Trump Cracks Down on Undocumented People as Corporate Harms Continue Unabated

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Jun 23, 2025

The last two weeks saw the Trump administration continue to ramp up racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, raids, and deportation quotas, balancing the whims of industry with the demands of fascist political appointees.

First, on June 12th, Trump suggested a policy shift to limit or stop targeting employees of farms, meatpacking plants, hotels and restaurants for arrest and deportation, reportedly after a phone call with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. Just three days later, June 15th, Trump reversed course, reiterating his calls for “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” reportedly in response to pushback from Deputy Chief of Staff (and white nationalist) Stephen Miller, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Miller and other officials have been calling for a daily quota of 3,000 immigration arrests, which would require more than tripling the current average of 750 immigraiton arrests per day for the start of Trump’s second term. There are also reports that ICE is close to running out of funding to carry out the current spate of raids and make these arrests. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” would increase ICE funding substantially in order to support these efforts, if passed by Congress.

Notably, defense contractors like GEO Group, who build facilities where ICE arrestees are sent and regularly abused and mistreated, stand to profit from this increased push. We’ve long raised alarms about the ties to GEO Group among Trump’s appointees, most notably Attorney General Pam Bondi, who lobbied for the corporation for years.

Posturing vs. Reality

Trump’s current push for immigration raids has sparked widespread mass protests, and have involved particularly egregious techniques—ordering ICE to abduct people who are leaving immigration court hearings even after having their cases dismissed; criminalizing more people’s immigration status; and targeting largely Democrat-run “sanctuary cities” for immigration raids which amount to kidnapping people from their communities. The administration’s rhetoric has also been particularly racist and dehumanizing, devaluing people’s lives based on their immigration status and promoting white nationalist beliefs and policies.

But it’s important to remember that brutal and widespread immigration enforcement efforts have long been a bipartisan American tradition. President Obama, dubbed “deporter-in-chief” by many immigrants rights activists, ramped up removals, the more active enforcement form of deportation, which involves a court order and criminal charges to discourage people from attempting to re-enter the US after being deported.

Indeed, the Obama Administration removed over a million more people than the Bush administration. As many have pointed out, despite his grandiose goals of carrying out the “largest Mass Deportation Program in History” and the Department of Homeland Security’s public exaggeration of how many arrests and deportations have occurred, Trump would have to significantly increase the rate of deportations under his administration so far to match Obama’s numbers. While the average number of daily ICE arrests between 2015 and 2024, from the tail end of the Obama administration through the first Trump and the Biden administrations, hovered around 350 arrests per day, the average number of ICE arrests over President Obama’s first term did not dip below 790 arrests per day, hitting a peak of 882 per day in 2011. As The Independent reported last week, “To break Obama’s [2013 record number of deportations], Trump would need to double the current number of people his administration is deporting, but it’s unclear if that could be done.”

That said, Trump’s focus on targeting people who are already complying with immigration enforcement, and sending ICE officers in plainclothes to abduct people from their communities, underscores the reckless, fear-mongering, and authoritarian bent of this current deportation push. The administration seems to want to demonstrate that it makes the rules, acting on its own whims, rather than taking the Obama approach of making and enacting policies that have cruelty baked into a relatively orderly system.

White Nationalism Wins Out Over Corporate Greed (Rhetorically, Anyway)

The administration’s flip-flopping around pausing and then un-pausing deportation raids due to the concerns of certain industries also highlights the internal tensions afflicting an administration with fascist aims that also sustains itself on corrupt dealings with corporations. Trump was faced with a choice—should he prioritize ruthlessly targeting any and all undocumented people to serve the narratives of his white nationalist advisors, or make an exception so that farms and factories could continue to exploit, mistreat, and underpay undocumented employees to turn a larger profit?

This time, judging by his public proclamations at least, Trump seems to have chosen the former, though one can imagine there might be differences in enforcement priorities behind the scenes to keep industry voices happy—time will tell.

Interestingly, the back-and-forth led Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, to issue a threat to corporations who might prioritize their profits over the Trump administration’s deportation program. Last week, she said in a statement, “there will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE's efforts."

It’s an uncommon framing from an administration that has actively dismantled the DOJ’s ability to enforce the law against corporations, and has signaled clearly that white collar crime enforcement will be even more lenient under Trump than it was under Biden-era Attorney General Merrick Garland’s egregiously lax approach. (The DOJ even published a flowchart demonstrating how corporations can avoid prosecution through “self-disclosure” after breaking the law.)

Clearly, the Trump administration only cares about enforcing the law against corporations (or at least, threatening to) when they’re challenging his administration’s fascist political priorities.

Real vs. Imagined Threats

Ironically, corporations present astronomically more risk to people in the US and worldwide, as compared to the individuals being scapegoated as “criminals,” “rapists,” and “murderers” by a racist administration. Corporate crime (and legal but incredibly harmful corporate conduct) claims far more lives every year than individual crime and harmful acts.

Professor Donald Braman spoke to this trend in a recent interview for Corporate Crime Reporter, noting that the annual death toll from corporate crime and misconduct (and from perfectly legal but abhorrent corporate behavior) far outpaces the death toll from homicides committed by individuals. Totaling up the annual death tolls from the opioid epidemic, particulate pollution from fossil fuels, and tobacco deaths, the comparison is roughly 20,000 to 30,000 deaths from “violent crime” by individuals, vs. 930,000 deaths resulting from corporate harm.

Beyond comparing individual and corporate homicide rates, we can note that wage theft vastly outpaces individual property crime in the US. As the Economic Opportunity Institute has reported,

“Each year, employers steal a whopping $15 billion annually from workers across the country. Property loss through stolen wages surpasses property loss from criminal offenses by a landslide, which totals around $500 million yearly. Put another way: The total value of property stolen through robberies, burglaries, and carjacking is not even 4% of what employers steal from workers each year.”

What’s more, all the statistics tell us that undocumented people have a higher rate of compliance with the law than US citizens. So, even those concerned about being harmed by individuals should be more concerned about citizens than undocumented people.

These arguments shouldn’t have to be made, because undocumented people shouldn’t be guilty until proven innocent in the public imagination. This work is only necessary in order to unwind the web of racist and white nationalist lies that all US presidential administrations tell about immigration, which the Trump administration has ramped up rhetorically in recent weeks.

Those opposing the Trump administration’s targeting and scapegoating of immigrants should make sure to redirect fear and anger toward its proper target—the billionaire executives and corporations exploiting and killing all of us to serve their greed.

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