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OBERLIN, Ohio — With a tweet promising to deport “millions” of undocumented immigrants, following on an earlier threat to slap tariffs on all Mexican trade “until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied,” President Donald Trump has signaled that one issue will dominate all others in his re-election campaign.

It hardly matters that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lacks the personnel to carry out massive deportations or that senior administration officials opposed shoehorning immigration concerns directly into trade policy.

Ever since candidate Trump entered the 2016 presidential race by insulting Mexicans, he has made it clear that he would stake his political future on a xenophobic hostility to nonwhite, nonwealthy immigrants. And he will allow neither Iranian challenges nor Chinese trade tensions to block his expressway to his base.

Trump’s cruel threats to immigrants living in the country without proper documentation, and his immoral disregard of refugees and Central Americans seeking legal asylum here, would make the Statue of Liberty weep. Even more, his dismissal of all immigrants, legal and undocumented alike, who lack the assets, privileges, and background his in-laws readily possess, was underlined in a set of policies addressing legal immigration unveiled in May.

In fact, over the past two years, the administration has already introduced many of the radical measures contained in these “new” proposals. At their heart, the measures seek to disrupt well-established patterns of family-based immigration while demonizing millions of poorer, largely nonwhite, immigrants legally residing in the country.

This past March, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced the planned closure of nearly two dozen field offices around the world, offices that process family reunification visas and foreign adoptions. Six months later, USCIS published rules changes designed to classify more applicants as ineligible for entry, based on income, assets, family size, education and skill levels, further undermining the family-based immigration system. While the proposed changes are still pending, research already indicates a substantial increase in visa denials based on “ineligibility” findings.

New rules governing legal noncitizens’ access to public funds (“public charge” rules) will undermine immigrants’ ability to stabilize their lives once here. These proposed but still unimplemented changes already have produced negative health outcomes for immigrant parents and children. Fear that the receipt of any public support will negatively impact an immigrant’s future ability to obtain permanent legal residence or to naturalize has led thousands to withdraw from legally permissible aid. Agencies in at least 18 states, for example, report enrollment drops of up to 20 percent in the federal nutrition program aimed at pregnant women and children, a drop officials attribute to immigrants’ fears about the impact of proposed changes.

Further, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently issued new guidance prohibiting mixed-status families from public housing programs. Currently, HUD allows families to live together in subsidized housing even if one family member lacks documentation, so long as the housing subsidy excludes ineligible persons. Under these new rules, those barred from housing would be evicted, shattering families and threatening millions of eligible households with the loss of housing assistance.

Nor do the attacks on immigrants stop should one become a citizen. Last June, USCIS formed a task force to denaturalize and deport individuals who “falsified” their citizenship applications. Removing citizenship is an extremely rare process employed only for the most egregious violations. By threatening to reopen citizenship cases based on simple errors, the administration signals to 20 million naturalized U.S. citizens that they will always be at risk, always be second-class citizens.

In his most recent decision to blame Mexico for failing to solve America’s immigration crisis, Trump again shifted responsibility for much that ails our country onto the backs of immigrants.

“Gang members, smugglers, human traffickers, and illegal drugs and narcotics of all kinds are pouring across the Southern Border and directly into our communities,” he charged, suggesting darkly that they bear responsibility for our struggling schools and inadequate health care.

But his portrayal of immigrants is as uninformed as it is vile. Immigrant heads of household are already becoming homeowners at a faster rate than their U.S.-born equivalents; they receive less income from public programs than U.S.-born heads of households; their children are more likely to go to college than all Americans; and they are less likely to commit crimes or be incarcerated than the U.S.-born population. Immigrants continue to get the job done.

Trump’s new threat to round up millions of undocumented immigrants – now on hold but always intended to intensify the fear that saturates their communities – is the latest proof that he will again anchor his presidential campaign in anti-immigrant hatred.

Steven S. Volk is Emeritus Professor of History, Oberlin College, and co-director of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Center for Teaching and Learning.

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