Donald Trump wants us to associate immigrants with criminality. That is the reason behind a weekly published list of immigrant crimes – the first of which was made public on Monday. Singling out the crimes of undocumented immigrants has one objective: to make people view them as deviant, dangerous and fundamentally undesirable.



The very idea is sinister.



Since the start of his presidential campaign, Trump characterized brown-skinned immigrants as criminals by painting Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as terrorists. This fear-mongering has continued into his administration, and has expressed itself in unprecedented policies.



Trump has gone so far as to create an office called Voice – Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office. An expert on concentration camps has already pointed out that the weekly list of crimes bears deeply troubling resemblances to Nazi–era Germany, where Hitler published Jewish crimes.



A report released by the Department of Homeland Security this week focuses on immigrant crimes in “sanctuary” cities, which seek to protect undocumented people from unnecessary deportation. This serves no purpose but to demonize immigrants and name and shame cities which do not cooperate with the Trump administration.



The report spotlights specific cases in which local law enforcement agencies didn’t hand over undocumented individuals in their custody to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). The report calls out the disobedient jurisdictions, and lists the nationality and “notable criminal activity” of undocumented individuals, who are left unnamed.



Reading the report, one is struck by how the alarmist rhetoric of Trump and the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t quite fit the nature of many of the crimes that are listed. A high number of them are for non-violent offences such as drug possession, driving under the influence of liquor and traffic violations.



A section that lists the reasons why some jurisdictions don’t cooperate with deportations shows that many of their reasons are quite reasonable. Some local jurisdictions are making the important distinctions between violent and non-violent offenses that Trump and his administration fail to make. And who knows better than them about what actually makes their communities safe?



Consider Ithaca, New York, for example, which states that they only honor warrantless Ice requests for “violent or serious crimes or terrorist activities”. The Travis County (Texas) sherriff’s office policy states that they accept Ice requests for individuals charged or convicted of “Capital Punishment, First Degree Murder, Aggravated Sexual Assault, or Continuous Smuggling of Persons”.



This report represents a clear tactic to intimidate local jurisdictions resisting Ice and an attempt to bend them to the will of Trump’s policies. It also risks stoking the flames of xenophobia and hatred against immigrants – even though the report does not actually substantiate Trump’s alarmism.



When Trump paints immigrants as dangerously criminal, he is not describing reality but trying to create one. While white people who commit crimes are treated by the content of their individual characters, immigrants and people of color are collectively smeared as dangerous threats.



There’s no reassurance that Trump is only targeting serious criminals. Trump has already deported immigrants such as Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos who appear as saints next to his own life. His recurring suggestion that there is a correlation between immigration and crime has been statistically debunked. Many studies show that immigrants commit less crimes than native-born citizens.



Sadly, the criminalization and deportation of undocumented immigrants also happened under Barack Obama. To think that the nearly 3 million immigrants deported under Obama were all criminals is delusional liberal hypocrisy. This is not to say that Trump and Obama are the same. While Trump criminalizes immigrants with hyperbole, Obama did it with dignified restraint. Now, Trump appears eager to abandon any restraints placed within the machinery he has inherited.



Certainly, some immigrants do commit serious crimes. But that is because they are like all other human beings. Singling out undocumented immigrants as an inherently criminal group applies a double standard.

The actions of this Republican administration – one which has heavily courted the evangelical vote – cuts against the basic New Testament insight that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”. For Trump, it’s the sins of undocumented immigrants that need to be put on a national pedestal for all to see. They are being used as scapegoats to atone for our country’s failed economic policies.

This is cruel, unfair and entirely unproductive.