THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 35
used the full extent of his political office
to bring detention and deportation and
death to our communities.”
One of the most fastidious chron-
iclers of this vast record is Lucas Gut-
tentag, a law professor at Yale and Stan-
ford. Guttentag is in his sixties, with
plastic-framed glasses and the warmth
of a genial high-school principal. In
the eighties, he founded the A.C.L.U.’s
Immigrants’ Rights Project, and later
worked in Barack Obama’s Depart-
ment of Homeland Security. When
Trump came to power, Guttentag was
alarmed not just by the pace of execu-
tive orders but also by the dozens of
provisions tucked within them like “tick-
ing time bombs,” as he put it. One cre-
ated a special office to study the effects
of crimes committed by “criminal aliens.”
Another sought to expand the use of
“expedited removal,” a tool for fast-track-
ing deportations.
In the fall of 2017, Guttentag as-
sembled a group of law students in a
wood-panelled room at Yale. He pro-
posed creating a communally sourced
database of every change that Trump
made to the immigration system. “So
many things have happened in year one
of Trump that are already receding from
our memory, because we’re looking at
the latest disaster,” he said. “If we don’t
keep track, it will take a new Adminis-
tration years just to unearth everything
that’s happened.” They called it the Im-
migration Policy Tracking Project. Gut-
tentag hoped that the database would
prove useful to whoever succeeded Trump.
“Going forward, we’re going to capture
everything,” he told the team. “Someday
we’ll need a road map for reversing all
this damage.”
T
he students carved up immigra-
tion policy into what one of them,
Rebecca Chan, described to me as “lit-
tle fiefdoms”: humanitarian protections,
labor laws, immigrant visas, citizen-
ship. Then they performed a kind of
public-policy forensics, searching for
evidence of new policies in the Fed-
eral Register, legal blogs, government
Web sites, Listservs for immigration
attorneys, and nonprofit newsletters.
When they found a change, they logged
it in a private database, along with the
text of the Obama-era policy that pre-
ceded it, and might otherwise be lost.
They worked in relative secrecy: some
students worried that their database
would get hacked by white-supremacist
trolls or be co-opted by Trump officials
for bragging rights.
Many of the tweaks in the Tracker
seem deceptively mundane. Last year,
the Administration finalized a rule to
nearly double the cost of the natural-
ization application, from six hundred
and forty dollars to a thousand and
thirty. (A federal judge in California
blocked the rule’s implementation,
much as dozens of other changes iden-
tified in the Tracker have been en-
joined in court.) Guttentag told me,
“Literally changing one single word
on a form can make a lot of differ-
ence.” In January, 2020, the ombuds-
man for U.S. Citizenship and Immi-
gration Services issued an alert that
the agency had begun rejecting cer-
tain paperwork if the blank spaces
weren’t filled out with the term “N/A,”
for “non-applicable.” In December,
U.S.C.I.S. redesigned the civics exam
given to those applying for citizen-
ship, doubling the number of ques-
tions, and giving some answers a
conservative bent. The answer to the
question “Who does a U.S. Senator
represent?” used to be “All people of
the state,” but now specifies “Citizens
of their state.” All told, new admin-
istrative hurdles and other obstacles
have cut the number of
legal immigrants to the
U.S. nearly in half.
By the end of Trump’s
Presidency, Guttentag’s
Trackers had logged a
thousand and fifty-eight
changes to the immigra-
tion system. Early in the
process, he gave me access
to the Tracker, and I began
to report on the human toll
of the lesser-known policies, enlisting
a team of postgraduate fellows from
the Global Migration Project at Co-
lumbia’s Journalism School. In the past
few years, we have spoken to two hun-
dred people who bore the brunt of
these changes, and found more than
sixty cases of irreparable harm that re-
sulted, including torture, sexual assault,
and death.
We followed, for instance, one of
the “ticking time bombs” that Gut-tentag spotted in Trump’s early orders:
the sanctioning of countries that refused
to accept deportees. Recent conflict
zones, including Somalia, Iraq, and Af-
ghanistan, were pressured into receiv-
ing deportees even as their own gov-
ernments expressed doubts about their
ability to insure the safety of those
who had been repatriated. In 2017, the
number of people deported to these
so-called “recalcitrant” countries more
than doubled; Mauritania saw a ten-
fold increase between 2016 and 2018,
despite the fact that Black Mauritani-
ans are often imprisoned and tortured
by the government. My Columbia team
matched the pressures placed on “re-
calcitrant countries” to more than a
dozen cases in which people faced ir-
reparable harm.
Soon after Trump took office, thou-
sands of Somalis were slated for de-
portation. (The Obama Administra-
tion, too, had pushed the country to
accept deportees.) Some reported being
shackled for forty hours, beaten, called
the N-word, and told that they were
being flown “back to the jungle.” (ICE
has denied the beatings, and declined
to comment on the racist language.)
Ahmed Salah, an asylum seeker in his
late twenties, was forcibly returned to
Somalia during Trump’s first week in
office. His cellmate claims that ICE
agents coerced his signature on the re-
quired paperwork, and said,
“Trump decides now.” (ICE
did not respond to requests
for comment on Salah’s
case.) Two years later, Salah
was killed in a car bombing
likely set off by Al-Shabab
insurgents. “He was a vic-
tim on both sides,” Salah’s
wife told me, from Moga-
dishu. “The anti-American
extremists on the one hand,
and the anti-immigrant Americans on
the other.”G
uttentag developed a deep under-
standing of technocratic minutiae
during his time in the Obama Admin-
istration. After years spent suing the
federal government, he joined D.H.S.,
in 2014, as a senior counsellor; at the
time, Obama was trying to address
critics’ claims that he had become the
country’s “Deporter-in-Chief.” The