Washington, DC — The following is a statement from Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, reflecting on 100 Days of the Trump administration, followed by a roundup of relevant America’s Voice content on the first 100 Days and beyond.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice: 

“Cruel, costly, and chaotic best describe the first 100 days of the Trump administration. From abducting American children to undermining the rule of law to tanking our economy, the lengths this Administration will go to demonize immigrants have no limits.  Yet, the more Americans see and experience the mass deportation agenda, the less they like it– as evidenced by recent polls that show that a growing majority of Americans disapprove of Trump on immigration and beyond.

Further, Trump’s minions seem intent on squandering one of America’s greatest comparative advantages as a nation by making it harder for people from around the world to imagine themselves studying, succeeding and creating businesses here in America. Our long-term fight is not just to fix a broken immigration system in a manner that reflects our interests and values, but to preserve a vision of America as the beacon of safety, liberty and freedom it has represented for so many, for so long.”

America’s Voice Content: 100 Days of Trump 

• Read the America’s Voice memo, “100 Days Roundup: The Current Polling and Politics of Immigration,” synthesizing the findings from polls over the first 100 days of this administration and highlighting four key takeaways and lessons for those seeking to offer opposition and an alternative to the Trump administration on immigration.
• Read the America’s Voice fact sheet, “High Costs, No Benefits: 100 Days of Trump’s Immigration Agenda,” detailing costs to Americans’ health and retirement security; costs to the U.S. economy; costs to Americans’ safety and security; and costs to Americans’ values and freedoms.
• Check out the America’s Voice website repository on 100 Days of Trump, featuring a digital toolkit, social media graphics, blogs, memos and fact sheets: https://americasvoice.org/high-costs-no-benefits/ 

Washington, DC — In this week’s installment of America’s Voice “This is What Mass Deportation Looks Like,” series, we spotlight how the Trump administration’s mass deportations are targeting affecting American children – and that Congress is proposing a budget that would turbocharge the deportation cruelty and chaos Americans are recoiling from by boosting the ICE enforcement budget tenfold (while slashing essential government programs such as Medicaid and SNAP). Among the horrific stories in the news include:

• The Washington Post reports, “Three U.S. citizen children from two different families were deported with their mothers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the early hours of Friday morning. One of them is a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was deported without medication or the ability to contact their doctors, the family’s lawyer said.”
• The Guardian reports, “Two women who were deported to Honduras alongside their US citizen children were held in “complete isolation” and denied any opportunity to coordinate the care and custody of their children before being put on a flight, according to one of the lawyers representing them.”
• HuffPost reports that “Dem Says ICE Took Florida Mom From Baby, Unlawfully Deported Her To Cuba”,  noting, “The baby was still breastfeeding at the time your Administration tore them apart, and the baby’s ongoing health issues require her mother’s return to the U.S. as soon as possible.”
• KFOR News in Oklahoma City reports, “A woman says her family’s fresh start in Oklahoma turned into a nightmare after federal immigration agents raided their home, taking their phones, laptops, and life savings – even though they were not the suspects the agents were looking for … ‘We just moved here from Maryland,’ [the mother said]. ‘We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.’”

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“Deporting American kids and leaving American babies without their mothers is not okay, not by a long shot. And in response to the outcry, this administration is trying to spin, lie and justify the unjustifiable. Americans are recoiling in horror, knowing we’re better than this cruelty and chaos. Now, through the pending budget, Trump and his allies in Congress want to turbocharge more enforcement against long-settled residents and American families. Shame on them.”

Washington, DC — As America’s Voice has been detailing in the ongoing, “At What Cost?” campaign, the Trump administration’s obsession with anti-immigrant policies comes at a high cost for the American people. In a new fact sheet released today, we detail four categories of the high costs to the American people: high costs to Americans health and retirement security; high costs to the economy; high costs to Americans’ safety and security and high costs to our values and freedoms. The fact sheet, “High Costs, No Benefits: 100 Days Of Trump’s Immigration Agenda,” is detailed below.

Yet the cruelty, costs, and staggeringly misplaced priorities detailed in the new fact sheet about the first 100 Days are also captured in a development from just these past few days. This weekend, the Washington Post filed, “Three U.S. citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from Louisiana,” which opened with the following sentence:

“Three U.S. citizen children from two different families were deported with their mothers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the early hours of Friday morning. One of them is a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was deported without medication or the ability to contact their doctors, the family’s lawyer said.”

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“Let this sink in: our government is deporting American kids, including kids with cancer, and is now trying to defend and excuse their choices on national television. Their actions embody the cruelty, chaotic, and harmful nature of their agenda the past 100 Days, and what they want from the next 100 Weeks and beyond, and exemplifies how Americans are paying a high price for the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant and mass deportation obsessions.

As Americans see the cruelty and overreach in action, a growing majority is expressing disapproval, connecting it to broader concerns regarding the rule of law, the tanking economy, cuts to Americans’ healthcare, and overall chaos and extremism. We’re better than this.”

Among the categories detailed in the new fact sheet, “High Costs, No Benefits: 100 Days Of Trump’s Immigration Agenda,” include:

• Costs to Americans’ Health and Retirement Security: to pay for a ramped up ICE and immigration enforcement budget, Congress is ready to slash $880 billion from Medicaid and $230 million from food assistance that U.S. citizens rely on.
• Costs to the U.S. Economy: If President Trump proceeds with mass deportation removing millions of construction, hospitality and agriculture workers, it could reduce the GDP by an estimated $1.7 trillion.
• Costs to Americans’ Safety and Security: The Trump administration has diverted DHS and FBI resources away from investigating violent criminals and fentanyl traffickers to focus on detaining and deporting long-settled, taxpaying and productive members of our communities who have been in the U.S. for decades.
• Costs to Americans’ Values and Freedoms: from detaining and arresting U.S. citizens to ignoring due process and the separation of powers, this administration’s immigration agenda is taking aim at core democratic principles for all Americans.

America’s Voice Content: 100 Days of Trump 

• Read through the new America’s Voice fact sheet, “High Costs, No Benefits: 100 Days of Trump’s Immigration Agenda” 
• Read the America’s Voice memo, “100 Days Roundup: The Current Polling and Politics of Immigration” 
• Check out the America’s Voice website repository on 100 Days of Trump, featuring a digital toolkit, social media graphics, blogs, memos and fact sheets: https://americasvoice.org/high-costs-no-benefits/ 

Be on the lookout for more America’s Voice content assessing the first 100 days of the Trump administration. 

Washington, DC — In ongoing installments of America’s Voice “This is What Mass Deportation Looks Like,” we highlight the Trump administration’s efforts to turbocharge mass deportations and we connect the dots between various developments that, together, capture the scale of Trump’s ambitions and the larger resultant damage on all Americans.

In recent days, we’ve seen how the Trump White House and Members of Congress are seeking to dramatically scale up funding for immigration enforcement – at the cost of Americans’ health and economic security — and are ensnaring U.S. citizens in the process. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports, “Justice Dept. Agrees to Allow DOGE Access Sensitive Immigration Case Data” – news that should be viewed alongside revelations about IRS information-sharing to enable immigration enforcement and misuse of a Social Security Administration database to crack down on immigrants as reminders how the administration is, in the Post’s words, seeking “to claw deeper into vast troves of federal data to advance the president’s aggressive deportation efforts.” Of note, DOGE’s litany of errors in their short existence – such as sending notices telling U.S. citizens to deport – underscores the near certainty they will continue to make mistakes and compound the chaos and costs inherent to the mass deportation agenda.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“This is what mass deportation looks like – making every appendage of our federal government into a tool for unsparing, costly, chaotic, and unpopular deportations of long-settled immigrants who are deeply rooted in American families and communities. These latest revelations are a harsh testament to the scope of this administration’s efforts to not just intrude on the lives of immigrants but violate the privacy of every American. Just as troubling is the complete silence from leading lawmakers with supposed concerns about the power of the state and the federal government prying into American families’ lives and sensitive information.”

Below, find key excerpts from the Washington Post story, “Justice Dept. Agrees to Allow DOGE Access Sensitive Immigration Case Data”:

“Representatives of the U.S. DOGE Service have received permission to access a highly sensitive Justice Department system that contains information including the addresses and case histories of millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The system — the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System, or ECAS — is used to store records of immigrants who have interacted with the U.S. immigration system, detailing their name, addresses, previous immigration-court testimony, and any history of engagement with law enforcement, among other things.

… The push to access the Justice Department system is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to claw deeper into vast troves of federal data to advance the president’s aggressive deportation efforts.

Last week, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who are working with DOGE asked to use a sensitive Medicare database, including personal health information and addresses, to help ICE locate people the administration does not think are in the country legally.

At DOGE’s behest, the Social Security Administration listed more than 6,000 living immigrants as dead in a bid to make them self-deport, overriding the objections of career staff. At the IRS, officials agreed this month to share data with the Department of Homeland Security, suggesting that the administration may want to use tax information to find as many as 7 million people suspected of being in the country illegally.

And at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, DOGE staffers are looking to identify and kick out mixed-status households, vowing to ensure that undocumented immigrants do not benefit from public housing programs even if they live with citizens…”

Washington, DC – The Trump administration’s indiscriminate mass deportation measures are rapidly broadening, extending far beyond their original targets to now include U.S. citizens and legal residents. A Georgia-born citizen, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez,  was detained in Florida despite presenting his birth certificate; a New Mexico teen, Jose Hermosillo, visiting Arizona was detained and held for nearly 10 days by Border Patrol before his case was dismissed by a judge; and Kilmar Ábrego García, a long-settled resident granted deportation protection by the Trump administration in 2019, is now being refused return to the United States. Additionally, a U.S. doctor and a lawyer – both U.S. citizens– have found themselves ensnared in this growing wave of wrongful detentions, underscoring the widening scope of the administration’s immigration actions.

These cases, alongside new court battles and reports of lawful permanent residents facing deportation, underscore a dangerous erosion of due process and the consequences are spreading far beyond immigrant communities.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice: 

“We have long said that attacks on immigrants are just the tip of the spear of unchecked government intrusion on the  liberties of all. Trump’s obsession with mass deportation is coming at the supreme cost of due process and freedom. The right to due process is a cornerstone of our Constitution, yet the Trump administration continues to assault the safety and liberty of American citizens. The recent detentions of U.S. citizens like Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez in Florida and Jose Hermosillo in Arizona are warnings of the dangers of the administration’s indiscriminate immigration enforcement practices. When the government disregards legal status, documentation, and even birth certificates, it reveals a system operating without accountability. These cases show a pattern: a deliberate erosion of legal safeguards that protect all of us.”

Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

This Tax Week, the negative consequences of the agreement between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and ICE, to share information about undocumented taxpayers, carries special urgency, both in matters of privacy as well as the loss of billions of dollars in federal, state, and local tax payments if people without documents stop paying taxes or are deported.

Last week, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) presented an analysis that concludes that “every 10-percentage point drop in the income tax compliance rate of undocumented immigrants would lower federal tax revenue by $8.6 billion per year, and state and local tax collections by $900 million per year.” That’s a combined reduction of $9.5 billion annually.

A thirty percentage point drop in the tax compliance rate would lead to a $25.9 billion annual reduction in payments to the federal government and $2.6 billion to state and local governments.

These figures should alarm the Trump administration, which has proposed not only an anti-immigrant policy but one that is, in many cases, illegal and unconstitutional, in its obsessive crusade against immigrants of color.

The IRS-ICE agreement allows the agency charged with collecting taxes to share data, which until now has been kept secret, with the immigration agency — data about the contributors who fill out their tax declarations using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs), which the IRS gives out to some categories of noncitizens who cannot obtain a Social Security number. The idea is to locate them and deport them.

Various high-level IRS officials, including the acting IRS Commissioner, Melanie Krause, resigned because the agreement clearly violates federal laws that protect the privacy of taxpayers’ information, independent of their immigration status. Only Congress can request that the information be revealed under special circumstances, but not for immigration matters.

The agreement should also worry citizens and authorized residents because no one knows to what end the federal government wants to access tax information. Ignoring these developments, and arguing that they will only affect undocumented people, is playing with fire. This contributes to eroding protections and individual rights, especially before a Trump administration that neither respects due process, nor what the courts rule, including the highest court in the land.

This has been proven in Trump’s reluctance to bring back a legal Maryland resident, Salvadoran Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported “by mistake” to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador, even though the nation’s Supreme Court ruled that the administration should “facilitate” the return of the young man who is married to a U.S. citizen and the father of three U.S. citizen children.

But to analyze the possible effects of the IRS-ICE agreement on government coffers in just dollars and cents, we do not have to go very far. These days, stories abound in the media of accountants saying that their undocumented clients are asking if it would be safe to file their taxes, in the face of fear that they will be detained and deported. Or experts warning about the loss of revenue at all levels.

According to the American Immigration Council, “in 2023, households led by undocumented immigrants paid $89.8B in total taxes. This includes $33.9B in state and local taxes and $55.8B in federal taxes.” In 2022, combined taxes totaled almost $100B, according to ITEP.

Also in 2022, “undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes,” ITEP reported. These are benefits to which they are not entitled.

With the IRS-ICE agreement and mass deportations, Trump, once again, shoots the US economy in the foot.

The original Spanish version is here.

Washington, DC — The following is a statement from America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas reacting to the details and implications of last night’s Supreme Court’s ruling that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar García to Maryland.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice: 

“While the language the Supreme Court majority used in its ruling was carefully chosen, make no mistake, the message was clear: the Trump administration must abide by the rule of law and Mr. Kilmar Abrego García must be returned to his family.

Predictably, Stephen Miller and other administration voices continue to lie about Mr. García; his background; and their ability and responsibility to return him to his family.  As we saw today in Judge Xinis’ courtroom, the Trump administration seeks to delay and obfuscate – and to defy the rule of law and the ruling by the Supreme Court. It was another shocking, though not surprising, display of their disdain for our Constitution.  As Judge Xinis wrote, their excuse for delay ‘blinks at reality.’

We join the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and others in support of the García family and their overdue reunification. Yet the significance of this case is much greater than just for one man and one family.

As we have been saying, immigration is the tip of the spear in the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law and due process and their attempts to run roughshod over the separation of powers is a threat to all Americans. The Supreme Court stood up to this lawlessness and the Trump administration now must follow the law.”

Next Monday, Trump ally and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele will visit the White House. If the Trump administration has not yet reunified Kilmar García with his family before the visit:

• President Bukele should be asked if he will return Mr. García to the U.S. if President Trump requests it.
• Relatedly, President Trump must be asked why an administration and presidency predicated upon the belief of this President’s powers of negotiation is incapable or unwilling to follow the law and persuade El Salvador to return Mr. García to his family.