All the president’s bogeymen

Immigration and Customs Enforcement regularly publishes data on the people being held at its detention facilities. Considered over time, those numbers are revealing. It is now the case, for example, that there are more ICE detainees being held in ICE custody who have not been charged with a crime than there are convicted criminals or people with pending charges — almost certainly the first time in the organization that’s been the case.

That’s because, until Jan. 20, 2025, ICE mostly did what President Donald Trump insists it is now doing: targeting criminal immigrants within the country’s borders. A far larger proportion of ICE detainees who’d been stopped by Customs and Border Protection — meaning primarily people stopped directly at the border as they sought entry into the U.S. — were people with no criminal convictions or charges.

Since Trump took office, though, that’s changed. First, the number of people being stopped at the border has dropped as fewer immigrants are seeking entry into the U.S. But, more importantly, ICE is spending a lot more money and energy scooping up non-criminal immigrants. A year ago, only about 3 percent of the people in ICE detention who didn’t have pending criminal charges or a conviction had been arrested by ICE. Now, more than half have.

The year-over-year change since last September is stark. The percentage of immigrants with criminal convictions who’ve been arrested by ICE is up about 80 percent. The percentage of immigrants with no convictions or pending charges who’ve been targeted by ICE is up nearly 2,000 percent.

Again, this is not generally what the president and his allies promised during the 2024 campaign. While the president did at times say that a second Trump administration would identify and deport every immigrant living in the country illegally — a group that is itself determined by vague and disputed boundaries — far more often he promised America that he would target the really bad guys, the criminals who he insisted were running rampant in the U.S., wantonly committing horrible acts of violence. But it turns out that people who are seeking permanent residency by following the rules are a lot easier to arrest and it turns out that the administration is more interested in the number of arrests than the target of them, so here we are. Trump told his base that immigrants were criminals and tasked his subordinates with arresting as many of them as possible, even if they turned out not to be criminals at all.

You likely noticed, though, that the image at the beginning of this article featured not an immigrant or an ICE officer but former FBI director James Comey, pictured in happier times and with a different president. Perhaps you see the throughline, but I’ll put a fine point on it anyway.

Comey, too, is the center of a narrative about his supposedly criminality that has been stoked and tended for years within the pro-Trump media bubble. He is not as sympathetic a victim as an immigrant parent seized outside his kid’s school, certainly, but the pattern is the same. Comey was presented as a nefarious force within the U.S. and a lawbreaker and, Trump’s base having accepted that, he is now being targeted for prosecution by the federal government.

I’ll take a moment here to note that, just as many of the non-criminal immigrant detentions are waved away as justified because those immigrants didn’t arrive on valid visas, Trump allies will and do insist that Comey’s prosecution is warranted given his actions. According to the federal indictment, Comey made false claims during congressional testimony. But legal observers from Lawfare to Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy view the charges as weak if not entirely contrived.

The way in which the indictment was obtained does little to counteract that perception. With the statute of limitations on Comey charges winding down, Trump publicly demanded that his attorney general move forward on targeting his opponents. A new acting U.S. attorney — someone who’d served as his personal counsel — was put in place and the indictment pushed forward. The official she replaced had declined to seek charges, almost certainly because of the weakness of the case.

What’s striking about the Comey indictment is that, even on its own terms, it is contrived. Trumpworld loathes Comey because it holds him responsible for the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, one of the central irritations of Trump’s political career. But this indictment doesn’t allege that Comey invented the Russia probe or anything even close to that. It is, at best, a multi-bumper bank shot, one that satisfies the right’s desire to see Comey in the crosshairs rather than its desire to prove Trump’s view of the Russia probe correct. (Trump and his allies have tried this before, with other targets. It didn’t work out.)

Instead, we have a pattern in which someone or some group of people is offered up by Trump as an enemy of the American people. This is credulously accepted by his base, in part because the pro-Trump media universe scrambles to dig up sketchy support for his claims in its eternal race for the right’s most valuable currency, attention. Trump’s presentations about the world rely on widespread incuriosity and accepting bad-faith actors at face value, but because those values have been so effectively inculcated on the right there’s little value for right-wing politicians or media personalities to contradict his claims.

The president said these were bad guys and so a third of Americans accept and celebrate that they are bad guys. The president says these people should be in jail so his administration works to put them in jail, to cheers from the base that he’s deceiving and the political allies who aren’t interested in disagreeing. And when it turns out that the presentation was wrong or that things weren’t quite as clear-cut as had been suggested, blame always falls somewhere outside of the Oval Office.

Trump’s us-vs.-them worldview will never run out of thems because what makes someone a them isn’t anything they’ve done — it’s simply that Trump has decided they are not an us.

Photo: FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledges applause during President Barack Obama’s remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House, June 21, 2013. (White House Photo by Pete Souza/Flickr)