By his own standards and those of his political base, President Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union address this past Tuesday can be counted as a triumph. He stayed mostly on message, focusing primarily on the economy and immigration, and rather than losing his cool and getting angry at Democrats, he deployed a set piece in which he challenged them to stand up if they agreed with the statement, “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens. Not illegal aliens.”
Almost all Democrats stayed seated, providing a media moment that will likely be replayed many times over in Republican ads for the upcoming midterm elections. As political theater, it was brilliant, maneuvering Mr. Trump’s opponents into a false dilemma in which they appeared to tacitly endorse the opposite of Mr. Trump’s claim, as if they had said, “No, our first duty is to protect illegal aliens,” a claim that, of course, no one believes.
Probably the Democrats should have stood, if only to deny Mr. Trump the made-for-TV moment, and then explained later that of course it is possible both to protect American citizens and to respect the civil rights of both documented and undocumented immigrants; and further, that the first duty—the duty which Mr. Trump and legislators alike swore an oath to uphold—is to support and defend the Constitution, which codifies those rights. While their instinct in the moment was probably not to take the bait Mr. Trump dangled before them, that wound up being exactly the hook on which they were caught.
The false dilemma between protecting citizens and protecting immigrants, however, was threaded through Mr. Trump’s address much more deeply than that one stunt. Throughout his nearly two-hour address, among his celebration of the Olympic champion U.S. men’s hockey team, his praise of the military and his awarding of two Medals of Honor, he highlighted victims of crimes committed by immigrants.
He introduced Dalilah Coleman and her father, the former a 5-year-old who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a crash caused by an immigrant tractor-trailer driver who was speeding and ignoring construction signs; the mother of Lizbeth Medina, a 16-year-old who was stabbed to death by an immigrant who Mr. Trump said had been previously arrested and released; and the mother of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old war refugee from Ukraine who was stabbed and killed by a mentally ill man whom Mr. Trump falsely said “came in through open borders” when in fact he had been born in Charlotte, N.C.
Mr. Trump is eager to tell these tragic and heart-wrenching stories. But there are parts of the stories he does not bother to tell.
One such part of the story is the legal complexity of immigration status. The Department of Homeland Security said Partap Singh, the driver of the tractor-trailer that injured Dalilah Coleman, crossed the southern border illegally in 2022 and was released into the country by the Biden administration. The Trump administration has often used misleading descriptions for asylum seekers who entered the country legally and were released on parole pending an asylum hearing; Politico claims this was the case for Mr. Singh. Mr. Trump also neglected to mention that Dalilah’s father, Marcus Coleman, said last September that the focus should not be on whether the “guy’s illegal or legal or anything like that” in an interview with a local TV station. That piece also quotes California governor Gavin Newsom saying that Mr. Singh had a valid federal work permit—i.e., he was not an illegal alien.
Similarly, Rafael Romero, who last year pleaded guilty to killing Lizbeth Medina, had entered the country legally in 2018 during the first Trump administration on a work visa that he then overstayed. He was arrested for burglary in 2022. After pleading no contest to those charges in April 2023, he was sentenced to probation by a Texas court before killing Ms. Medina on Dec. 5, 2023.
Another part of the story that Mr. Trump does not tell is about how effective immigration enforcement might be at preventing crimes. While it is clear that Mr. Romero could not have murdered Ms. Medina had he been deported after being sentenced for burglary, the same logic does not apply to the accident in which Dalilah Coleman was injured. Even though Mr. Trump used her story to call for a law to forbid issuing commercial driver’s licenses to undocumented migrants, Mr. Singh had legal status when he was issued his license.
The larger pattern here, as I argued a few months ago, is that “any crime committed by an immigrant is being treated as a more serious violation than similar crimes committed by citizens born in the United States.” Even though we know that immigrants commit crimes at rates lower than the native-born U.S. population, the story that Mr. Trump and his supporters tell is that every crime committed by any immigrant is a sacrilege against American security, demanding an overwhelming response.
Finally, there is a set of stories that Mr. Trump avoided telling at all during his State of the Union address. He did not utter the names of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal immigration agents during the recent enforcement surge in Minneapolis. In fact, he did not talk at all about his administration’s urban surge operations and the unrest they caused in U.S. cities for most of the past year. Nor did he talk about Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, even though he and his parents have active asylum claims. Nor did Mr. Trump tell the story of ChongLy Thao, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Laos whom immigration agents handcuffed and dragged out of his house into the snow wearing only shorts and sandals, before later releasing him without explanation or apology.
It is not possible to force Mr. Trump to tell these stories during the State of the Union address any more than it is possible to force him to be accurate about his economic claims or tell both sides of the crime stories that he does recount. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump remains responsible for the stories that arise from his administration’s indiscriminate and inhumane immigration enforcement. In the stories Mr. Trump tells, he is valiantly keeping the United States safe from dangerous immigrant criminals. But in the story we are all living together, his continued hateful rhetoric about immigrants and his push for maximal enforcement is endangering not only the rights of immigrants but also the rights of all Americans. Sadly, the story of civil rights being endangered seems likely to prove truer and more lasting than the exaggerated stories of immigrant crime.
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