The cattle rancher industry, Republicans in battleground states, and United Nations human rights experts have little in common. But like millions of Americans, they’ve all expressed concern that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has gone too far.

The ACLU’s latest report, "76 Ways Mass Deportation Is Breaking Our Democracy,” provides the first comprehensive civil rights review of the impact mass deportations are having on our democracy. We found that in the administration’s vast assault on our rights and liberties, mass deportation has been its weapon of choice. It has been used as a pretext, mechanism, and distraction, sometimes all at once. The result is a surgical attempt to dismantle our multiracial democracy and its core safeguards — at a staggering scale and speed. Under an avalanche of Trump administration actions connected to the mass deportation agenda, our democracy is growing unrecognizable.

But the reverse can also be true: We can defend, strengthen and future-proof our rights and democracy by repudiating mass deportation and dismantling its infrastructure. For that to happen, activists, civil rights groups, and politicians who have shirked from the thorny challenge of immigration reform must embrace it as inextricable from the broader task of rebuilding our democracy and civil rights.

The next Congress, starting in January, will provide that opportunity. Our report is a roadmap for Congress to investigate abuses, connect the dots between them and build public support for major change to our immigration system to save our democracy. We broke down our key findings below, including the need for Congress to investigate the build-out of a national deportation force, and the use of mass deportations to dismantle our multiracial democracy.

Congress has already begun the task of investigating the harmful impacts of mass deportations on all Americans. Masked, heavily armed agents are patrolling our communities, attacking people in front of their homes and dragging people from their cars. Congressional “shadow” hearings, unfortunately attended only by Democrats, have started to lay this bare.

Earlier this month, the mother of Renee Good, who was killed by a federal agent last January, testified: “I voted for President Trump under the impression that these agents were here to protect the citizens of the United States,” she said. “Jesus teaches us to forgive and I have, but what we are asking for is accountability."

Congress must go deep in its quest for accountability. Beyond the horrors of the administration’s surge in Minneapolis last winter, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has embedded itself in communities across the country:

• More than 2,000 federal, state and local agencies are now working together, in what we call the national deportation policing force, using more than 25,000 federal law enforcement agents from agencies like the FBI, and thousands more state and local police through an obscure program called 287(g)..

• Federal agents are setting up deportation traps in sites of American life: checkpoints in national forests, patrols at school bus dropoff points, and traffic stops for pretextual reasons like “tinted windows” that lead to deportation.

• As the administration breaks its own record for the number of deportation arrests, it’s growing even more reckless. Many of the people this deportation force is stopping and abusing are citizens and legal residents. Their Black or Brown skin, the language they speak, their jobs in construction or farming, all lead to law enforcement targeting them, often violently.

The administration uses federal agents as an internal security force, deploying them to cities run by opposing party officials, often in a blatant attempt to threaten them. This force has proven a threat to our safety and our rights in myriad ways:

• Agents have shot, killed, blinded, dragged, tackled, and beaten individuals attending protests, as well as people seeking to record and observe immigration and law enforcement activities in public. The administration has lied about agents’ actions, claimed agents have “absolute immunity,” and refused to disclose information needed to hold them accountable.

• The administration is surveilling people who disagree with the mass deportation agenda. Undercover agents infiltrated community meetings in New York and Minneapolis and activist Signal groups engaged in First Amendment-protected activity.

• The government’s access to people’s real-time locations, travel patterns, biometrics, and other personal information —and the injection of $240 billion in taxpayer dollars for immigration enforcement, passed by Congress — will pose repercussions for years to come.

Congress must also grapple with the administration’s attempts to restrict access to citizenship and legal status and investigate mass deportation as part of the white nationalist assault on our multiracial democracy.

Under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has used neo-Nazi and white supremacist phrases, lyrics, images, and spokespeople in their recruitment efforts and social media posts, prompting a congressional inquiry. In December 2025, DHS posted a photo of an empty beach with the words “America After 100 Million Deportations” imposed on it, and accompanying text: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”

The rhetoric increasingly matches the administration’s actions:

• The administration attempted to end birthright citizenship — denying citizenship to U.S.-born children.

• The Trump administration is embarking on the largest de-legalization campaign our nation has seen in generations, targeting longtime U.S. residents from countries with primarily Black and Brown citizens, an estimated 6.1 million people in total, many of whom had passed administrative and legal tests to remain in the United States and have relied on these protections for decades. As they lose their legal status, these individuals are at risk of arrest, detention and deportation. They have lost work authorization, which carries the consequences of losing health insurance and the ability to support their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

• While Trump administration allies often say they support legal immigration, the administration has introduced bureaucratic hurdles and canceled naturalization interviews and oath ceremonies, abruptly halting the lengthy, years-long process for thousands of Americans in waiting.

• The administration has dropped the naturalization rate by 75 percent, compared to two years prior. Thousands of individuals married to U.S. citizens and people serving in the military are now in limbo.

• The administration effectively shut down the refugee resettlement program — except for white Afrikaners from South Africa, for whom it created a new fast-track system.

The administration’s goal was never just to stop unauthorized immigration. It’s trying to limit the number of people with legal status, make them deportable, and exclude longstanding residents from citizenship in a larger quest to roll back the multiracial nature of our democracy. Without status or citizenship, millions are consigned to a permanent underclass. They contribute to our country, including through vital labor but are denied the full recognition and protections of citizenship.

It’s all too easy to imagine the administration turning its mass deportation machine not just on immigrants, people who “look like” immigrants, and those who protest and observe their actions, but against any individual who does not pass the administration’s test of who rightly belongs in America based on national origin, race, religion, gender, sexuality and belief.

Organizations and leaders concerned for the future of our democracy should recognize the risks and join the immigrant rights movement in working to dismantle the infrastructure of mass deportations. Doing so requires major, transformative change to our nation’s immigration system, so that it cannot be weaponized against our constitutional freedoms and our multiracial democracy.

In principle, this means committing to equal protection under the law for both citizens and noncitizens. In policy terms, it means that elected leaders, diverse movements and coalitions should come together to seek:

• A Broad Path to Citizenship: To stop the deportation drive, we need to provide a path to citizenship for our loved ones and neighbors. Our democracy cannot survive with an unequal society that deprives millions of Americans of the full rights and protections of citizenship.

• Replace ICE with a New Immigration Management System: The national deportation force must be dismantled, ICE must be replaced, and mass immigrant detention must end. We need to create a new Immigration Management Agency with a mission to keep families together, support American communities, and meet the needs of the American workforce.

• Modernize Asylum and Border Management: We must stop closing our doors on the world. We need to modernize the border and asylum systems, so that no administration can use them to sow fear and manufacture crisis in a bid to justify repressing all our rights. Our nation should be a safe haven for those fleeing dictatorship, and a beacon of democracy.

• Fail-Safe Accountability: No agents, no matter the badge they wear, should be functionally immune from prosecution and unaccountable to the public, the courts, and Congress. We need system-wide change, including through judicial review and the right to sue the agencies and individuals who commit abuse.

It will take time and effort to build the political and public support necessary to achieve these changes. Congress can start by designing its upcoming oversight and legislative agenda to reveal the shared harm of the mass deportation campaign — and the universal imperative to defeat it.