On immigration policy, Donald Trump isn’t as radically different from Barack Obama and Joe Biden as his inflammatory rhetoric suggests. Each has built upon his predecessor’s efforts to make border militarization and mass deportations the norm.
Imagine this: You’re sitting in your living room when an earthquake hits. You snatch up your children and dash into the street. Seconds later, the building collapses. You’re alive but are now homeless. The kids’ school is also destroyed, as well as your jobsite. Reconstruction in Port-au-Prince will take years, if it ever happens at all. The only option is to leave.
You cram your children into a boat with dozens of other Haitians and set off toward Florida. But before you see land, the US Coast Guard catches the boat. Somewhere in the detention process, you’re blindfolded. When it’s taken off again, you are not in the United States but Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Such a scenario could become commonplace. Last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order to indefinitely detain as many as 30,000 migrants in Guantanamo. It is a horrifying prospect, a brazen and shameless attempt to symbolically conflate the act of migration with terrorism.
But you’d be wrong to think this is merely one more nightmare on the fascist horizon. In reality, this scenario has already played out before under both George Bush Sr and Bill Clinton, who each detained tens of thousands of Haitian migrants at the military base in the 1990s. During his presidency, Joe Biden also used Guantanamo to imprison migrants, granting a private prison company a $163 million contract to run the facility, even though as vice president he and Barack Obama promised to close the detention and torture facility.
While uproar over Trump’s executive order is certainly warranted, if one is able to set his inflammatory rhetoric aside and instead focus on the material evolution of US immigration policy, it soon becomes clear that Obama, Trump, and Biden aren’t as radically distinct from one another as it might first appear. In fact, when it comes to border militarization and deportations, they’ve successively built upon one another’s work.
A Bipartisan Effort
Border militarization is a twofold process. The first part is obvious. It’s the construction of walls and the expansion of immigration patrols. It’s the guns and zip ties, the heat-seeking drones and attack dogs sicced on asylum seekers.
This more visible militarization has long been the overt terrain of Republicans, as well as what receives the most media attention. “Build the Wall” comes to mind immediately, of course. (Though it should be noted that Kamala Harris, in her campaign’s disastrous rightward lurch, communicated to voters that she would build the wall better than Trump.)
The second part is less visible. It’s the legal sphere, an ever-shifting immaterial terrain that migrants must navigate for years, often over the course of two or more presidential terms and with less and less success. Immigration law has traditionally been the site where — though Trump’s boisterous executive orders might receive more attention — liberals frequently do the most damage.
This extends back to the root of modern border militarization in the United States with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was signed by the Republican president Chester A. Arthur in 1882, back when Republicans were the country’s liberal party, not a conservative one. The goal was exactly what it sounds like: to entirely halt Chinese immigration for decades, well into the twentieth century.
After World War I, outright exclusion acts fell out of favor in an increasingly diverse United States, but they were replaced by immigration quotas. Quotas did not cease this exclusionary logic — they just better concealed it. Instead of outright banning a nationality or ethnicity deemed undesirable, a tiny fraction was permitted entry in a kind of legal sleight of hand. Accepting a few obscured the denial of the many.
Today this logic still animates US asylum policy. By the end of Biden’s term, asylum acceptance rates had dropped to 35.8 percent, which means that, in practice, the asylum system denied two people for each one it let in. Contrary to what liberals profess, asylum’s primary function is not to save migrants but to continually cast them aside, all the while providing an ideological cover of tolerance and acceptance.
Similar tactics are used to obscure the bipartisan effort to dismantle refugee resettlement. In 2021, for instance, the Biden administration deceptively committed to accepting “up to” 62,500 refugees; but it only admitted 11,454, the lowest of any president in history, including Trump. For 2022, that number was bumped to 125,000, a purely imaginary figure that was, at the time, cited by liberal media as an example of Biden’s generous policies toward Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion; but only 25,519 refugees were actually admitted.
This feigned championing of immigrants in public while in reality putting them in the blender is a Democratic strategy first perfected by Barack Obama, who deported over three million people, the most of any president to date.
As California attorney John Flanagan, who has been working in immigration law since the Obama administration, told me, “When it comes to immigration, Republicans smash and grab, while Democrats smooth and soothe,” meaning that both work in concert with one another, each obscuring the consequences of the other’s actions.
“It might seem like Republicans are the only ones breaking the system,” said Flanagan, “but the trend with the last two Democratic presidents is to maybe reverse a few of the most egregious Republican immigration policies while refusing to address the overall harmful system in a substantive way.”
In fact, Democrats tend to build upon it. Though running on a pro-immigrant platform in 2008, Obama expanded a Bush-era initiative called Secure Communities, which linked federal and state fingerprint data to identify migrants who had previously been caught crossing the border. This technology was frequently abused by law enforcement.
“In 2016, I was interning at a public defender’s office in San Francisco,” said Flanagan, “when a man whose car was stolen went to the police station, and the police were like, ‘Oh, you have a warrant.’ By ‘warrant’ they meant he had a faulty deportation order, and they called ICE to pick him up. It was dystopian. And it was made possible by Obama’s efforts to entwine federal and local fingerprint databases.”
During the same time, the Obama administration also pumped out a litany of anti–Central American migrant policies as gang violence and governmental instability in the region reached a breaking point. Worried that millions of Central American migrants potentially had a legitimate asylum claim, Obama nixed gang persecution as a valid qualification. Under the new restrictions, easily tens of thousands of Central American migrants who would have received asylum pre-Obama have now been deported instead, many of them to their deaths.
In contrast to Obama, Trump deported around 140,000 people per year during his first term, approximately just a third of his predecessor’s yearly count. But what Trump lacked in deportations, he made up for by other means. By drastically expanding a policy known as “Remain in Mexico” — which likely evolved from a little-known Obama administration invention originally dubbed the “Migration and Refugee Protection Protocols” — Trump illegally forced those asking for asylum to live indefinitely in Mexico with no social or economic assistance while awaiting their asylum case.
In his first year as president, Biden was responsible for approximately 59,000 deportations, significantly fewer than either Obama or Trump. However, this was due largely to his continuation of Title 42, a Trump-era COVID-19 protocol that turned away migrants at the border more than a million times. If we were to include those rejections in Biden’s official deportation tally, it would likely be as high as Trump’s, if not Obama’s.
One more statistic: if we trace funding for US Border Patrol from 2009 to 2024, we see a steady and sharp increase across all three presidents, starting with Obama (the budget was $2.66 billion in his first presidential year and 3.8 billion by his last) and culminating in Biden’s highest-ever budget of $7.3 billion in 2024.
The point is that, when we delve into the data on the border and deportations, Obama, Trump, and Biden appear interchangeable, carrying out the same xenophobic, anti-immigrant politics that have come to define twenty-first century America. Despite their distinctive rhetoric on immigration, they do not act in opposition. They have each conspired to produce the world’s largest deportation regime.
As Flanagan bluntly put it, “Democrats seem addicted to loading the guns for Trump to shoot us with.”
Return of the Repressed
Given the overwhelming evidence that border militarization is a bipartisan affair, it must be asked why so many Americans continue to mistakenly believe Democrats offer a positive alternative to Trumpism on the issue.
One factor is certainly rhetoric. Trump’s unabashed racism shocks because it is designed to shock, whereas, up until recently at least, the Obama-style approach was to proclaim Immigrants Are Welcome Here while a multiracial ICE raid quietly deported them just offstage. It’s easy to understand how many would be confused by this, at least for a time.
This doesn’t mean rhetoric isn’t important, of course. It has real-world effects, forcing immigrants to live in fear and emboldening anti-immigrant vigilantes. It also contributes to an overall rightward shift in immigration policy on both sides of the aisle, framing political actions that were once seen as commonplace (such as Ronald Reagan, of all people, granting blanket amnesty to approximately three million undocumented immigrants in 1987) as the impractical idealism of an out-of-touch left.
But all the more reason, then, to question this persistent faith that Democrats are somehow just naturally better than Republicans on immigration, despite all evidence to the contrary. Something deeper is at play.
Immigration has arisen as a hot-button issue, a burning ember in the national consciousness, specifically because it betrays two central contradictions that bedevil the Democratic Party and its brand of liberal politics. First, that liberal Democrats not only need Trumpist discourse but desire it, because such open statements of xenophobia provide the conditions to “resist” on the purely rhetorical level. This inherently reactive position allows them to equate saying with doing. Each repulsive utterance from Trump presents the opportunity for the Democrats to counter with some empty moral platitude.
This discursive counter obscures the second condition, which is that liberals, like conservatives, also want to curtail immigration, because immigrants are the continuous reminders of the failures of liberalism, from Obama’s embrace of drone warfare in the Middle East, which killed approximately 3,797 people directly and paved the way for Israel’s genocidal model in Gaza; to Clinton’s disastrous passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which looted Mexico’s economy, causing the much of the Mexican mass migration we are familiar with today; to Jimmy Carter’s support of right-wing murder squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in the name of fighting communism, leading to persistent poverty and political instability in the region.
Immigration is the reappearance of these liberal failures in a new form, the form of the migrant, a literal embodiment of the return of what liberals so fervently wish to repress. This has become more apparent than ever as some “Resistance” Democrats have doubled down on beating Trump at his own game. Take Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy:
In the first week, Trump removed 7,300 people. On average, Biden was removing 15,000 a week.
Under Biden 72% of ICE arrests were criminals. Under Trump it’s dropped to around 50%.
Trump is removing less people and less criminals. These guys are terrible at everything. https://t.co/rytt6ONTTm
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 30, 2025
Speaking of being terrible, Murphy was an architect of the recent bipartisan immigration reform bill that attempted to win centrist voters away from Trump during the presidential election by adopting many of his border militarization propositions. After the bill was enthusiastically embraced by Harris’s sinking ship, Trump immediately rejected it, leaving Harris (and Murphy) looking even more impotent and unprincipled than before.
But this kind of Democratic failure is par for the course, and it ultimately feeds into greater collaboration with Republicans on border militarization.
A little-known example of this collaboration is a 2019 Supreme Court case, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, in which a detained Sri Lankan migrant sued for habeas corpus — that is, his right to not be imprisoned indefinitely during immigration proceedings. Liberal justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg among them — ultimately sided with their conservative counterparts to rule that migrants like Thuraissigiam did not qualify for habeas corpus, citing the fact that detainees at Guantanamo Bay were not entitled to it either.
This bipartisan decision set the legal precedent that may very well allow Trump to move forward with his new executive order, dooming tens of thousands of migrants to rot day after day in Guantanamo.