From Eisenhower’s brutal Operation Wetback to Obama’s record-breaking deportations earning him the grim title "Deporter-in-Chief" the United States has waged a relentless campaign against undocumented communities, regardless of which party held power. This is not a partisan issue, but a systemic one: a machine of exclusion built on stolen land, sustained by myths of legality and borders that never existed for colonizers.
The 1950s saw mass deportations under Eisenhower, where racial profiling and forced removals terrorized Mexican communities. Decades later, Clinton escalated detention and border militarization with policies like Operation Gatekeeper, funneling migrants into deadly desert crossings. Bush normalized ICE raids in workplaces and homes, while Obama perfected the machinery, deporting more people than any president before him, 3 million lives uprooted under a veneer of progressive rhetoric.
Trump’s overt cruelty family separations, child cages, and mass ICE sweeps was not an aberration, but the logical endpoint of this decades-long project. Biden, despite campaign promises, has maintained Title 42 expulsions and expanded detention camps, proving again that enforcement is bipartisan. The common thread? A nation built on displacement can not tolerate the presence of those it seeks to erase.
"No one is illegal on stolen land" is not a slogan, but a historical fact. Borders are colonial inventions, and the very laws used to criminalize migrants today were drafted by the descendants of settlers who crossed oceans without papers. ICE vests and detention quotas are just the latest tools in a centuries-old playbook of displacement.
As Howard Zinn reminded us:
"The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away. For if they can remember, they can resist."
This is not about presidents it’s about power. Power has always feared the people it can not make disappear.
Project 2025, the far-right blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and Trump allies, seeks to effectively erase modern America and resurrect a pre-Civil War era,where federal power was gutted, white supremacy was codified, and marginalized communities had no legal recourse. This dystopian vision includes mass deportations, the dismantling of civil rights protections, and the weaponization of every federal agency against immigrants and dissenters.
Trump a convicted criminal—married to an immigrant (Melania, who entered on an "Einstein visa" after likely violating its terms), now leads a movement to expel others like her. His administration stripped protections from 300,000+ Haitians and Venezuelans (many in Florida, where they form the backbone of essential industries), while his allies openly build "Alligator Alcatraz" a confirmed, militarized detention camp in the Everglades designed to warehouse migrants in sweltering, inhumane conditions.