups established bases in Mexico, worked directly with Mexican drug cartels, or sent operatives via Mexico into the United States in 2021… to date there had been no confirmed cases of a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil by a terrorist who gained entry to the United States through Mexico.” Three years later, the 2024 report said there was still “no credible evidence indicated that international terrorist groups established bases in Mexico” and that “no one who gained entry to the United States through Mexico carried out a terrorist attack in the United States.”

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In fact, in the 25 years since 9/11, there has only been ONE case of a jihadist foreign terrorist organization coordinating a fatal attack inside the United States or of a lethal jihadist attacker receiving training or other support from terrorist groups abroad (every other jihadist who conducted a lethal attack inside the U.S. since 9/11 was a citizen or legal resident)…. and guess who the president was when that one incident happened at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, when a Saudi Air Force officer in the U.S. for military training killed three U.S. sailors. Yep, Donald Trump.

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A risk analysis of terrorism and immigration from 1975-2023 conducted by the Cato Institute found that “a total of 230 foreign-born terrorists were responsible for 3,046 murders on U.S. soil from 1975 through the end of 2023.” The report goes on to say that “nine of them entered the U.S. as illegal immigrants; 79 were lawful permanent residents; 24 were students; 1 entered on a K-1 fiancé(e) visa; 29 were refugees; 13 were asylum seekers; 43 were tourists on various visas; 15 were from Visa Waiver Program countries; 1 entered on an A-2 visa for government business or military training; and 1 was on an H-1B visa for skilled temporary foreign workers. The visas for the remaining 15 terrorists could not be determined and are recorded as ‘unknown.’”

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The report concludes with this: “The chance of a person perishing in a terrorist attack committed by a foreigner on U.S. soil over that 49-year period was about 1 in 4.5 million per year. The hazard posed by foreigners who entered in different ways varies considerably. For instance, the annual chance of being murdered in an attack committed by an illegal immigrant was zero.”

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Tons of other research on immigration and crime consistently show that immigrants – including those who are unauthorized – have either no impact or a diminishing effect on crime. Multiple studies have found that unauthorized immigration not only does not increase violent crime, but in some cases decreases it. Studies have shown that unauthorized immigration is associated with a reduction in drug arrests, drug overdoses, and driving under the influence, and others have found that it reduces rates of property crime, larceny, and burglary.

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A study published in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, conducted jointly by four universities, discovered that “research has shown little support for the enduring proposition that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime. Although classical criminological and neoclassical economic theories would predict immigration to increase crime, most empirical research shows quite the opposite... We investigated the immigration-crime relationship among metropolitan areas over a 40-year period. Our goal was to describe the ongoing and changing association between immigration and a broad range of violent and property crimes. Our results indicate that immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period.”

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The Marshall Project – a nonprofit journalism organization that has won two Pulitzer Prizes – extended the study’s data six years, finding that “crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board. In general, the study’s data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two.”

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Another study by prominent sociologists David Light and Michael Miller, published in the journal Criminology, confirms those findings: “Undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative, although not significant in all specifications. Using supplemental models of victimization data and instrumental variable methods, we find little evidence that these results are due to decreased reporting or selective migration to avoid crime. We consider the theoretical and policy implications of these findings against the backdrop of the dramatic increase in immigration enforcement in recent decades.”

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Another study by these two found that “increased undocumented immigration was significantly associated with reductions in drug arrests, drug overdose deaths, and DUI arrests, net of other factors.” They concluded that “there was no significant relationship between increased undocumented immigration and DUI deaths, and that their study “provides evidence that undocumented immigration has not increased the prevalence of drug or alcohol problems but may be associated with reductions in these public health concerns.”

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The Cato Institute found that “all immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives relative to their shares of the population. Even illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans.” 

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In another report focused on Texas, the Cato Institute said this: “Whether one focuses on criminal convictions, arrests, or the number of individuals convicted or arrested, the results are the same: illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans in Texas. Legal immigrants have the lowest rates of all, except for some measures of property crime where illegal immigrants are even less crime prone. Native-born Americans living in Texas have the highest criminal conviction and arrest rates. Even on the margin, there is no statistically significant effect of the illegal immigrant population on the rate of criminal convictions, either overall or for illegal immigrants specifically.”

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“Crime, at least in the state of Texas, is a domestically produced problem and not an imported one. Texas is one of the states where we would expect higher illegal immigrant crime rates if they were an especially crime prone subpopulation. Texas’ proximity to Mexico, the reputation of its criminal justice system, and the state-level politics all militate toward increasing the illegal immigrant crime rate relative to legal immigrants and native-born Americans.”

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Likewise, a study that compared the undocumented foreign-born population in U.S. metropolitan areas data with FBI Uniform Crime Report data found “negative effects of undocumented immigration on the overall property crime rate, larceny, and burglary; effects in models using violent crime measures as the outcomes are statistically non-significant.”

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3. It Erodes Our Rights.

Unsurprisingly, thanks to all the chaos these immigration policies have created, U.S. citizens are getting caught up in this mess big time – as the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the other examples we have already given, prove.

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In October 2025, a ProPublica investigation found over 170 cases where U.S. citizens had been detained at raids and protests. Over 20 citizens reported being held for over a day without being able to call their families or a lawyer. In some cases, their loved ones couldn’t even find them.

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ProPublica’s story led to an investigation by Senate Democrats, where “citizens told congressional investigators that immigration officers had dragged them from cars, detained them for days, fabricated claims of assault, routinely used excessive force and denied medical care. The investigation also found that agents ‘treated children with reckless disregard for their safety and wellbeing.’”

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“One citizen recalled that federal agents pointed guns at her youngest children, ages 6 and 8, and dragged her 14-year-old daughter out of a pickup and zip-tied her. The citizen, Anabel Romero, told investigators that an agent threatened to ‘fucking blow your head off’ during the chaotic raid at a rural Idaho racetrack. Romero also said agents ‘wouldn’t let people get diapers or food for their kids.’ Romero and her children were born in Idaho.”

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What makes this even more chilling is that – lying yet again – the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly claimed they never arrest or hold noncitizens. Former DHS Secretary Noem herself said, “No American citizens have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true and false reporting.”

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The examples of American citizens being harassed and/or detained are endless. Fifteen-year-old Diego Rosales, an American citizen born in Chicago, was ambushed in Bedrosian Park by three white men with pistols on their hips and clad in fatigues, masks, and body armor as part of Operation Midway Blitz (this episode was all caught on camera lest you believe the Trump/Vance administration’s b.s. denials that it even happened).

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Also caught on video was the ambush of Dayanne Figueroa, a paralegal born and raised in the United States. The Washington Post describes the incident this way: “(Figueroa) honked at a vehicle blocking her path. Seeing her lane clear, she said she accelerated forward to steer clear of the action. Video of the incident shows an unmarked SUV swerve to the right as Figueroa’s vehicle moves forward and then crashes into the driver’s side.”

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“A moment later, immigration agents exited the SUV with guns drawn. They pulled Figueroa out of the car by her shoulders and handcuffed her as she thrashed on the pavement. Figueroa was placed in the third row of a red van between two trembling Hispanic men also in handcuffs. A supervisor, she said, made eye contact with her in the rearview mirror as she begged the masked agents to identify themselves and their agency. She said she told them she was a U.S. citizen. ‘No one is going to help you,’ she recalls the supervisor saying. ‘You’re all criminals.’” Figueroa was held for four hours and released without charges.

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Naturally, the Trump/Vance administration has pushed back on claims that people are suddenly being “disappeared” – meaning that people are vanishing, often clandestinely, so those in charge can create a climate of fear and to silence dissent. But is that such an outlandish claim after what you’ve read so far?

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Regardless of what you think of this administration’s tactics, it’s hard to deny that there is an enormous difference in what used to be an ordinary everyday arrest and what is happening today. It’s not hard to understand why Americans freak out when they are sent to a place far from their homes and aren’t given access to their attorney.

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Another fabulous new thing is that, to make certain they are not in violation of the Trump/Vance administration’s new decree that people visiting America – and those who have already arrived – must “not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles,” tourists from the 42 countries who are allowed to come to the U.S. without a visa (like Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and South Korea) are now required to share their social media activity from the past five years; their email addresses that have been active for the past ten years; and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children.

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When you first hear this, it may not seem like such a bad idea. But let’s really think this through. These are things that China and Russia have been doing for years. If that’s not enough to give you pause, think about the impact this has on free speech.

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Already, Óscar Arias Sánchez, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and two-time president of Costa Rica, had his visa revoked because of his alleged close ties to China. In truth, his real crime was saying on social media that Donald Trump was like a “Roman emperor, telling the rest of the world what to do.” 

Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral citizen studying at Tufts University, was arrested on a Boston street by masked agents as she walked to dinner because of an op-ed she wrote in the school newspaper criticizing Tufts’ response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. After being detained for over six weeks in Louisiana, U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions ordered her release, saying, “I suggested to the government that they produce any additional information which would suggest that she posed a substantial risk. And that was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case. There is no evidence here.” Calling her arrest a “traumatic incident,” he continued: “The court finds that Ms. Öztürk has raised a substantial claim of a constitutional violation. Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”

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At Columbia University, Indian Fulbright scholar and doctoral student Ranjani Srinivasan’s student visa was revoked after the Department of Homeland Security accused her of being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization” – even though she vehemently denied this from the start.

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This all seemed to start when Ms. Srinivasan happened to return to her university housing after a picnic with friends the same day pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Although she was adamant that she wasn’t part of the protest, she was arrested at the entrance of her building. A judge soon recognized Ms. Srinivasan wasn’t involved and dismissed all charges against her.

Let’s talk about the Hamilton Hall takeover in the context of free speech for a minute. In late April 2024, pro-Palestinian activists broke into the historic building that is home to key administrative offices for the university, smashing windows and barricading themselves inside using rope, zip ties, bike locks and furniture.

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They then unfurled a banner renaming the building “Hind’s Hall” after a Palestinian child killed in Gaza and demanded the university divest from Israel-linked companies and give amnesty to suspended students (similar events happened at Hamilton Hall during both the 1968 anti-war and 1985 anti-apartheid demonstrations). 

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Over 20 hours later, police finally intervened, clearing Hamilton Hall and arresting over 100 protesters inside and outside the building. The incident resulted in 46 protesters being charged with criminal trespassing, a class B misdemeanor.

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… as they absolutely should have been if they were involved in this destructive behavior in any way. If people who study from abroad were involved in this mayhem, Columbia had every right to suspend them, and the United States had every right to expel them from the country. Visas have conditions, as they should.

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Visitors to America don’t have an automatic right to every single one of our constitutional rights. When visitors are asked to leave, they need to leave and, as a result, no longer enjoy the protections under our legal system. The Supreme Court has made this pretty clear. Therefore, students and outside groups and individuals who engaged in damaging and violent behavior during the Hamilton Hall protest are fair game. That said, when visitors come to America with America’s consent and an intent to obey the law, they should enjoy rights under our laws. Under the current administration, that’s not always happening.

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In September 2025, U.S. District Judge William Young – who was nominated by President Reagan in 1985 – ruled that the efforts of senior administration officials to arrest and deport noncitizen student activists, particularly pro-Palestinian students, was an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment. In a scathing 161-page ruling, he called the administration’s crackdown a “truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech.” He continued, “We are not, and we must not become, a nation that imprisons and deports people because we are afraid of what they have to tell us.”

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Judge Young took special aim at ICE: “ICE goes masked for a single reason – to terrorize Americans into quiescence. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed, masked secret police.” Comparing immigration agents to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan,” Judge Young declared that federal efforts to deport protesters amounted to a “full-throated assault” on freedom of speech. “Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”

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In January 2025, during a hearing to determine the appropriate remedies for the Trump/Vance administration’s illegal effort, Judge Young again ripped into the administration and those who lead it. Denouncing what he called “breathtaking” constitutional violations and calling the president an “authoritarian” who expects everyone to “toe the line absolutely,” he said that President Trump and his senior officials have a “fearful approach” to freedom of speech that seeks to “exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.”

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He also said that former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to deny people their rights. At one point, Judge Young, his voice dripping with incredulity, said, “The secretary of state, the senior Cabinet officer in our history, involved in this.”

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< Sidebar: During the trial Judge Young was ruling on – American Association of University Professors v. Rubio – it was revealed that top administration officials directed DHS staff who usually analyze transnational criminal networks to instead compile reports on students involved in pro-Palestinian protests. The main source of information the analysts used was thousands of profiles created by Canary Mission, a nontransparent pro-Israel group that says it documents individuals who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews” on college campuses to “combat the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses.” After generating the reports, DHS would then refer them to the State Dept. to revoke the visas and green cards of the people involved. >

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“Talking straight here,” the Judge said. “The big problem in this case is that the Cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment.”

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To open the September proceedings, Judge Young shared an image of a handwritten postcard that he had received, which said, “Trump has pardons and tanks.…What do you have?” The Judge responded: “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, we the People of the United States … have our magnificent Constitution.”

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It may be tempting to believe – despite all the evidence – that these atrocities are mainly being directed toward people who weren’t born in the United States and that’s where it will likely end. But please believe us when we say this is NOT a thread we should pull on – especially considering all the other infringements on free speech the Trump/Vance administration have tried.

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What’s next? What’s going to be the next offense that is simply too ghastly to abide, whether you’re an American or not? Protesting the Venezuela coup d’état? Making a joke about the president’s hair or him being weirdly orange? Who’s next? Atheists? Catholics? Democrats? Republicans? If you don’t think this can happen, THINK AGAIN.

Police states aren’t created overnight. They are created by citizens almost sleepwalking into them by slowly and quietly conceding their freedoms.

That’s just the First Amendment. What about the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? This administration is also overtly trampling on due process and that should terrify us as well.

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The very thought that an American citizen can be detained without due process is outrageous …and Justice Brett Kavanaugh saying in a Supreme Court opinion that immigration stops of individuals legally present in the U.S. is just a “typically brief” and “minor inconvenience” as opposed to the slipperiest of slippery slopes is an absurd thing for a fifth grader to say, much less a Supreme Court Justice.

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In the United States of America, you can’t just say someone is guilty, you must prove it. In the United States of America, someone somewhere must prove something to be true before it is. Thank God.

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4. It Promotes Bigotry.

American citizenship and, as an extension, immigration have been highly debated issues since the beginning of the Great Experiment we call the United States of America. First there was the Naturalization Act of 1790 which offered citizenship to “free white people,” then the Naturalization Act of 1870 which extended citizenship to African slaves not born in America.

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Sprinkled throughout 1812 to 1902, there were political parties like the Know Nothing Party, which was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, and laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which, if you didn’t quite get it from the name, excluded Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. There were also the Wars of Expansion and other brutal conflicts fought to expand our nation’s territory: Creek Indian War (1813-1814); Trail of Tears (1838); Mexican War (1846-1848); Bleeding Kansas (1854-1856); Battle of Little Bighorn (1876); and the Spanish-American War (1898).

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This all led to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act. The Hart-Celler Act abolished the 1920s-era National Origins Formula, a series of qualitative immigration quotas based solely on national origin. These quotas severely restricted immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere. Or, to put it more bluntly, the National Origins Formula blatantly discriminated against Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, and other non-Western and Northern European ethnic groups.

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It’s the age-old question. Who belongs here?

Here is how we answer that question: American identity is based on a set of universal ideals that were set forth in the U.S. Constitution. You are a citizen when you are born here, or if you choose to come here after you follow the established rules, promising to support and defend the U.S. Constitution and U.S. laws, and pledging to bear true faith to the United States.

To us, you do those things and you are every bit as American as those who came over here on the Mayflower. In our minds, this philosophy is what makes America truly exceptional.

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In his farewell speech, President Reagan said: “Since this is the last speech that I will give as president, I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

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On the other hand, it’s clear from their words and deeds that some people in the Trump/Vance administration disagree with us on who does and doesn’t belong here (please note, we said some, not all).

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At the infamous rally at Madison Square Garden a month before the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump’s top policy adviser Steven Miller said, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Well, it certainly didn’t take long to figure out what he meant by that. It appears some of these guys believe that citizens with ancestors who go back to the Mayflower have a stronger claim to this country than any of the people who came after them. If your ancestors were on that boat or fought in the Revolution you are AMERICAN American.

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Certain phrases that many of them use now – like “Heritage Americans” – signal this loud and clear. They seemingly believe that Heritage Americans are AMERICAN Americans… people who can go on Ancestry.com and trace their ancestral roots to the Anglo-Protestant, Scotch-Irish settlers of the original colonies…. people who, of course, happen to be white.

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We're not making unfounded assumptions about these guys. Vice President JD Vance came out and said this at a 2025 speech at the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute: “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.” He also said, “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” After marveling over the fact that “our ancestors” could “tame a wild continent,” he concluded, “That is our heritage as Americans.”

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Elsewhere, in July 2025, an oil painting of a white pioneer couple cradling a baby in the back of a covered wagon was posted on the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account, along with the caption: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.”

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In response to questions about the post, then DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote, “If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook. This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage.” Are you sensing that everyone on their team got the memo?

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Some of this crew believes our refugee system should also reflect this view, severely restricting travel and visas for countries where people have darker skin while favoring white Afrikaners – the white minority that once ran South Africa’s brutal apartheid system – and conservative Europeans who have been, as a presentation to the White House by officials in the State and Homeland Security Departments put it, “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.” < That last one appears to be a reference to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party, an organization that JD Vance has vigorously defended but that many accuse of aligning, at least on some level, with Nazism. >

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Their strategy also includes stripping some naturalized Americans of their citizenship. To that end, the Trump/Vance administration issued guidance to field offices for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, telling them to “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 de-naturalization cases per month” in 2026. < Under current federal law, individuals can only be denaturalized if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in very few other limited circumstances. >

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The most ironic part of trying to define who is and who is not a “Heritage American” is that Americans have never been a homogenous group of people. Differences and diversity have defined this country from the start. While those in the colonies shared a British heritage, they didn’t have common histories or a shared cultural heritage. From the beginning, there were huge differences in their origin stories and very diverse histories, traditions, backgrounds, faiths, languages and socioeconomic disparities. Colonists identified far more as citizens of their own colonies than they did as “Americans.”

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This is the very reason the United States Constitution is such a remarkable document. Its architects had to find a way to build a fair and cohesive government despite these vast differences.

American exceptionalism at its finest!