The American Civil Liberties Union released a report on Tuesday, Oct. 6, slamming President Donald Trump’s mass deportations agenda.
"In the past 20 months, the Trump administration has taken hundreds of actions to consolidate the president’s grip on power, execute a radical redefining of who belongs in America, and enact the largest rollback of civil rights and liberties in recent history," the ACLU report says. "Deportations have provided a pretext, a distraction, and a legal justification all at once, as the administration attacks our individual constitutional rights —impacting all Americans."
The ACLU is a civil rights organization founded to defend rights enshrined in the United States Constitution.
The new 139-page report outlines 76 steps
it says Trump has taken to fundamentally undermine American freedoms and democracy. Among its findings, the Trump White House has used immigration policy to silence journalists, surveil political opponents and trap thousands in a punitive immigration detention system that sees people sent to prisons in countries they have never known before.
USA TODAY has reached out to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment on the ACLU report.
The report comes out at a point where the nation is gearing up for the 2026 midterm elections wherein who controls Congress for the rest of Trump’s final term is at stake. Top Democrats are warning the president and his loyalists are putting a plan in motion to potentially steal ballots and ultimately the election.
"As the administration’s resources and reach grow, no one is safe from its ever-widening net of abuse," the report says.
What’s covered in the ACLU report?
The sweeping report covers some of Homeland Security’s most high-profile moments, including fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, to less-publicized moments, among them the department’s use of license plate readers to track the movement of people nationwide.
But the report is broken down into three categories: 25 attacks on civil liberties, 40 attacks on government institutions and 11 attacks on pluralistic democracy, as in attacks on society’s tolerance of minorities.
The report also offers four solutions, namely immigration reform, banning Homeland Security’s aggressive tactics and strengthening public oversight of government authorities, including the White House.
A full copy of the report is available on the ACLU website.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump’s immigration policy is breaking American democracy, new ACLU report says
