Welcome, deportation tourism
Donald Trump loves him some American flag. It’s Americans he can’t stand. Americans like Manu Borges Santos, age 2, now officially a tourist in Brazil.
Manu is American. She was born Emanuelly Borges Santos in a Fort Lauderdale hospital in September 2022. But in February, she was taken into custody in Florida alongside her mother and father, both of whom were undocumented, and placed on a deportation flight to Brazil, where the family has been plunged into a bureaucratic morass.
It is not known if Manu has a criminal history or any tattoos.
Manu, who is not a citizen or resident of Brazil, was forced to enter the country as a tourist. In the tense months since, as authorities here tried to figure out how to give her legal status, the girl has been left all but stateless — removed from her country of birth and not yet adopted by her parents’ ancestral home. She has no right to routine pediatric checkups in Brazil’s public health-care system. She cannot easily enroll in a Brazilian school or day care. And she’s living on a temporary tourism visa that’s set to expire in weeks.
What then? Does Brazil deport the two-year-old to her home country whose flag-fetishizing president exiled her in February? If so, then birth tourism meets “deportation tourism.” Perhaps Trump will issue a meme coin. It bears his initials.
Manu is not alone. The Migration Policy Institute found in 2020 that “4.4 million U.S.-citizen children had at least one unauthorized immigrant parent.”
Deporting unauthorized immigrants is only part of the MAGA agenda. The administration is also revoking the student visas and green cards of people who’ve committed (or are suspected to have committed) what MAGA considers thought crimes.
As for Manu, her crime was being born at odds with Trump’s edict that the 14th Amendment (a.k.a. the U.S. Constitution) does not apply to persons born on our soil to noncitizens. The U.S. Supreme Court has already indemnified Trump from prosecution for ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate political foes. It will now decide if he can also rewrite the Constitution he’s systematically ignoring. Then we’ll find out if he can also ignore the Supreme Court.
But getting back to little Manu, the American exile:
Last month, at least three American children were sent to Honduras alongside their undocumented mothers. One of the children, who was also 2 years old, was sent against the wishes of her father, court filings assert.
The removal of that child elicited a sharp rebuke from Terry A. Doughty, a federal judge in the Western District of Louisiana. He called it “illegal and unconstitutional to deport” U.S. citizens.
But you know, constitution schmonstitution.
In Jennifer Palmieri’s account of Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hopes and Dreams” show yesterday, she offers this anecdote about being an American outside our borders:
It is not a great time to be an American abroad. I was reminded of this when the security agent at the Manchester airport told me, “You can go ahead and put the eagle away.” He was pointing at the logo of my American passport. There was an edge in his voice that suggested he had been hoping for some time that America would get its comeuppance.
Well. Little Manu has gotten hers for the effrontery of being born in Fort Lauderdale to noncitizen parents. It is not a great time to be an American toddler in exile.
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