Trump Administration Admits It Believes all Immigrant Workers are ‘Criminals’ Even If They Have No Criminal Record

Donald Trump, who last year became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes, spent the entire 2024 campaign falsely equating all immigrants as “criminals” in order to minimize the political fallout of his unpopular “bloody” mass deportation agenda. Following his win in November, some elected Republicans, including Florida’s Marco Rubio and María Elvira Salazar, frantically tried to tone down those threats, insisting that he really would be focused on “criminals,” not hardworking contributors to our communities. Believe us, they insisted. But not so, the administration they were trying to shield has since clarified.

During a Jan. 28 interaction with a reporter, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the Trump administration views all undocumented immigrants as lawbreakers, falsely describing individuals swept up in recent ICE actions as “criminals” even though data from just one day of enforcement actions revealed hundreds of those detained have no criminal record at all. Click below to watch the back-and-forth.

"Of the 3,500 arrests that ICE has made so far since President Trump came back into office, can you just tell us the numbers?” a reporter asked Levitt at the briefing. “How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally?”

"All of them,” Levitt falsely claimed, “because they illegally broke our nation's laws, and therefore, they are criminals as far as this administration goes. I know the last administration didn't see it that way, so it's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that's exactly what they are." For the record, actual policy experts have made clear that simply being undocumented in the U.S. ”is not, standing alone, a crime.” What is a crime, however, is falsifying business records in order to conceal an illegal scheme to corrupt an election. 

When the reporter followed-up by asking if all 3,500 individuals detained by the administration had a criminal record – which, again, they did not, according to administration figures – a smiling Levitt again disparaged them all as criminals. "If they broke our nation's laws, yes, they are criminals, yes," she said. The facts: “ICE has arrested scores of migrants in the U.S. who have no criminal records,” NPR said in its Feb. 5 headline. In a Feb. 7 report, ProPublica said that less than half of the roughly 8,200 individuals detained from Inauguration Day through Feb. 2 actually have a criminal record. 

Those labeled a public safety threat by a smiling Levitt include the neighbors and community members so many of us have interacted with for years, even decades. Her definition of a “criminal” also includes a U.S. military veteran who served his country and was swept up in an indiscriminate raid targeting an establishment in Newark, New Jersey. “He is Puerto Rican and the manager of our warehouse,” his boss said. “It looked to me like they were specifically going after certain kinds of people — not every kind, because they did not ask me for documentation for my American workers, Portuguese workers, or white workers.” Newark Mayor Ras Baraka added the veteran “suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned.”

But this indiscriminate sweep was no error by immigration officials. In yet another incident targeting U.S. citizens of Puerto Rican descent last month, a Milwaukee woman “was grabbed by ICE after speaking Spanish, along with her mother-in-law and a child,” Adrian Carasquillo reported at The Bulwark. “They were driven to a facility but were not ultimately taken inside. Instead, they were released when she showed documentation and said they were from Puerto Rico. The agents, according to the report, responded simply with ‘Sorry.’” It’s completely despicable though unshocking behavior. Remember the Trump campaign’s notorious Madison Square Garden rally where a vetted speaker denigrated Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”?

Levitt’s claims and the first weeks of the second Trump administration have made perfectly clear that the endless stream of ugly lies directed at immigrant communities throughout the 2024 campaign is now going to be driving official immigration policy. When they claim “criminals,” they’re really talking about our nation’s educators, they’re talking about the folks who will be helping rebuild Los Angeles, they’re talking about the essential workers who toil in the fields year round to feed us and help keep Social Security and Medicare alive for Americans through their tax contributions. Millions of these community members have lived and worked here for years and our nation depends on them, whether Trump wants to admit it or not. 

In fact, even as Trump has described immigrants as an existential threat to our nation, he’s hired some to clean and care for his homes, feed and cater to his resort guests, and help build his empire, quite literally. Guess they aren’t that dangerous?

“What we’ve warned about has been proven true,” Mario Carrillo, Campaigns Manager for America's Voice, wrote at Bluesky. “Trump’s mass deportations have never been about going after ‘criminals’ when all undocumented folks are criminals in their eyes and subject to deportation. Just cruel, callous, and will lead to so much suffering for not only immigrants, but our country.”