Disclaimer: All authors are American citizens. We were all born in the United States of America.

This isn’t a proclamation that writers for the Trinitonian normally have to make, but after the Trump administration attempted to illegally deport Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk and Moshen Mahdawi in 2025, some of us feel we don’t have a choice. The presidential administration views students as a threat, and will stop at nothing to silence them. If anything happens to any one of the five of us in the coming weeks, at least that’s on the record now.

But we’d be writing this even if we weren’t citizens. Journalism doesn’t require a birth certificate. Witnessing injustice doesn’t require papers. All five of us are documenting what’s happening because the San Antonio we know, the one where most of us are Black or Brown, is worth fighting for.

San Antonio is not a sanctuary city. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement activity is happening here every day. Just 16 minutes from campus, ICE purchased a detention center. An article by the San Antonio Current illustrated the horrifying similarities between immigration processing centers and the Crystal City Alien Enemy Detention Facility — a Japanese internment camp. It has a picture of internment camp survivors wearing shirts that read “Stop Repeating History.”

Read that again. They’re repeating one of America’s most shameful historical mistakes, just 16 minutes from campus, and they don’t even have the decency to pretend it’s different this time.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has never been about enforcing existing immigration law. It’s about systematically stripping legal protections from immigrants to manufacture a larger class of immigrants to deport.

Donald Trump has been systematically removing legal status for millions of immigrants every single day. He’s creating a larger class of undocumented people by invalidating their documents. He’s done this for refugees who came here under the Biden administration, stripping 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela of their humanitarian parole status.

He’s also removed people from Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The decades-old program which exists as part of the Department of Homeland Security, for “eligible foreign-born individuals who are unable to return home safely due to conditions or circumstances preventing their country from adequately handling the return.”

Trump and Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, are not enforcing the law. They’re rewriting it in real time to criminalize people retroactively.

ICE operates with near-impunity now. They’re conducting workplace raids, pulling people out of churches, detaining students on their way to class. They’re not checking papers. They’re meeting quotas. And when agents are incentivized to make arrests by any means necessary, livelihoods become collateral damage.

It’s been just over a year since Donald Trump took office for the second time, and this behavior has already become the new normal.

We understand the counterargument: “They’re here illegally. They broke the law. They’re making us less safe.”

Here’s the reality: Unlawful presence in the U.S. is a civil offense, not a crime. It is handled in civil court like a zoning violation. But deportation proceedings offer fewer protections than traffic court — and most people being deported right now aren’t getting trials at all.

And the safety claim? Undocumented immigrants are arrested at half the rate of U.S. citizens for violent crimes. This pattern has held for 150 years.

Moreover, the debate over “legal vs. illegal” misses the point entirely. What’s happening now isn’t a systematic redefinition of who counts as a person deserving of rights, but instead a more explicit return to America’s original design. No one’s Making America Great Again; America has never been great for people who aren’t white. Citizenship has never fully protected people of color in America. Black people were property. Native people weren’t citizens until 1924. Japanese Americans were citizens and still got put in camps.

What’s different now is just speed, scale and normalization. The law has lost its power as a neutral arbiter of justice — it is now being wielded as a tool to decide who gets to be a human in America. And it always has been.

So if this isn’t about law or safety, what’s it about? It’s about terrorizing communities in a city that’s two-thirds non-white. It’s about acting upon a ideology that’s villainized people of color for decades — continuing their mistreatment as an accepted norm. The shift from “family separation is a crisis” to “well, what did they expect?” is conditioning.

But we’re not shutting up. We’re putting this on the record because history needs witnesses. We want the future to know that this is the moment when being an American citizen stopped being enough protection if you had the wrong skin color, wrong name or the wrong opinion.

And this is also the moment where we refused to let that be the end of the story.

*Though this column includes five members of our staff, it does not reflect the stance of the Trinitonian as a whole.