That Trump is struggling to have his ICE goons meet the quota for detaining and deporting people (reportedly the target is about 3,000 people per day) is clear from the fact that they are now doing so for the most minor of offenses.

An Irish grandmother who has lived in the US for most of her life and holds a green card is facing deportation because she wrote a bad cheque for $25 in 2015.

Donna Hughes-Brown, 58, was detained in July after landing in Chicago on a flight from Dublin and is being held in isolation in a detention centre in Kentucky. She has lived in the US since 1977, has five children and grandchildren, and ran a horse farm in Troy, Missouri.

Her husband, Jim Brown, a US citizen and military veteran, told reporters his wife was not a criminal and that he “100%” regretted voting for Donald Trump as president.

He said she had been detained on a misdemeanour relating to a $25 cheque she signed a decade ago and for which she made restitution and received probation.

She was detained under legislation amended on 4 July as part of Trump’s sweeping “one big beautiful bill” act. The couple visited Ireland that month for a funeral. When they landed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on 29 July a police officer was waiting for her on the ramp.

It is now clear that ICE agents are using the flight manifests of all incoming flights to the US and scouring its databases to find even the smallest infraction of travelers in order to deport them. The network of laws in the US is so vast that pretty much everyone has violated at least one of them. If you are lucky, you would not have been prosecuted for the most minor ones and so would not be part of the database used by ICE. But Hughes-Brown was not so lucky and now she faces deportation, sent away from her family.

Right from the beginning, Trump made outlandish claims about undocumented immigrants in the US, that they were all violent criminals who were threatening entire cities, and even eating people’s pets. His vow to get rid of all of them was popular with a segment of the population and undoubtedly appealed to the racist and xenophobic impulses of his cult followers (since most undocumented immigrants are from Central and South American and thus brown-skinned), who were only too eager to lap up the sensationalized stories whenever a crime happened to be committed by one of them.

The number of undocumented people in the US is estimated to be about 14 million. Of these roughly 43% supposedly had some kind of protection from deportation because they had applied for asylum or were covered by some kind of status that allowed them to stay. While some immigrants have undoubtedly committed crimes, the idea that immigrants as a whole are a major source of crime, or are even more likely to commit crimes, has been repeatedly debunked.

The scapegoating of ethnic and religious minorities is well-tread historical ground in the United States, and immigrants have always made for an easy target. Chinese, Irish, Italian, Muslim, Mexican—all these people and more have been falsely accused of bringing crime into the United States, particularly during times of economic or political unease. Today, some politicians are peddling the same, tired myth, this time of a “migrant crime surge” among immigrants who recently arrived in the country.

However, a robust body of research shows that welcoming immigrants into American communities not only does not increase crime, but can actually strengthen public safety. In fact, immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born. This is true at the national, state, county, and neighborhood levels, and for both violent and non-violent crime.

The American Immigration Council compared crime data to demographic data from 1980 to 2022, the most recent data available. The data showed that as the immigrant share of the population grew, the crime rate declined. In 1980, immigrants made up 6.2 percent of the U.S. population, and the total crime rate was 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people. By 2022, the share of immigrants had more than doubled, to 13.9 percent, while the total crime rate had dropped by 60.4 percent, to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people. Specifically, the violent crime rate fell by 34.5 percent and the property crime rate fell by 63.3 percent.

Even at the rate of 3,000 deportations per day, that still amounts to about one million per year, nowhere close to clearing out the estimated 14 million. They clearly have already caught many of the low-hanging fruit, rounding up people in areas where people of color are working in low-paying short-term jobs, and that is why they are going after people like Hughes-Brown. The main goal of this policy is to feed the passions of the Trump cult that likes to find scapegoats for their own failures.