Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ reality TV show is both fake and incredibly dangerous

The cruelty was the point when 104 undocumented migrants from India were placed in leg shackles and handcuffs and loaded onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 last week for a grueling 40-hour deportation flight from the United States to the northern city of Amritsar in their native country.

The harsh treatment on the first time a $1 million-a-pop military jet was used for the long-distance India deportation run was not meant to be a secret. To the contrary, the head of U.S. Border Patrol posted a video to the Elon Musk-owned X social media platform showing the shackled deportees getting marched onto the aircraft and issued a warning that “if you cross illegally, you will be deported.”

The American swagger was very much at odds with the anger and rage among the passengers who spent nearly two full days in shackles and, as news of the U.S. military operation spread across India from everyday people and some political leaders in the world’s second-most populous nation, a supposed U.S. ally.

“It was worse than hell,” a deportee named Harvinder Singh told an Indian lawmaker in a widely shared video in which he claimed he was handcuffed and chained the entire flight — which included a refueling stop in Guam — and not allowed to move. Another, 23-year-old Akashdeep Singh, said after landing: “The way [the U.S. troops] looked at us, I’ll never forget it … We went to the bathroom with the shackles on.”

As news of the American hell flight spread across India, lawmakers — some of them wearing shackles — from the opposition party to authoritarian Prime Minister Narendra Modi staged a protest in New Delhi, while young activists at a separate event burned an effigy of President Donald Trump.

Amid the chaos of the first three weeks of Trump’s second term, the Indian outrage got buried in the news cycle. But we should pay close attention to what the new regime in Washington is really doing here. The unusually cruel military deportation flights — which have sparked similar outrage in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere — are just one prong of Trump’s immigration scheme that promised voters “mass deportation,” yet so far is mostly a made-for-TV and puffed-up reality show, albeit with real pain for the cast swept up in it so far.

Still, the fact that the launch of Trump’s “mass deportation” is largely performative — statistically, for now anyway, the numbers of undocumented migrant arrests and deportations are no higher than peak days under Joe Biden — doesn’t make the performance any less alarming, let alone downright un-American. It’s dangerous when our government is staging photo ops and even gaming the internet (stay tuned) to create a fake reality, and it’s appalling when their reality show has already tortured hundreds of mistreated deportees, while causing a nonstop panic attack for millions of immigrants in our communities, and riling up his MAGA base with mostly fake news to make them believe the U.S. is under an invasion.

Two stories this weekend reveal the Trump immigration strategy of fakery and fear. Friday saw another U.S. military flight of deportees — this one into the hastily repurposed American military base and detention camp at Guantánamo Bay on the tip of Cuba. Although just 30 prisoners were aboard the C-130 military cargo plane, Trump has signed an order authorizing as many as 30,000 migrant detainees at Gitmo, as troops are hastily erecting a new tent city there.

We know this because a reporter and photographer for the New York Times — that’s right, the new regime’s supposed “enemy of the people” — were invited to document the moment for their presumably liberal American readers back home. Indeed, new Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even there to mug for the camera, proclaiming that “vicious gang members will no longer have safe haven in our country.”

The images no doubt thrilled Trump’s MAGA base and terrorized decent undocumented people who are working and raising kids back in the United States, and also horrified much of the world (including millions of Americans) who already associate Guantánamo with the torture of post-9/11 detainees.

And yet, the other headline reveals the awareness in Trump World that even the carefully cultivated images of alleged “bad guys” shackled on cargo planes aren’t enough to generate the “shock and awe” that was promised in the first weeks of the new regime.

The Guardian revealed that on Jan. 24, or just four days after Trump’s inauguration, someone from inside the new government pulled up literally thousands of old press releases about years of enforcement actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and put a brand new time stamp on each one.

Why? The perpetrator was apparently trying (successfully, as it turned out) to game the Google algorithms so people searching for what was happening with Trump’s mass deportation scheme — a group that, again, includes both POTUS 47 fans and fearful people in immigrant-laden neighborhoods, among others — would think there was a swirl of ICE activity, even as the stories might actually be from 2008.

Mass deportation — so far, anyway — is really a mass delusion. The scheme reminds me very much of the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, and how Hollywood producers fooled the American people with a studio-faked war in Albania, including a dramatic image of a girl (young Kirsten Dunst) fleeing a terror attack with her kitten that was really a bag of Doritos, digitally altered.

Wag the Dog premiered on the cusp of TV’s “reality show” boom that was led by Trump’s The Apprentice, whose producers reinvented the barely afloat Manhattan developer as a pretend successful business mogul, building a fake boardroom as a TV set because Trump’s real one was so shabby.

Two decades later, Trump’s fake reality show mindset is empowering a new Big Lie that his regime is mass deporting violent criminals and sex offenders. Yet so far, a regime that promised voters millions of deportations has arrested no more than 1,100 migrants on any given day, and last weekend booked just 300, according to NBC News.

Last week, ICE officials gave special access to its preferred TV network, Fox News, for its raid in Aurora, Colo. — where Trump had campaigned in 2024 claiming the city was overrun with Venezuelan gangs that he would clean up. Despite promises that 100 violent gang members would be rounded up, even Fox had to tell its viewers that only about 30 Venezuelans were detained, and it was only able to identify one as a known member of the Tren de Aragua organization. This as the Trump regime has also dispatched 3,600 troops to the U.S. border with Mexico, despite the fact that unauthorized border crossings are at historical lows.

Team Trump is creating its own reality of an empire fighting a war — with pointless troop movements, military air shows, and tent cities that are completely empty inside. At her first White House briefing, Trump press secretary Carolyn Leavitt cited a handful of violent offenders swept up so far, but statistics show as many as half arrested so far have no criminal record.

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Most of the Indian natives who were shackled for 40 hours by U.S. troops had come to America without proper documents, aided by unlawful “travel agents,” to flee a lack-of-jobs crisis in their South Asian homeland, not to commit rapes or robberies. “You see it in movies, and you hear from people around you that there’s work there and people are successful there, so that’s why I also wanted to go,” deportee Sukhpal Singh, a father of two, told CNN.

The Trump regime would argue just the threat of mass deportation is shrinking border crossings to even lower levels. But the side effects of its shackle-bound strategy — especially law-abiding migrants hiding in their attics from ICE, skipping out from work or school and devastating our communities, but also the further tarnishing of America’s image around the world — are far worse than any cure.

Even liberals who want a more humane approach to immigration than either GOP or Democratic administrations have pursued shouldn’t do an end-zone celebration around the low number of arrests so far, and here’s why.

For one thing, Trump’s wag-the-dog fakery around immigration spotlights the MAGA government’s altered-reality approach to just about everything. The president’s weekend moves to take control of the National Archives by firing its head, Colleen Shogan, reveal a regime eager to follow George Orwell’s dictum of controlling the future by controlling the past. His first 20 days have been marked by 72-point headline distractions — the desire for lebensraum in Greenland, a nonsense plan for Gaza, tariffs that come and go — from what is most painfully real, which is an effort by a tech oligarchy to dismantle American democracy.

The bigger worry, though, is that just because the cruelty of mass deportation is largely performative doesn’t mean these performances won’t scale up dramatically in the months ahead. Trump reportedly is already badgering his border czar, Tom Homan, and ICE to meet ambitious arrest targets, which would probably require crueler and more legally dubious measures that would fill those empty tents at Gitmo. If the president needs his phony war against a nonexistent border invasion to distract the American heartland from the coming evisceration of government services, the cruelty will become a bigger and bigger point.

The feminist philosopher Judith Butler wrote in an essay for the Guardian that the “sadistic glee” of Trump’s presidency “depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist — it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance.”

The inhumanity now on display from Amritsar to Aurora is a sneak preview of what will come if we fail to act quickly and decisively. You don’t need Anton Chekhov to understand that you don’t build empty tents at Gitmo in Act One of your presidency unless you plan to fill them in Act Three. While Trump’s “mass deportation” is still mostly fake for the Fox News crowd right now, saving America’s soul requires making it 100% unreal, for good.

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