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The first weeks of the second Trump administration have been marked by a series of staggeringly regressive carceral actions, mirroring many of the proposed policies under the Project 2025 agenda. Donald Trump has signed executive orders to relaunch federal prison contracts with private companies, end the federal moratorium on the death penalty (again), and enforce cruel prison conditions for people whose death sentences were commuted by Joe Biden just before he left office.
As predicted by his campaign rhetoric, the brunt of his policies have targeted immigrants, with directives for increased criminal prosecutions, detention capacities, and military resources to support what he promised will be “the largest deportation program in American history.” As Trump falsely claims the people targeted are “violent criminals” threatening the safety of innocent Americans, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have surpassed 1,000 on some days, with little transparency over who is being arrested and why.
Yet, for all his “tough-on-crime” fearmongering, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that on his first day in office, Trump also blanket-pardoned nearly 1,600 people who faced serious felony charges and/or convictions related to the January 6, 2021, insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, including those who perpetrated violence against Capitol police officers trying to keep the peace. In recent weeks, more damning details have emerged about the pardoned rioters: several have beencharged for other crimes, including domestic violence and rape.
Pardoning political loyalists, whose convicted conduct would otherwise fall on the extreme end of the category of so-called “violent criminals” he aims to punish, makes clear that the Trump administration is only performatively concerned with public safety. Trump’s true priority is to punish political enemies and marginalized people and communities, disproportionately Black and brown, and remove them from American public life. At its core, Trump and his party’s politics are one of disposability. They believe that in order to secure the flourishing of a select few (namely, right-wing corporate interests and white supremacist allies), others must be eliminated — deported, detained, criminalized, or even killed.
To put it bluntly, Trump is now violently pursuing, rounding up, and disappearing immigrants, the majority not charged with any criminal offense, while right-wing loyalists convicted and sentenced for violent felonies against the country are released and celebrated.
In short, the Trump criminal justice agenda is merely a front. Considering the Republican Party’s near-absolute devotion to “law and order” politics, it is darkly ironic how much of Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown is flagrantly unconstitutional, most notably his attempt to unilaterally amend the Constitution by executive order to end birthright citizenship and his recent, horrifying suggestion that incarcerated Americans may be transported to what would effectively be a penal colony in El Salvador. Trump also suggested that he plans to expand Guantánamo Bay — which the Center for Constitutional Rights describes as a “global symbol and site of lawlessness, torture, and racism” — into a migrant detention center for 30,000 people.
