by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty
Donald Trump’s administration moved this week to declare thousands of immigrants dead.
The 6,000-plus very-much-alive people, predominantly undocumented immigrants from Latin America, continue to eat, sleep, breathe, and work on U.S. soil. Their names have nonetheless been added to the Social Security Administration’s “death master file,” the database used to list dead people who should no longer receive benefits.
The New York Times, the first to report on the perverse repurposing of the death master file, noted with unusual pointedness that the administration was including “the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead.”
The dead have no claim to rights.
Listing immigrants among the dead is a nasty workaround to swiftly remove access to means of survival in this country – permanently cutting off access to benefits, bank accounts, and the ability to legally work. It’s just the latest move in a relentless effort to make life so unliveable for immigrants, such that they will be forced to choose to leave, if not swept up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported first.
This is more than cruel expediency. Death is the point.
The Trump administration is openly stating its willingness to condemn millions of people to civic and social death on multiple fronts, from immigrants marked as dead by the Social Security Administration, to denying trans people access to passports, correct documentation, or any existence according to government records at all.
This is not mere metaphorical killing: Expulsion from official public life can be truly deadly.
Trump’s escalation of necropolitical rule – historian Achille Mbembe’s notion of governance organized around exposing certain groups to premature death and elimination – is producing a fascist reality that threatens to revoke the legal rights of whole swathes of the population.
The dead, after all, have no claim to rights.
Mahmoud Khalil’s Rights
These necropolitical affronts aren’t just visible on Social Security rolls. They are an unspoken part of so many of the immigration cases before us. Take, for example, the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, where he was involved in the anti-genocide protests, and, a permanent resident whose U.S. citizen wife is expecting their first child.
“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked in his March letter from a Louisiana ICE detention center. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”
On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled Mahmoud Khalil can be deported on baseless Trump administration claims that he poses a threat to American foreign policy.
“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family,” Khalil told the judge, after she informed him of her ruling. “I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”
Khalil’s lawyers will be appealing the decision and are pressing a separate habeas corpus petition in federal court in New Jersey. Like the kidnapping and detention of Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed and the revocation of hundreds of student visas apparently for participation in anti-genocide protests, Khalil’s predicament makes a mockery of constitutional protections.
Khalil’s fight against deportation on baseless charges of “antisemitism” and threats to “national security” is indeed a test case for the limits of basic constitutional and human rights under Trump.
“The right to have rights,” which was first mentioned by philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany, highlights that a person is not inherently rights-bearing but must be acknowledged as a member of a political community to be granted any other rights at all. We might speak of universal rights, but they must be recognized and only have material force when recognized by state powers.
It is precisely the removal of the right to have rights, the right to be recognized as a human under law, at which Trump aims.
It is no accident that Palestinians and their supporters are among the first targeted. Israel, the U.S., and the so-called rules-based international order have designated Palestinians outside the bounds of rightful acknowledgment — that is to say, expellable, detainable, and killable — for 76 years.
It is precisely the right to be recognized as a human under law at which Trump aims.
“I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention—imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights,” Khalil wrote in his letter.
Khalil’s lawyers are arguing that he has been targeted by the administration for nothing more than speech that should be protected under the First Amendment. There is even a particular measure in the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act that is supposed to bar the government from deporting people as threats to “foreign policy” for speech alone.
And yet to assert these protections has proved fruitless. Where are Mahmoud Khalil’s rights?
Necropolitics Out in the Open
When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to round up Venezuelan immigrants, this, too, was an attack on the right to have rights. And it is proving successful: The majority of the 200-plus men rounded up on consistently groundless charges of gang membership had no criminal record. That didn’t stop them from being sent, with no due process, to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador.
This policy of extraordinary rendition as deportation only becomes darker with every new detail. U.S. designations of criminality have long been used to strip people of their basic rights. The potentially permanent removal to a totalitarian prison camp would not be justified even if every detainee were convicted of serious crimes.
Take the case of a man who the Trump administration admits was wrongly sent to El Salvador. Despite this admission, the government is fighting to not have to retrieve the man — going so far as to defy a court order on Friday. It reflects a commitment to the removal of demarcated people from the rights-bearing community.
Trump’s Republican Party has been described as a “death cult” since his first term, when MAGA Covid denialism took on deadly and suicidal forms. A rejection of medical science, a welcoming of environmental decimation, an all-out assault on basic welfare provisions, extraordinary worker exploitation, reproductive health care bans, an undying commitment to gunpower – these are typical morbidities of American reaction under capitalism, imbued with a messianic charge under Trump.
Like much of the Trumpian project, the administration this time round has a more honed, violent and unambiguously fascist mode of death-dealing.
Trump’s policies may leave the entire population, including his devoted base, more vulnerable to premature death and debility; Trumpian politics of domination, meanwhile, rely on clearly demarcating so-called enemies and threats as already dead, removable, or killable.
There is, however, at least one way that Trump’s “death cult” turns necropolitics on its head.
Necropolitical governance — the deadly, racist ordering of life and death by Western liberal democracies — have typically sought to administer death behind closed doors or far from home. The public was not supposed to learn about the tortures in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison or the abuses in Guantanamo Bay; the police killings, the racist brutality of prisons; the pollution and its grossly unequal distribution of environmental devastation; and much more.
The Trumpian move is to don the Totenkopf, to embrace and supercharge this monstrous and grossly unequal death tableau.
Khalil, meanwhile, continues to show us what it means to fight for the living.
“After the hearing, Khalil turned around to face the 22 observers and journalists filing out of the courtroom and formed the shape of a heart with his hands,” NPR reported. “He smiled.”
