10 June 26th - July 2nd, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | nation’s military and local and national law enforcement apparatus. Trump seems to be calling new plays from that playbook with each passing week. Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has deliberately stoked a wave of nativism that includes: pausing visas for international college students, reinstituting an expanded travel ban from mostly Muslim countries and sending an additional 3,000 active-duty troops to the nation’s largely tranquil southern border. The government is also using a 60-foot strip on the U.S. side of the border, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, to circumvent the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the use of the military for domestic law enforcement activities. As a result, migrants have been hit with “trespassing” charges, though whether those charges will stick remains an open question. Stephen Miller, Trump’s chrome- domed, white nationalist policy guru, has openly toyed with the idea of the president invoking the Insurrection Act, which would green-light using the military for local law enforcement purposes — a line that’s been crossed to some extent recently in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Miller repeatedly has belittled the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process and suggested that the administration may suspend habeas corpus, which the Constitution says can be done only “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Due process and habeas corpus are such bedrock guarantees against false imprison- ment that they predate the Constitution by centuries. Though the Trump crowd envi- sions abrogating these legal safeguards for undocumented residents, the Constitution refers to “persons” and “people” when it comes to these rights, not “citizens” and “non-citizens.” Without due process and writs of habeas corpus, a U.S. citizen could easily be subject to immigration enforce- ment and removal. Add to this slippery slope the Trump administration’s uncon- stitutional wet dream of revoking birth- right citizenship for millions of Americans — enshrined in the 14th Amendment — and suddenly the rights we hold so dear begin to seem as impermanent as Vice President J.D. Vance’s eyeliner. The Trump administration is already testing the boundaries. Tasked by Miller with arresting 3,000 undocumented persons per day, armed immigration agents have rounded up undocumented aliens in broad daylight in cities as diverse as Phoenix, Nashville and New York, zip- tying harmless men, women and children who showed up on time for immigration hearings. ICE has reportedly hauled people away from their workplaces, chased farmhands through the fields and detained high-school kids and pregnant moms. What’s more, they’ve regularly done so wearing masks and without identifying themselves, as if they were LARPing their “Sicario” fantasies. Then there’s the $6 million Trump paid to El Salvador dictator Nayib Bukele to accept and essentially permanently imprison nearly 300 people expelled from the U.S. on the flimsiest of accusations of gang affiliations. After numerous court rulings, the Trump administration finally returned one of those disappeared men, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to the U.S., only to immediately slap him with ginned-up charges of human smuggling. These abuses have sparked the national outrage that has engulfed the country and led to widespread protests, both planned and spontaneous, in recent months. More than a few have quoted the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” which is (for now) mounted in bronze inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” it famously reads. A more realistic version was penned by rocker Lou Reed. It was released as part of his cynical “New York” album in 1989, years before our current immigration scares. Even then, the song held a mirror up to America’s hateful face, shoveling the nation’s unvarnished, rapacious cynicism back at it: Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor I’ll piss on ‘em That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says Your poor huddled masses Let’s club ‘em to death And get it over with and just dump ‘em on the boulevard A Long Time Coming from p8 Border Patrol arrests a migrant who had jumped over the border fence near Nogales on February 12, 2019. (Steven Hsieh)
