It’s a toxic cycle: The public rightfully disapproves of the atrocities of anti-immigrant policies; in response, liberals roll out unimaginative plans hinged on outdated narratives; and finally, in the vacuum created by the lack of any tangible, pro-immigrant vision, the right recaptures the public’s attention with fear mongering and a sensationalist focus on crime and the border.
To break this cycle, we must imagine a pro-immigrant future in which our communities, not politicians and pundits, get to define safety.
We can start with recognizing that the modern-day legal basis for the criminalization of immigrants largely rests on a pair of anti-immigrant bills signed into law by Bill Clinton 30 years ago. Building upon the U.S. legacy of racialized immigration control, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) further entrenched mass incarceration and laid the blueprint for the detention and deportation machine we have today.
These laws drastically expanded the government’s ability to automatically detain and deport people without due process and without consideration for their current circumstances.
IIRIRA, in particular, dramatically expanded who can be deported, made detention mandatory, created fast-track deportations, and stripped immigration judges of much of their discretion.
The numbers show just how much these laws have supercharged the mass incarceration and deportation of immigrants over the past 30 years. In 1995, 50,924 people were deported and fewer than 7,500 people were held in immigration detention. By 1997, the number of people deported more than doubled to 114,432, and by 2001, 20,500 people were held in detention. Thirty years later, the devastation has only climbed higher, with nearly 330,000 people deported in 2025 and roughly 70,000 people in ICE detention today.
Once mandatory detention created the demand, private prison companies cashed in and played an integral role in building what is now the world’s largest immigration detention system. Today, approximately 90 percent of people detained in ICE custody are held in prisons owned or operated by private corporations.
The bills also provided the blueprint to turbocharge detention and deportation by further entangling the criminal legal and immigration systems. In what is known as the prison-to-ICE pipeline, immigrants are subject to double punishment; many face the loss of their freedom twice for the same conviction. Because ICE can arrest people as they’re released from prison (despite that individual serving their time and completing their sentence) many are re-incarcerated on the very day they would otherwise go home to their families.
This double standard disproportionately punishes Black people and reinforces systemic racism by propagating existing racial disparities — like those found in conviction rates and policing practices like profiling — into the immigration system.
Today, the ’96 laws continue to be key tools the Trump administration uses to carry out its immigration agenda. As the administration’s enforcement net widens to target and arrest political dissidents, families, and even U.S. citizens, we must recognize the role criminalizing narratives have played in leading us to our present slide into authoritarianism. Criminalization is the primary justification used to make these cruel policies all the more entrenched and widespread.
Here lies the danger of not fighting the root of the problem: When we concede fundamental rights like due process for some, we begin to concede those rights for all. When we fight only for those immigrants who have not yet been labeled “criminal,” we’ll find ourselves unprepared when authoritarians inevitably stamp that label on more and more of us.
Enough with the exclusions.
All people are worthy of human dignity, due process, and the right to live in safety, no matter where we were born. Those who have been previously ensnared in the U.S. carceral system — including those who have committed harm in their past — are not disposable. They’re people, often with full lives established in the U.S., who are worthy of redemption and second chances like anyone else.
To build toward this vision, we must rally around bold proposals that affirm these values. We must reject the toxic “good immigrant/bad immigrant” narrative once and for all and champion a vision in which freedom, human rights, and basic human dignity are the floor for our demands, not merely concessions or carveouts for some.
Patriot act sealed the deal