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That’s true. I just think that was the explicit intention from the beginning.
They started with criminals, at least nominally, mostly because it’s the most obvious place to start but not because they wanted people to think it would stop there.
Yes, they started with "criminals", and now some of the rhetoric slips into membership/legitimacy language. That's when policy enforcement turns into category enforcement, and history has receipts on how that ends.
I voted for this
I support this message
You also omitted operation wetback under Eisenhower
Good catch. Operation Wetback is a real precedent, and it belongs in this history. Appreciate the clarity on “I voted for this”; my point isn’t that enforcement is illegitimate, it’s that when it scales and starts targeting categories, safeguards matter. I left Wetback out of the top 3 because I was ranking by breadth/duration/institutionalization, but it’s definitely in the next tier of “mass removal” precedents worth including.
I think we’re sleepwalking into mass deportation, not by accident, but by building capacity and shifting from “violent criminals” and “securing the border” toward a system designed to deport people at scale.
The public story is “border security.” But the numbers we have suggest the detention surge is being driven mostly by people with no criminal convictions.
If that’s what’s happening, then the question isn’t motive. It’s trajectory: once you build a system that can remove massive numbers of people, the target list tends to expand.