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      Attorney general warns UK joining war on Iran may be illegal

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      Britain’s attorney general has warned ministers that getting involved in Israel’s war against Iran could be illegal beyond offering defensive support, it has emerged.Richard Hermer, the government’s most senior legal officer, is reported to have raised concerns internally about the legality of joining a bombing campaign against Iran.An official who has seen Hermer’s official legal advice told the Spectator, which first reported the story, that “the AG has concerns about the UK playing any role in this except for defending our allies”.Keir Starmer is considering whether to provide the US with military support if Donald Trump decides to bomb Iran, and whether to approve the use of the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean for the attack. Hermer’s advice could limit the degree of UK support for the US.A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said: “By longstanding convention, reflected in the ministerial code, whether the law officers have been asked to provide legal advice and the content of any advice is not routinely disclosed.“The convention provides the fullest guarantee that government business will be conducted at all times in light of thorough and candid legal advice.”The prime minister chaired an emergency Cobra meeting on Wednesday to discuss a range of scenarios and ongoing diplomatic efforts. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, is to meet his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, in Washington DC on Thursday as the US weighs up its options.Trump has yet to make a final decision on whether to launch strikes against Iran. The Guardian reported that the president had suggested to defence officials it would make sense to do so only if the so-called bunker buster bomb was guaranteed to destroy the country’s critical uranium enrichment facility, which is between 80 and 90 metres inside a mountain at Fordow.Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire for days after Israel launched airstrikes which it said were aimed at preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials claim the country’s nuclear programme is peaceful and that Israel has caused hundreds of civilian casualties.Taking Fordow offline – either diplomatically or militarily – is seen as central to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons after the International Atomic Energy Agency found the site had enriched uranium to 83.7% – close to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons.Miatta Fahnbulleh, an energy minister, said Starmer would take any decisions with a “cool, calm head” and be guided by international law.“Legal advice is for the prime minister, and I think that’s where it will stay – and you can understand why I won’t comment on that. But what I will say is that we have a prime minister who is a lawyer and a human rights lawyer, he will obviously do everything that is in accord with international law,” she told Times Radio.“No one wants an escalation. No one wants this to erupt into a major conflict in the region that is hugely destabilising for every country involved, and for us globally. So the most important role that the prime minister can play, and is playing, is to be that cool, calm head to urge all partners around the negotiating table and to find a diplomatic route out of this.”However, the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, said the UK could “hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis”.Asked if she believed Hermer was right to sound a warning, Patel told Times Radio: “I don’t think we can hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis and national security when we have to work alongside our biggest ally in the world, the United States, when they look to us for potentially … setting out operational activities through our own military bases.”The UK had not received a formal request from the US to use Diego Garcia in the south Indian Ocean or any of its other airbases to bomb Iran as of Wednesday night.Diego Garcia was recently the subject of a new 99-year lease agreement with Mauritius that left the UK in full operational control of the military base. In practice, Diego Garcia is mainly used by the US, but the fact that it is ultimately a British base means that Starmer would have to approve its use for an attack on Iran.The US is also thought likely to want to request the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus for its air tankers, used to refuel B-2 bombers. The UK has deployed 14 Typhoon jets at Akrotiri to protect its bases and forces and to help regional allies, such as Cyprus and Oman, if they come under attack. More

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      ‘He’s moving at a truly alarming speed’: Trump propels US into authoritarianism

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      It reads like a checklist of milestones on the road to autocracy.A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a US senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent.A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest.Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes.The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confront protesters contesting his mass roundups of undocumented migrants.A senior presidential aide announces that habeas corpus – a vital legal defence for detainees – could be suspended.The sobering catalogue reflects the actions not of an entrenched dictatorship, but of Donald Trump’s administration as the president’s sternest critics struggle to process what they say has been a much swifter descent into authoritarianism than they imagined even a few weeks ago.“Trump is throwing authoritarian punches at a much greater rate than any of these other cases in their first year in power,” said Steven Levitsky, Harvard political scientist and author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of How Democracies Die. “But we don’t yet know how many of those punches will land or how society will respond.”Five months after Trump’s inauguration, seasoned analysts with years of studying one-time stable democracies degenerating into autocracies are voicing alarm at the speed of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on institutions and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression. They are unnerved by the deployment of masked Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents – dressed in plain clothes and without identifying official insignia – to arrest people on the streets for deportation, a tactic critics say is evocative of dictatorships and designed to provoke fear among the general population.Some voice doubts about the judiciary’s capacity to act as a democratic safeguard, despite a wave of legal challenges to the president’s executive orders. They cite the 6-3 conservative majority of the US supreme court, which has a history of issuing rulings friendly to the president, who appointed three of its justices to the bench during his first administration.Trump has tried to propel the US in an authoritarian direction with greater intensity than noted autocrats like the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, or Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, according to Levitsky.Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador to Bulgaria and acting ambassador to Moscow, said Trump was outpacing Vladimir Putin, the Russia president for whom he had often voiced admiration.“This is going faster than Putin even came close to going in terms of gradually eliminating democratic institutions and democratic freedoms,” said Rubin, who witnessed Putin’s early years in power at close quarters. “It took him years. We’re not even looking at six months here.”Bright Line Watch, a survey of political scientists, recently gave the US a score of 53 – the lowest since it started collecting data in 2017 – on a spectrum ranging from 0 for total dictatorship to 100, denoting a perfect democracy, according to Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College, one of the institutions conducting the study.Academics commissioned said they expected the country to fall further, forecasting a score of 48 by 2027.“We’re in the range of countries like Brazil and Israel, but well above countries like Russia,” said Nyhan. “I do expect things to get worse. The potential for further democratic erosion is very real.”Key to whether Trump can tilt America decisively into authoritarianism will be his efforts to assert control over the armed forces, argued Levitsky.“Trump’s ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions,” he said. “It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side, and he’s taken steps in that direction.”Padilla’s manhandling – after he tried to question homeland security secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference – drew fierce scrutiny. It took place against a backdrop of Trump’s deployment of 4,000 national guard troops on to the streets of Los Angeles, later augmented by 700 active marines, against demonstrators protesting against the administration’s anti-migrant crackdown, who did not appear to be present an undue challenge to local law enforcement authorities.View image in fullscreenThe decisions took place against the opposition of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who would normally be empowered to deploy the national guard in the state but whose role Trump usurped as he sought to make an example of a state with a large immigrant population and whose Democratic stranglehold he wishes to break.The deployments, denounced by opponents as an attempt to foment violent confrontation, took place in the run-up to a military parade staged in Washington last Saturday. Ostensibly held to honor the US army’s 250th anniversary, the event was held – perhaps not coincidentally – on the president’s 79th birthday. Opponents said it was redolent of autocracies like China, North Korea and Russia and reflected a desire by Trump to turn the military into his personal tool.Amid speculation that the parade might be disrupted by an anti-Trump No Kings protest on the same day, the president threatened to use “very big force” against demonstrators, in apparent contradiction of the US’s tradition of tolerance of peaceful dissent. In the event, no clashes between government forces and protesters were reported at the Washington parade on a day when an estimated 5 million demonstrators turned out at 2,100 locations across the US, according to organizers. However, there were sporadic reports of violence elsewhere; in northern Virginia, a man drove his car through a crowd of No Kings protesters, striking one, in what police said was an intentional act.But in a much worse portent for democracy on the same day, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was shot dead at her home along with her husband Mark in what was called a targeted political assassination allegedly carried out by 57-year-old Vance Boelter, whose friends say was a Christian nationalist Trump supporter.Boelter, who is now in police custody, is suspected of then shooting and wounding another politician, John Hoffman – a Democratic member of the Minnesota senate – and his wife, Yvette. He is said to have had a list with more than 45 targets, all of them Democrats, at the time of his arrest.Rubin said the shootings created a climate of fear comparable to that of Weimar Germany before the rise of Hitler.“Fear is powerful and pernicious,” he said. “People won’t be willing to to be candidates for these positions because they’re afraid. The general public is intimidated. I’m somewhat intimidated.“You can say passivity is immoral in the face of evil, that it is complicity, all the things that were said about Nazi Germany. Well, it’s easy to say that. In Nazi Germany, there were some courageous people, but not very many, because they were afraid.”Equally significant, analysts say, is the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the legal boundaries of the president’s powers – the fate of which will be decided by the supreme court, which issued a ruling last year that effectively granted Trump vast prosecutorial immunity for acts committed in office.“Has Trump solidified his power? Have we reached a point where we have an out-of-control president who controls all the institutions? No, but we’re at the 11th hour,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology and international affairs professor at Princeton University. “He’s moving at a truly alarming speed and pressing all the authoritarian buttons. We’re a few supreme court decisions away from having a president we can’t get rid of.”Trump’s national guard deployments in Los Angeles may have been aimed at establishing a legal precedent enabling him to deploy troops at will when state authorities tried to defy him.“He wants to establish that he can disable the governors from fighting back against him [by using] military force,” Scheppele said. “The Los Angeles deployment was perceived as an escalation but in reality, the military haven’t done that much. However, there’s a legal infrastructure underneath it all that’s scarier.”Levitsky, said the administration – spearheaded by Stephen Miler, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff – had adopted a practice of declaring emergencies to acquire potentially dictatorial powers.“In the US constitution, almost every existing constraint on executive power can be circumvented in a state of emergency,” he said. “And it’s becoming clear that the administration is learning that emergencies are the easiest route to circumvent the law and not be blocked by the courts. The supreme court is very reluctant to say, ‘No, that’s not an emergency, Trump, you lied. You made that up.’ It’s sort of a free pass for circumventing the rule of law.”The White House used economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping trade tariffs, while invoking the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act, passed in anticipation of a war with France, to justify summarily deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. Miller repeatedly called last week’s protests in Los Angeles an “insurrection”, implicitly justifying the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which enables a president to use military forces to quash a rebellion on US soil.Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, warned that the penchant for emergencies could be applied to next year’s congressional elections, when the Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, an outcome that could curtail his authoritarian power grab.“Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried,” Frum wrote.“He might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him – and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.”Even if Trump were to suffer an election reverse, his ability to wreak further havoc will remain, Nyhan warned, simply because Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote in sufficient numbers to remove him from office in the event of him being impeached by a Democratic-controlled House.“The Founding Fathers anticipated Trump precisely,” he said, referring to the constitutional provision to try and remove a president and other officials for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.“It was just assumed that Congress will jealously guard its prerogatives and impeach and remove any president who exceeded the boundaries of the constitution. But in our current political system, that is a seemingly impossible task.“So we face the prospect of a lawless authoritarian continuing to act for the next three and a half years, and there’s a great deal of damage he can do in that time.” More

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      New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles

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      Foreign students will be required to unlock their social media profiles to allow US diplomats to review their online activity before receiving educational and exchange visas, the state department has announced. Those who fail to do so will be suspected of hiding that activity from US officials.The new guidance, unveiled by the state department on Wednesday, directs US diplomats to conduct an online presence review to look for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States”.A cable separately obtained by Politico also instructs diplomats to flag any “advocacy for, aid or support for foreign terrorists and other threats to US national security” and “support for unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence”.The screening for “antisemitic” activity matches similar guidance given at US Citizenship and Immigration Services under the Department of Homeland Security and has been criticised as an effort to crack down on opposition to the conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza.The new state department checks are directed at students and other applicants for visas in the F, M and J categories, which refer to academic and vocational education, as well as cultural exchanges.“It is an expectation from American citizens that their government will make every effort to make our country safer, and that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing every single day,” said a senior state department official, adding that Marco Rubio was “helping to make America and its universities safer while bringing the state Department into the 21st century”.The Trump administration paused the issuance of new education visas late last month as it mulled new social media vetting strategies. The US had also targeted Chinese students for special scrutiny amid a tense negotiation over tariffs and the supply of rare-earth metals and minerals to the United States.The state department directive allowed diplomatic posts to resume the scheduling of interviews for educational and exchange visas, but added that consular officers would conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting” of all applicants applying for F, M and J visas.“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said. “The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country.” More

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      ‘Abducted by Ice’: the haunting missing-person posters plastered across LA

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      “Missing son.” “Missing father.” “Missing grandmother.”The words are written in bright red letters at the top of posters hanging on lampposts and storefronts around Los Angeles. At first glance, they appear to be from worried relatives seeking help from neighbors.But a closer look reveals that the missing people are immigrants to the US who have been disappeared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Some of the faces are familiar to anyone who has been following the news – that missing father, for instance, is Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador in March without a hearing, in what the Trump administration admitted was an error. “Abducted by Ice,” the poster reads, under a picture of Ábrego García with his small son. “Did not receive constitutional protections. Currently being held in detention.”The missing grandmother is Gladis Yolanda Chávez Pineda, a Chicago woman who was taken by Ice when she showed up for a check-in with immigration officials this month. She had arrived in the US seeking a better life for her daughter and was in the midst of applying for asylum. “Lived in the US for 10 years,” the poster states. “No criminal history.”View image in fullscreenThe missing son is Andry Hernández Romero, a makeup artist who fled persecution in Venezuela. On arrival in the US, he was detained, with US authorities claiming his tattoos indicated gang membership. His family and friends say that’s ridiculous. He was among hundreds of people deported to the El Salvador mega-prison known as Cecot in March. “Currently being held in a concentration camp,” the poster says.The posters are just a few examples of a campaign of quiet resistance on the streets of Los Angeles. On Monday, a walk down Sunset Boulevard in the historic Silver Lake neighborhood meant encountering an array of flyers, artwork and spray-painted messages of support for disappeared immigrants and fury at the administration.The “missing” posters, which have also appeared in other neighborhoods, were particularly effective. Duct-taped to telephone polls amid ads for comedy shows, guitar lessons and yard sales, they reminded passersby of the individual lives derailed by Trump’s immigration crackdown – instead of names in the news, these were families and friends who might have lived just down the road.View image in fullscreenHumanizing people’s stories was precisely the goal, said the creators behind the posters.“I just wanted to reframe this idea of immigrants as criminals, and put into perspective that these are people – this is someone’s grandmother, this is someone’s father, this is someone’s son,” said Ben*, the posters’ 28-year-old designer. He worked with his friend Sebastian*, 31, to distribute them around town.What began as a friends-and-family effort expanded after Ben shared the PDF: “I shared it with a few friends, then they shared it, and so it kind of just blew up.”For Sebastian, the issue was personal. “I moved here from Colombia 14 years ago, and ever since the first Trump administration, I’ve seen my community being attacked,” he said. “So as soon as I saw these posters that my friend was doing, that I felt something in me that needed to go out and help.”While they worked, “people started taking photos, and I had a moment with this one elderly woman where she was looking at it, and she really just started tearing up,” Ben said. “At that moment, I was like, ‘OK, this is actually connecting to people.’”The images have appeared in recent days as the city has become a focal point for protests against Trump’s immigration policies, which began on 6 June amid raids targeting immigrants at several locations in the city.As the protests emerged in parts of LA, Donald Trump called in the national guard without the governor’s consent – an action no president has taken since 1965. Shortly afterward, he summoned hundreds of marines. Much news coverage painted the city as a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, with protesters facing off against troops and cars on fire, fueling Trump’s narrative of a lawless city hopelessly embroiled in chaos.In fact, much of the unrest was confined to a small area of downtown LA. Across most of the vast city and county, life continued as normal, the sun shining over familiar traffic jams, studio lots and suburban sprawl. Still, the protests – and the federal government’s wildly disproportionate clampdown – served as a spark that has helped to fuel a national outcry, as well as this subtler demonstration of local solidarity.Alongside the “Missing” posters were a series of alternative descriptions of Ice – rather than Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, stenciled messages on the pavement and shop windows condemned “Illegal Country-wide Embarrassment”, “Institution of Child Endangerment” and the perhaps less clear “Insecure Confused Ejaculation”.View image in fullscreenOther flyers advertised Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, while still others noted that “Undocumented hands feed you”, with an illustration of a person working in a field. Those latter posters were created by Sydney*, 29, who works in the music industry in Los Angeles. Her 9-to-5 job makes it impossible to attend protests, she said, so creating this image was an alternative way to participate in resistance. “You read something tragic every morning lately about the Ice raids,” she said.She was particularly moved by the plight of agricultural workers, toiling for low wages under the threat of immigration crackdowns. “I just felt very compelled to speak up for them in places that people probably don’t think about them, like Silver Lake and the city,” she said. “I am Latina. I have many family members that came here and are immigrants, and so it just touches home for me.”Inspired by a slogan she saw in protest photos and Mexican decor flags, Sydney created the stylized image as a social media post. “I just wanted to tie something beautiful with something very political and loud,” she said. A friend saw the post, asked if she could print it out, and plastered it around town.That DIY approach adds to the posters’ power: there is a sense of neighbors helping neighbors. As the administration conjures a tale of a city in crisis, the images – unpretentious and haunting – serve as a reminder of what the protests are actually about.* The Guardian is withholding full names for privacy reasons More

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      America is sleepwalking into another unnecessary war | Eli Clifton and Eldar Mamedov

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      As the United States inches closer to direct military confrontation with Iran, it is critical to recognize how avoidable this escalation has been. “We knew everything [about Israel’s plans to strike Iran], and I tried to save Iran humiliation and death,” said Donald Trump on Friday. “I tried to save them very hard because I would have loved to have seen a deal worked out.”As two of the last analysts from an American thinktank to visit Iran, just three weeks ago, we can report that Iran’s own foreign ministry and members of the nuclear negotiating team were eager to work out a deal with Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, and showed no indication they were interested in slow-walking talks.Over the course of conversations held on the sidelines of the Tehran Dialogue Forum, high-level foreign ministry officials expressed concern about the potential for a spoiling effort by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and various staff and officials showed themselves open to considering a variety of scenarios including a regional nuclear consortium for uranium enrichment under international oversight and bilateral areas of diplomatic and economic engagement with the United States.What we heard should have been cause for cautious optimism – yet instead, Washington squandered a rare diplomatic opening, seemingly allowing Israel to start a disastrous war of choice that may soon drag in the US. Contrary to the narrative that Iran was dragging its feet in negotiations, we saw no evidence of deliberate stalling. In fact, Iran’s worsening economic crisis had created a strong incentive for Tehran to strike a deal – one that would provide sanctions relief in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, with even the possibility of broader normalization with the US on the horizon. Middle-class Iranians we spoke with elsewhere in Tehran were frustrated with the economic situation and, despite a highly developed sanctions-resistant economy, eager for sanctions relief allowing them greater access to international travel and trade.Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, emphasized flexibility on nearly every issue outside Iran’s red line on low-level uranium enrichment. That was echoed in private conversations we held with foreign ministry staff and members of the nuclear negotiating team. Domestic enrichment is non-negotiable for Iran but they believed they had front-loaded their concessions to Witkoff, offering up a 3.67% limit on their enrichment with whatever monitoring and surveillance mechanisms were necessary for the US to feel confident the deal was being honored.Enrichment, even at a low level, is a matter of national pride, a symbol of scientific achievement and a defiant response to decades of sanctions, the red line consistently stated in our conversations and one which they thought was agreeable to Witkoff. Iran claimed to be completely blindsided by Witkoff’s 18 May statement that zero enrichment was the only acceptable terms for a nuclear deal but was open to returning to talks to discuss ways forward. After weathering immense economic pain to develop this capability, no Iranian government – reformist or hardline – could feasibly surrender to the zero enrichment demand. The idea that Tehran would dismantle its enrichment program in 60 days, as the Trump administration demanded, was never realistic.This was not mere stubbornness – it was rooted in deep mistrust sown by Trump. The US had already violated the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) by unilaterally withdrawing during Trump’s first term, despite Iran’s verified compliance. Why would Tehran now accept another agreement requiring total denuclearization, with no guarantee Washington wouldn’t renege again?Iranian officials signaled openness to creative solutions, including shipping excess low-enriched uranium to Russia; forming a regional consortium for enrichment; allowing US inspectors to join International Atomic Energy Agency teams – a major shift from previous positions. Other ideas were also floated at the Tehran forum, albeit not from official sources – temporary suspension of enrichment and a pause on advanced IR-6 centrifuges as confidence-building measures. Araghchi’s expressed willingness to return to JCPOA-permitted enrichment levels (below 4%) – was a concession so significant that it drew criticism from Iranian hardliners for giving too much, too soon. This was not the behavior of a regime trying to stall; it was the posture of a government eager for a deal, engaged in an effort to avoid spoilers in Jerusalem, Washington and at home in Tehran, and knowing full well that long, drawn-out negotiations would offer more, not fewer, opportunities for enemies of diplomacy to strike.The US team, led by Witkoff and mediated by Oman, seemed to share this urgency. The Iranian government seemed empowered enough to make a deal – if the US had been willing to take yes for an answer. Yet here we are, on the brink of another Middle East conflict – one that was entirely preventable. Instead of seizing this rare moment of Iranian flexibility, the US chose escalation. The consequences may be catastrophic: a wider regional war, soaring oil prices and the total collapse of diplomacy with Iran for years to come.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt is still possible to step back from the brink. Tehran has signaled willingness to re-engage in talks if Israeli ceases attack. Omani channels remain open. Yet, after the start of the Israeli bombing campaign, the political space for negotiations has shrunk.The US is sleepwalking into another Middle East quagmire, an open-ended war with unclear goals, loose talk of regime change and the potential for a regional conflagration if Iran attacks US military installations in the Persian Gulf. And this war comes after Iran extended a real offer for compromise. If Washington chooses bombs over diplomacy, history will record this as a war not of necessity, but of tragic, reckless choice.

      Eli Clifton is senior adviser at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

      Eldar Mamedov is non-resident fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and member of the Pugwash Council on Science and World Affairs More

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      America had open borders until 1924. Racism and corporate greed changed that | Daniel Mendiola

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      The US immigration system is a scam that dehumanizes people for profit. Communities across the country have had enough.The protests in Los Angeles have invited a long overdue conversation about the true nature of the US immigration system. While the immediate catalysts for the protests were ramped up Ice raids attempting to meet Donald Trump’s arbitrary deportation quotas, the protests spring from a deeper history.In reality, the protests reflect decades-long frustrations with an abusive immigration system designed to dehumanize immigrants, weaken workers and keep wealth flowing upward. Ice’s recent tactics were only the last straw.Excellent articles have shed light on why Los Angeles in particular, with generations of immigrant communities and a history of immigrant rights movements, has emerged as an epicenter of resistance. Whether immigrants themselves, or families, neighbors, coworkers, or friends of immigrants, people in these communities have long experienced the trauma of a system that renders people “illegal” just for doing basic things like getting a job. Similar statements could be made for other major sites of protest such as New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Denver and Houston.While much of the news coverage has turned toward the US president’s mobilization of the military and what that means for his growing authoritarian tendencies, this is only half the story. To fully understand what is at stake in the protests, we can’t lose sight of the thing that drove people to protest in the first place: a violently unfair immigration system that is an affront to us all.It is worth noting that this immigration system is not an original component of US governance. Whereas the first government under the US constitution formed in 1789, there were no federal immigration laws until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and even this law was limited in the sense that it banned a specific class of immigrants. The US did not have closed borders until the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national origins quotas across the board.The primary justifications for these early immigration laws were xenophobia, eugenics, and overt racism. By the 1990s, however, multinational corporations understood that closed borders – especially combined with free trade agreements freeing multinational companies to shop around for “cheap” workers, while at the same time constraining the options of workers to move around and look for better jobs – were a powerful weapon in their arsenal to squeeze ever more profit out of global supply chains. While cleverly hidden behind discourses of “security” and “sovereignty,” our immigration system is actually a scam rigged to guarantee an upward flow of wealth at the cost of human rights.The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) illustrates this dynamic. Signed in 1992, Nafta created a free trade zone among Mexico, Canada and the US, specifically making it easier for goods, capital and corporations to move freely while conspicuously ignoring the movement of workers. Far from an oversight, as the scholar Bill Ong Hing has written, this was the whole point of the agreement.While no US labor unions or other human rights representatives had a seat at the table, the US advisory committee for trade and negotiations – composed almost entirely of representatives of multinational corporations – led the negotiations, ensuring that the agreement followed corporate interests. The drafters wanted easier access to cheaper Mexican labor, but they understood that if Mexicans had the same rights as companies to cross borders in search of better opportunities, then the “invisible hand” of supply and demand might make this labor less cheap. Accordingly, immigration restrictions helped to rig the game. In line with these interests, the Clinton administration, in power when the agreement took effect in 1994, not only went along with the plan to leave immigrants out of the deal, but also doubled down on closed borders with harsh new measures to restrict immigration through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.Ultimately, Nafta and the IIRIRA worked hand-in-hand to trap Mexican workers and give artificial negotiating advantages to multinational corporations. The mechanism made sure that Mexicans would have to either stay put on their side of the border and tolerate whatever working conditions were available, or live without legal status if they did “vote with their feet” to seek better opportunities in the US. In either case, they were far more vulnerable to exploitation. Unsurprisingly, this harmed workers all around, especially Mexicans, leading to stagnant wages, harsh working conditions, and irregular migration that forced people into an exploitative informal economy, even as productivity and corporate profits soared.Significantly, Nafta was not an isolated case, but rather an embodiment of how the US immigration system enshrines this major power imbalance between labor and capital. In fact, the same Clinton administration and private sector advisory committee that oversaw the implementation Nafta also played a key role in creating the World Trade Organization in 1995 following similar principles. Today, multinational corporations continue to move freely around the world, while people seeking a better life continue to face restrictive borders enforced by state violence.At the same time, we as taxpayers pay increasingly absurd sums of money for the violent border security measures that keep this system in place. The American Immigration Council has calculated that since 1994, the annual budget for the US Border Patrol has risen from $400m dollars to more than $7bn in 2024 – an increase of over 700% even when factoring in inflation. They further estimate that since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent more than $400bn dollars on the various agencies that carry out immigration enforcement.Under the current Trump administration, these numbers are set to soar even further. In the same “big, beautiful” spending bill that is already facing backlash for slashing public programs while offering enormous tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, a massive increase in spending for Trump’s signature deportation plan is included. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that this will add $168bn to the deficit over the next five years – already an extreme amount – though the Cato Institute has noted that the CBO calculation left out key variables. In fact, Cato finds that the number could actually be closer to $1tn.In short, our immigration system is a massive grift. It divides communities, separates families, hurts workers, and subjects people to state violence for doing normal things like working at an Italian restaurant or going to church on Mother’s Day. And we as taxpayers subsidize the companies profiting on this abusive system.As I have previously written, the Trump administration has distinguished itself from previous governments by intentionally targeting legal immigrants. However, as protesters flood the streets with signs saying “No One is Illegal,” the deeper significance of this protest movement becomes clear. The message is that someone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shouldn’t depend on their immigration status. And it certainly shouldn’t depend on the whims of multinational corporations who have essentially coopted violent border enforcement for their own profits.As a final thought, I think people are also tired of all the gaslighting. Despite the barrage of official rhetoric claiming that tough immigration measures are for our own good – that they make our communities safer, that they protect jobs, that we shouldn’t feel bad because immigrants don’t deserve to be treated as we would want to be treated ourselves – we know from both academic analysis and our lived experiences that these are all vicious lies, and the policies that spring from these lies have deadly consequences for real human beings. For me, the recent protests demonstrate that communities across the country are standing up to reject these lies.As I think about the significance of this movement, I am reminded of a passage from Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s 2020 book The Undocumented Americans. Reflecting on the power of storytelling as a counterweight to the deluge of dehumanizing assaults immigrants face on a daily basis, she concludes: “What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?”People are protesting because they are fed up. And they are right to be.

      Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More