Donald Trump is dead serious about sanctioning illegal immigration. Why anyone would stand against such a proposition is a question rarely asked in corners of American discourse. Perhaps that’s because of the unspoken arrangement that exists between the ruling economic class and the underpaid immigrant who mows the lawn or scrubs the toilet in silence. In these quiet transactions, a certain understanding prevails—“don’t ask, don’t tell” as a national mantra that keeps the system running even as it renders the real questions invisible.

To those legal immigrants who followed the system by the letter of the law—who paid the visa fees, shouldered the debt, and navigated every legal obstacle—it is a particular insult to see others slip in through the back door. These legal immigrants mortgaged their futures on the promise of America, only to discover a system that has turned a blind eye to the shadow economy that lives in the cash-in-hand, no-questions-asked world of fake IDs and Social Security numbers. For them, it never occurred to acquire the American Dream illegally. Yet they can still relate, on some level, to those who chose to break the law and live the dream under the constant threat of detention and deportation. That’s the dream lived under psychological terror.

Illegal immigration isn’t confined to the flyover states or the sun-bleached stretches of California. It’s also embedded in the very heart of New York City where illegal immigrants prop up the billionaire class in their penthouses, and where the city’s food supply is so laced with sugar and chemicals it might as well be dessert.

Illegal immigrants are no anomaly. They’re woven into the very fabric of American life—nannies, chauffeurs, cooks, and cleaners, part of an economy that politely looks the other way.

So are we surprised by the protests? We should not be. We have trained ourselves to believe that illegal immigration is the natural order of things, a fact of life to be defended rather than questioned.

Trump has chosen to strike at this carefully constructed bull’s-eye with no mercy. His stance is not a policy accident—it is personal. Both Ivana and Melania Trump came to America legally, and his position is not only political but shaped by the testament of their experience. Trump has four children with legal immigrants.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have taken up the mantle of championing the undocumented, even as these immigrants cannot vote. In a country where requiring identification at the polls is seen as a threat to democracy itself, the political calculation is not hard to read: cast the other side as heartless, and forget to mention the crucial adjective—“illegal.”

On Sunday, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act should protests—whether genuine or manufactured—erupt into violence. He has learned from the past. He watched what the George Floyd protests turned into and saw what happens when the executive branch hesitates. This time, he won’t. Trump sees these political unrests not as noble cries for justice but as the well-worn tactics of political subversion.

He understands the game because he’s seen it played before. His first term was marked by the very tactics Washington uses to engineer early elections in countries it deems ripe for regime change. But this time, he sees himself as the target. With European leaders who have tasted that same medicine on their side, Trump seems determined to wield the presidency’s vast powers without blinking. Trump’s hardline stance on illegal immigration signals a no-holds-barred approach to domestic unrest, power politics and America’s quiet compromise.

The 47th president, unlike those who preceded him, sees the office not as a caretaker’s role but as a weapon of last resort. “They spit, we hit,” he said on Sunday—a phrase that distills his worldview into four brutal words. If history is any guide, he’ll hit back twice as hard.

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Ksenija Pavlovic is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Pavlovic Today, The Chief White House Correspondent. Pavlovic was a Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Fellow in the Political Science department at...

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