Undocumented immigrants, indeed immigrants and asylum seekers of all stripes, have been the frequent rhetorical and political targets of President Donald Trump during his presidential campaign and after his return to power in 2025. Now a bankroll of nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars is at his disposal, amassed by his administration with the collaboration of compliant Republicans in Congress.

Last year’s Big Beautiful Bill had already allocated a historic $170 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security for spending through 2029. That enormous outlay was boosted on June 10 with an additional $70 billion. That war chest for immigration enforcement suggests that the turmoil experienced by cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and infamously Minneapolis is only going to continue through the balance of Mr. Trump’s term in office, if indeed the chaos over immigration on U.S. streets does not get much, much worse.

The White House’s goal remains 1 million deportations a year. Where are those numbers of deportees going to come from?

Mario Russell, the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies, has some worries about what may be happening next. “The choices that are being made” reflect “a crisis of imagination, understanding and morality,” he says.

“It’s a proxy,” he says, “a fig leaf for something else.”

It is not about border security, “the border is shut down,” he points out. It’s not about crime as crime rates across the country reach historic lows, and studies consistently find immigrants commit criminal acts at rates far below the native born.

And it’s not about the economy. Some 82 percent of immigrants in the United States above the age of 16 are part of the national workforce, he reports, and many studies have detailed the economic contributions made by immigrants, including in shoring up the nation’s Social Security system.

So what is it? Mr. Russell asks.

That vast spending he fears is being hurried together “for something that’s really more profoundly immoral, a campaign of cleansing, a purging of migrants.”

Was last year’s chaos in U.S. cities far from the border an anomaly in American life or a trial run? Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, promises “an ICE surge” on the streets of New York in retaliation for efforts by New York Governor Kathy Hochul to restrain the agency’s reach in her state. His threats are deeply unsettling in a city that is home to more than 3.1 million foreign-born people from more than 150 countries, representing about 38 percent of the city’s total population.

Could New York become the next Minneapolis?

“I expect it’ll be on a quieter level,” Mr. Russell says, and probably less “publicly inefficient and incompetent” than what was experienced in Minneapolis, where two protesters were killed by agents from ICE and the Border Patrol. “But I think we’ll still see the kind of presence and permeation into communities and frankly terrorizing [of] people in schools and churches or workplaces and homes.”

Mr. Russell marvels at the administration’s indifference to public opinion, which has broadly turned against the pursuit and detention of working immigrants and the disruption it propels in family and community life.

“What does it mean for this administration to sort of telegraph its intention to go into the city that actually has represented the force and strength [of immigration] and [been a] gateway for one of America’s most critical points of identity?” he asks, particularly during what will be America’s 250th anniversary celebration.

Immigrants under threat around the world

But it would be a mistake to believe that the United States was alone in the world in its failure to address tensions and paradoxes related to immigration. More than 304 million people were living outside the nations of their birth in 2024, according to the U.N. International Office for Migration—3.7 percent of the total world population. It is a number that has only ticked higher each year over decades as war, famine, drought, political oppression and poverty press desperate people to cross borders.

In fact, on June 9, just a day after Mr. Homan’s televised threats against the nation’s greatest metropolis, masked men in Northern Ireland rampaged in Belfast, burning the cars, businesses and homes of immigrants or their neighbors in an xenophobic pogrom that was reminiscent of the worst days of the Troubles. The violence began after a horrific attack on the streets of the city perpetrated by a Sudanese asylum seeker, but the mayhem may reflect tensions that have long been escalating because of immigration. Among the families and individuals driven from their homes or terrorized by mobs were Nigerians, Sudanese and other Africans as well as members of the city’s Ukrainian refugee community.

Meanwhile in South Africa, immigrants from Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi and other African states were seeking a way home this week as migrants were targeted in sporadic attacks. Anti-immigrant groups have set a deadline of June 30 for immigrants illegally present in South Africa to leave.

Many native-born South Africans have come to blame immigrants for exacerbating the nation’s chronic unemployment and poor housing conditions. Immigrants are likewise blamed for straining public health and education services.

In an address to the nation on June 8, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged tensions over undocumented immigration but urged South Africans to address the problems without violence or rancor. He committed his administration to work with “sister African countries” to “address the factors that drive migration on our continent and elsewhere.”

“South Africa cannot address migration challenges alone,” he said in an address to the nation. “Migration is a continental and global phenomenon.”

But while confronting the continent-wide phenomenon of undocumented migration, he urged: “We must not allow ourselves to turn against foreign nationals or each other.” He said South Africa’s borders could be protected without offending human dignity.

“We can enforce our laws while upholding our Constitution,” the president said. “Let us build a South Africa that is secure, lawful, compassionate and prosperous.”

The president’s speech offers a glimpse of the kind of frank, reasonable and merciful leadership that the world could use more of at this tense moment as the global migration crisis shows little sign of diminishing. That’s the kind of leadership the United States used to demonstrate, Mr. Russell suggests.

Just compare the South African leader’s comments to the remarks made two days earlier by America’s self-described Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. The secretary spoke at a D-Day commemoration in France on June 6 meant to honor young American men who perished on Normandy’s beaches in a crusade against fascism in 1944, Mr. Hegseth turned to the invasion he apparently believes today threatens western Europe. Just a hint, it’s not Russia.

“Sadly, today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” Mr. Hegseth said. “Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

How is the United States leading on immigration?

“We think about the United States as having an important [global leadership] role, always curating and shepherding a kind of global conscience and consciousness, holding back and holding in the temptations to unleash exclusion and rancor and rage against migrants as the easy psychosocial scapegoat,” Mr. Russell says.

These days the United States is leading the world on immigration in the opposite direction, he worries.

“We are adding fuel to the fire,” Mr. Russell says.

With mountains of cash to burn, the administration has been throwing together juridical and law enforcement instruments meant to drive out immigrants, particularly those from nations the president has colorfully described in a manner unrepeatable here. Potential deportees have disappeared into detention sites often hundreds of miles away from their families and homes and the administration is negotiating bizarre third-party landing sites for refugees and asylum seekers.

On June 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed dumping former Afghanistan officials, interpreters and others who had assisted the U.S. military and their families into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other nations proposed as receivers for people deported or diverted from the United States include Rwanda, South Sudan, Mexico, El Salvador and the Central African Republic.

At the same time, Mr. Trump has personally thrown out a welcome mat for Afrikaner farmers, insisting against all evidence that they are the victims of genocide.

The administration has doubled the numbers of white South Africans it is willing to host this year, funnelled into what remains of a once vibrant refugee resettlement network, now reduced to about 7 percent of its former capacity. Mr. Russell can’t say if the favoritism shown to white farmers and the disfavor shown to everyone else reflects a policy of unfiltered racism. He suggests the administration be measured by its actions and its words.

“When you look at the data around crimes, security threats, health, access to benefits, labor and employment, none of the justifications that the administration gives for why people should be excluded or why the undocumented—14.6 million people—should be deported, makes sense,” Mr. Russell says. “So you are left to ask yourself: What’s the motivation behind this?”

“Res ipsa loquitur, right? ‘The thing speaks for itself.’”

But if American leadership on immigration has fallen by the wayside, Mr. Russell holds up the leadership of at least one American as “extraordinary.” He speaks of Pope Leo XIV, a son of Illinois and now the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics around the world.

Mr. Russell describes the pope’s role on the world stage at his moment as “a gift of conscience, a gift of hope.”

Leo has taken up the cause of the world’s migrating people with the same focus and passion as his predecessor, Pope Francis. Leo has frequently spoken on the dignity of migrating people and their right to welcome and support, but he has also emphasized what might be described as the inverse of that teaching, that people should have the opportunity to remain in the countries and cultures of their birth.

Leo has often highlighted the obligations of affluent nations to attend to both dynamics. Yes, they must manage their borders, but they must also manage the protection of the dignity of sojourners and investments that will allow people to remain rooted in dignity.

Speaking in Madrid on June 6, Leo urged political leaders to resist “the temptation to gain popularity by fanning the flames of polarization” and to “overcome sterile simplifications.”

Just a few days later at a meeting with migrants and the organizations that rescue and accompany them in Gran Canaria on June 11—with the Atlantic looming behind him where so many had perished while seeking to escape their circumstances—Leo said, “We cannot grow accustomed to counting the dead. Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.”

He spoke directly to the migrants present, many of whom had endured brutal treatment at the hands of human traffickers. “You are not just numbers or files,” Leo told them. “You are people who have left behind families and homes. You have dreams that no one has the right to despise.”

Pope Leo has no plans to visit his homeland on its 250th anniversary in July. In fact, he will be spending that day on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, a frequent site of migrant landings from the Mediterranean and the place where Francis began his public ministry in defense of the human dignity of migrating people in July 2013.

Res ipsa loquitur.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).