How Racist Legislation From 30 Years Ago Laid the Foundation for Trump’s ICE Terror

Under President Donald Trump, immigration enforcement agencies have launched a massive campaign of terror against immigrant families with raids, detentions, and deportations unequaled in recent history.

The effects of the president’s assault on immigrants is plain to see. But many people have forgotten that key parts of the legal infrastructure, and the very language around immigration and criminality to which we have become so accustomed, were built long before his administration.

Key foundations to Trump’s racist anti-immigrant policies were laid 30 years ago when the Clinton administration passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA).

Undoing IIRAIRA and its harmful consequences must be part of a broader plan to undo the tangle of laws that treat immigration as a pre-crime, and to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and its punitive and militarized tools.

IIRAIRA cast the very act of immigrating to the United States as potentially criminal, creating the concept of “criminal alienhood.” The law vastly expanded the consequences on immigration status for convictions or for committing violations. It also blocked immigration judges in many cases from granting case-by-case protection to very sympathetic immigrants who had unusual circumstances.

Part of President Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” wave of legislation in the 90s, IIRAIRA allowed immigration enforcement agencies to treat immigrants as criminals and laid the groundwork for the racist anti-immigrant policies we’re seeing today. IIRAIRA also created the 287(g) program, authorizing local police to arrest and detain immigrants on behalf of immigration enforcement agencies—which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has used to terrorize immigrants across the country under the Trump administration.

IIRAIRA greatly increased the list of triggers for immigration penalties, as well as making them more vague. What started out as a focus on the worst offenses ballooned to sweep up lower-level offenses. IIRAIRA made it much harder for immigrants to apply for asylum and established grounds for detaining and deporting many more immigrants—including permanent legal residents. This included a bar on reentry for deported immigrants, and making reentry a criminal offense, which further criminalizes immigrants and which is currently the top charge for immigration prosecutions.

Another harm we can trace back to the passage of IIRAIRA is the legal framework the law created for mass detention without due process. The United States now has the largest immigration detention system in the world in which millions of people have been detained without guaranteed access to legal representation and in often inhumane conditions. As of July 2026, over 65,000 people were being held in ICE detention and—similarly to those already deported—over 70% had no criminal convictions.

Each administration after Clinton expanded the category of offenses for which immigrants could be detained and deported. By the Obama administration more than 20 categories of crimes were grounds for deportation. At the same time, criminal law and immigration law started working in tandem, in a process legal scholars dubbed “crimmigration.”

With the growth of “deportable offenses” came the rise in rhetoric that intertwined immigrants and criminality, despite repeated statistical studies showing lower crime commission rates among immigrants than among the native-born. By the time Trump said in his 2015 presidential campaign launch that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs… Bringing crime” and called them “rapists,” the US public had been well primed to associate criminality with immigrants.

In the decades since the passage of IIRAIRA, LatinoJustice PRLDEF and other immigrant rights organizations have repeatedly challenged both the perception of immigrants as criminals, and the laws and practices that have created the criminal charge-to-deportation express pipeline we are experiencing today. We brought our first case challenging 287(g) agreements in 2009, won $112 million last year for immigrants who had been illegally held in jail custody for handover to ICE, and filed our latest of these cases at the start of the current administration in 2025.

Over the past 30 years, IIRAIRA has frayed the fabric of our society by tearing apart families and criminalizing our immigrant neighbors. Undoing IIRAIRA and its harmful consequences must be part of a broader plan to undo the tangle of laws that treat immigration as a pre-crime, and to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and its punitive and militarized tools. This is the only way we can once and for all have the immigration system we deserve.