THE NEW COLOSSUS by Emma Lazarus[1]
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"[1]
Written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, the above poem is engraved in a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. I thought of it when the Department of Homeland Security barged into Ilhan Omar's home and confiscated her computer, iPhone, and papers in the Department of Justice's (i.e. Trump's) attempt to have her deported to Somalia where she was born. She is an immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1995 as a child with her family fleeing civil war and is a naturalized citizen.
I thought of it again today when my dentist's receptionist told me about efforts to deport her some years back because she lost a paper proving that she came here as a child with her family from Germany. She had to fight for a year to remain, spending hundreds of dollars and then only with help from Senator Ron Wyden was she successful. In the process, U.S. and Oregon officials subjected her to prejudice about Germans.
The Trump Administration has made anti-immigration his primary policy, including those who have become U.S. citizens. Naturalized citizens cannot be deported unless the government follows a civil procedure called denaturalization and then, only if the government proves the person was not legally eligible to be naturalized or that citizenship was obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.
The Administration's claim against Representative Omar is that she was actually 18 years old, not 17, when her father secured citizenship in 2000. Therefore, she didn't qualify as a child and it was a willful misrepresentation. They have not proven this. Trump intentionally focused on her because she has strongly opposed him.
On June 11, 2025, the DOJ Civil Division issued a memorandum directing its attorneys to pursue denaturalization cases more aggressively, making it one of the Division's top five civil enforcement priorities.
According to Pro Publica, 506 U.S. citizens have been detained by ICE/Homeland Security from January 2025 to October 2026. They state this is likely an undercount. At least 70 of these were children and teens. Roughly a dozen citizens have been deported, most of them children.[1]
One was a four-year-old boy, a U.S. citizen and cancer patient. He was not allowed to bring his cancer medication with him when he was deported despite ICE's awareness of his need. The boy's seven-year-old American born sister was also deported.[2]
In December 2025, a U.S. citizen in Baltimore was picked up and held for 25 days, making her unable to see her five-year-old son over Christmas.[3]
The heighth of hypocrisy is ICE detention of Native Americans. Let me stress "NATIVE Americans!"
"Across Indian Country, we are seeing Native American people illegally stopped, abused, or detained by ICE agents. It is hard to miss the irony of locking up the first people of this land in an immigration sweep," stated Native American Rights Fund Executive Director John Echohawk.[4]
"These arrests and detentions blatantly violate the treaty, as well as the constitutional and civil rights of the Native Americans being apprehended."[5]
ICE targets people based on racial profiling, which the U.S. Supreme Court says does not violate the U.S. Constitution despite the Fourth Amendment prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and the Fourteenth Amendmen's guarantee of Equal Protection of the laws for all Americans.[6] On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court issued an order allowing ICE to resume stops in the Los Angeles area using factors such as race, Spanish language use, and employment in certain industries wiping out the reasonable suspicion and probable cause standards. The three member minority stated in dissent: "[A]ll Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents' satisfaction."
Ninety percent of targeted individuals in June and July 2025 were of Latin American heritage, according to analysis of ICE data.[7]
According to the White House, the Administration has deported 605,000 people since January 2025. Another 1.9 million self-deported in that period.
* * *
In 2019, during the first Trump administration, Ken Cuccinelli, whom Trump appointed as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, revised a line from Emma Lazarus' poem in support of the administration's "public charge rule", which would have rejected would-be immigrants who lacked adequate income and education to support themselves. Cuccinelli would have rewritten the caveat as, "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge". He later suggested that the "huddled masses" should be European, and he downplayed the poem as "not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty." Ms. Lazarus must have rolled over in her grave or arisen to haunt him. The Trump administration rule was later blocked by a federal appeals court.[8]
[1] Pro Publica; projects.propublica.org
[2] Id.
[3] Id.
[4] NARF STATEMENT ON UNLAWFUL ICE ACTIVITY, January 26, 2026. rfa@narf.org
[5] Id.
[6] NOEM v. PERDOMO, et al., 606 U.S. _____ (2025). Decided September 8, 2025.
[7] CATO Institute, "One in Five ICE Arrests Are Latinos on the Streets With No Criminal Past or Removal Order, August 8, 2025.
[8] Wikipedia