You’re Probably Wrong About Immigration, and That Ignorance Has a Human Cost

I’m utterly exhausted from hearing people who think they would have stood up to the Nazis chant “Build the wall!” and lament “Just come here the right way!”

The human price tag of mass deportation and immigration misinformation confronts me daily as an immigration attorney and advocate at Project Libertad, the nonprofit I founded to bridge the gap in legal and social services for immigrant youth. Recent, real-life examples include:

• A parent languishing in a jail cell while their child graduates high school; that child sobbing in a cap and gown, heartbroken that their parent is not present for this pivotal moment.

• Frantically checking the ICE Detainee Locator each day, concerned that my teen client has not responded to my messages and fearing the worst.

• Fearful texts from high school-aged clients, telling me that they are afraid to leave home amid rampant ICE raids in the area.

• High schoolers dropping out of school to work and pay their relatives’ legal fees.

• Small children crying, hiding whenever the doorbell rings, terrified that ICE has come to take away their parents.

• High school students arrested on their way to sports practice.

• Children zip tied in immigration court.

• Asylum seekers languishing in a Salvadoran concentration camp -- sometimes, despite court orders to the contrary!

The list goes on. Incomprehensibly, the children of Project Libertad endure such moments many times daily. Just since I started drafting this piece, several new gut punches have emerged to batter our community: predicted ICE raids across Pennsylvania, the termination of deportation protections for children with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, and a new travel ban.

With each new injustice, a sense of heaviness floods me; the cruelty feels too heavy to bear witness to. And yet, many times that is all I can do to help: bear witness and ask myself, “Why?” Is this inhumanity truly what my fellow Americans voted for or wanted? Do they understand or care that those impacted are just fellow human beings? People with hopes, dreams, loved ones, challenges, and successes? Even Trump, the architect of the current mass deportation campaign, called the US-Canadian border “an artificial line,” inadvertently and unintentionally making the case that immigration advocates have long stated for the US-Mexico border.

Something that gives me hope amidst the despair is the idea that hearts and minds can be changed if we can help people understand the truth of the US immigration system, rather than basing beliefs on an imagined, inaccurate version of the system.

Through my work, I often speak to large groups of people about the facts of the US immigration system and the myths that spread unabated. Consistently, I find that anti-immigrant folks fundamentally misunderstand the immigration system, and that misunderstanding drives them, at least in part, to support abhorrent policies.

Common, misinformed refrains include:

“Why don’t they just get in line and come here the right way?”

“We have a system, and people have to follow the rules.”

“My grandparents came here the right way, so they should, too!”

In reality, most undocumented people or would-be immigrants abroad simply have no way to obtain lawful immigration status in the US. You read that right: most people have no way to legalize their immigration status. Options for obtaining legal status are extremely limited. There is no “general” application one can file for legal status, work authorization, or legal permanent residency. Most of our ancestors who immigrated to the US would not be eligible to do so under current immigration law. Simply put, the game is rigged. Most undocumented people would gladly do anything or pay any amount of money to fix their status, if only they had that option. For most immigrants, saying “Get in line!” is a cruel joke: there is no line.

That’s to say nothing of asylum seekers -- the majority of our clients at Project Libertad -- who are pursuing the only legal avenue available to them, yet are treated like criminals. The only way for asylum seekers to seek protection is to first arrive in the US and then apply for asylum. Applicants are eligible to apply for asylum regardless of whether they came to a Port of Entry (POE) or crossed the border between POEs. There is no way to apply from abroad, and seeking asylum is 100% legal. Yet, our system treats asylum seekers like criminals, holding them in crowded, inhumane detention centers and placing them in removal (deportation) proceedings.

Other common, persistent immigration myths include:

• the idea that immigrants bring a rise in crime (on the contrary, study after study shows that immigrants commit fewer crimes than US Citizens)

• that immigrants are stealing jobs (studies show that immigrants create jobs and benefit the economy by paying taxes they’ll never benefit from)

• that immigrants are taking welfare handouts (undocumented people do not qualify for federal public benefits)

• that immigrants are filing fraudulent asylum claims to “game the system” and stay in the US (asylum fraud by immigrants is exceedingly rare; immigrants are much more likely to be victims of immigration fraud than to perpetrate it).

This deluge of misinformation dehumanizes immigrants, paving the way for the public to be okay with atrocities -- or to at least look the other way. Each new act of cruelty is, of course, rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the reality of our immigration system.

Every day, I watch in disbelief as people who claim they would have been on the right side of history in Nazi Germany fall prey to the same tactics that Hitler and the Nazis used to turn everyday Germans against their Jewish neighbors. My fellow Americans seem unable to recognize the hallmarks of a holocaust unfolding before us unless it’s boorish, obvious, a caricature.

These folks fail to recognize nuance, how authoritarian regimes manipulate the public by initiating their persecution first against the marginalized, so that there will not be a public outcry. Then, gaining ground, they expand their tactics from there. We’ve seen this happen already in the first five months of the Trump administration: even US citizens are now being swept up by ICE.

This is not the only similarity between the US in 2025 and Nazi Germany. Like many US citizens today, the average German citizen approved of Hitler’s actions, at least at first. The Holocaust began with stripping Jewish people of their immigration status and mass deportations. In 1935, Hitler passed the Reich Citizenship Law, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship. By that time, the Frank family had fled Germany, so they did not lose their citizenship immediately. However, in 1941, Hitler passed the “Eleventh Decree to the Law on the Citizenship of the Reich,” which stated that all German Jews living outside of Germany were no longer citizens of Germany. At that time, Anne Frank and her family became stateless, meaning they were not legally citizens of any nation.

In 1940, the first political prisoners were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were German and Polish men (both Christian and Jewish). Most of them were imprisoned as political opponents of the Nazis.

Today, in the US, Trump has begun stripping immigrants of their lawful status. Those deemed political opponents of Donald Trump have been detained by ICE, with many sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador, where they may languish for life. The Holocaust is happening again before our eyes, and half of the country cannot see it for what it is.

Advocates like myself have long decried the inhumanity of the US immigration system -- but what we are seeing now is a deeply concerning escalation of inhumanity, cruelty, and lawlessness. This is justified by letting the anti-immigrant right craft a narrative of lies and propaganda about immigrants, despite easily available, factual information to the contrary.

Case in point: the so-called “border crisis” that both right and left-wing news outlets discuss. Instead of countering the idea of a border crisis with the fact that there is no border crisis, other than the US’s decision not to process asylum seekers humanely, Democrats and the news media have allowed that narrative to take hold, letting the anti-immigrant right frame the conversation in a misleading way.

I fear that in some far-off future, history will be whitewashed yet again, and everyone will acknowledge the evil that occurred, when it is far too late to do anything about it. As Omar El Akkad wrote regarding the Palestinian genocide, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” Yet, my hope is that there’s still time for thoughtfulness, facts, and accountability.

It’s far past time to have an honest, fact-based conversation about immigration. Facts matter. Words matter. Propaganda and misinformation are how we got here. Facts are how we will begin to dig our way out.