TIME Magazine Asia March 19, 2018 Back Issue

RIPPED APART: THE COST OF AMERICA'S IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN
In 2017, President Trump deported more than double the number of noncriminals than Obama had the previous year. The detainees prioritized by Trump’s approach included community leaders, doting parents and children: a ten year-old girl with cerebral palsy in San Antonio; a grandmother described as the “backbone” of a Navy veteran’s family; a father of two in Detroit who had lived in the U.S. since he was ten years old. A major consequence of this new policy has been an explosion of fear among immigrant communities, which are reacting not so much to the spiking number of arrests but to the apparent randomness of the roundups. Luis Zayas, dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, cites instances of ICE agents arresting people who had just filed paperwork for a green card.