The executive branch, as enforcer of the law, holds an arsenal of powers it may lawfully use but usually does so sparingly. A president could pardon every federal prisoner in the country, or order the IRS to audit, aggressively and by the book, every donor to the opposing party. A president could direct prosecutors to charge every technical violation on the books, from feeding wildlife in a national park to obscure paperwork errors, against anyone he or she chooses.
All of this would be legal, yet it doesn’t happen. The repercussions would be enormous: liability, judicial intervention, congressional oversight, bad publicity, lost midterms, a lost White House, and successors who seek revenge.
Immigration is different.
President vs. Immigrants
For a year and a half, the world has watched the United States wage a campaign against both immigrants and those hoping to become American citizens. Most of it has been done by the president acting alone. He can deport people through expedited removal , which strips any judicial review. He can bar entry by nationality , quietly tell consular posts to refuse more visas, and set the refugee ceiling near zero . He can end parole and cancel temporary protected status for countries in crisis , making hundreds of thousands of lawfully present people removable overnight.
All of it has happened, and the courts have largely let it stand .
The administration has targeted people with and without any criminal background. It has established informal quotas, such as 3,000 deportation arrests a day and a million deportations a year. This has led to questionable searches, seizures, and arrests, as well as degrading conditions and detention that stretch on. A pending lawsuit alleges that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) handed the immigration files of detained Iranian asylum seekers, including the bases of their claims, to Iranian consular officials in the United States, and that some of those applicants were then deported to Tehran.
Since restraint is practiced across so much of America’s criminal justice system, why are immigrants hit from every angle? True, immigrants are easy targets, anti-immigration policy is red meat for the base ahead of the midterms, and quotas achieved make for good television.
But there is a less obvious reason.
At home, the White House has nothing to fear beyond words. Although public outcry has been loud, the White House has ignored it. The noncitizen, sadly, cannot push back with anywhere near the force of a citizen. They cannot vote, and if removed, have no member of Congress to petition. They also face steep barriers to standing and diminished constitutional protection in reaching any remedy a court might offer. Even if a detention were procedurally defective, it does not undo the removal or the imprisonment that followed. Where no pressure can be applied, none is felt, and the executive proceeds unbothered.
Except in one place. U.S. noncitizens are still citizens elsewhere, and their governments have embassies in and relationships with Washington. And the Trump administration might actually listen to these governments.
Such diplomacy, however, is delicate, pragmatic, and interests-based. Harsh removals can strain relations and jeopardize whatever the United States wants from those countries. The more the United States wants, the more it will take into consideration the concerns over treatment of its nationals.
India vs. South Korea
On February 5, 2025, a US Air Force C-17 landed in Amritsar carrying 104 Indians, one of whom told the BBC he had been handcuffed for the entire 40-hour flight. India’s parliament erupted. The Indian foreign minister told lawmakers that ICE procedure had permitted restraints since 2012 and that nothing had changed. Nothing did. Ten days later a second military flight landed at the same airport with the men aboard still in shackles, this time after Modi had visited the White House.
South Korea got something else entirely. On September 4, ICE raided the Hyundai and LG battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia, arresting 475 people, more than 300 of them Korean, in what DHS called the largest single-site enforcement action in its history. The agency published its own video of workers waiting to have their legs shackled.
Then Washington folded, and it folded in stages. Within three days, Seoul announced that negotiations for the workers’ release had concluded. The administration agreed to process them as voluntary departures rather than deportations, which preserved their eligibility to return instead of triggering a 10-year bar. A Korean official confirmed that the workers would fly home without restraints .
Then Trump personally ordered the repatriation paused so that the two governments could discuss whether the workers should stay after all. They left Atlanta on a Korean Air charter on September 11, and the foreign minister who had been shouted at by his own parliament three days earlier was in Washington pressing Rubio for more skilled worker visas. Trump said publicly that America needed foreign workers to train Americans.
The Indians were treated worse and received a speech. The Koreans were treated better and received a personal intervention from the president of the United States. The difference was not the conduct and not the law. It was the $4.3 billion plant, the 20 other industrial sites Korean firms are building on American soil, and a lawmaker in Seoul asking out loud whether his country had given its money and its technology only to be treated like this. The lesson is that Washington responds not to the severity of the mistreatment but to the leverage of the state complaining.
Other Cases
Other cases fall along the same spectrum. Brazil, near the top, got a gesture. When a deportation flight diverted to Manaus in January 2025, Brazilian federal police boarded it, removed the handcuffs from all 88 Brazilians, forbade the American agents from replacing them, and Brazilian leader Lula sent an Air Force KC-30 to finish the journey.
Colombia tried something similar. Colombian President Gustavo Petro turned back two military flights the next day, demanded civilian aircraft, and was met with 25 percent tariffs rising to 50, visa revocations, and enhanced inspections. He capitulated the same night, and the White House announced that Colombia had agreed to unrestricted acceptance of deportees on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay.
Smaller states with less leverage accepted deportees from other countries in exchange for trade and visa concessions. Guatemala and Honduras began receiving other nationalities, and over 1,000 Hondurans, Salvadorans, Mexicans, and Nicaraguans have been transferred to Guatemala since the fall of 2025.
Ghana, facing tariffs and visa restrictions, accepted West Africans removed from the United States, some of whom were woken in the middle of the night and not told their destination until hours into a military cargo flight. Eleven were held in military detention. Its foreign minister called the arrangement humanitarian and denied any compensation, then conceded on Ghanaian television that Washington had tied it to visa restrictions, a trade deal, and a 15 percent tariff. When Accra agreed to take 40 more, Washington restored five-year multiple entry visas and granted tariff exemptions. Months later Ghana was swept into a 75-country pause on immigrant visas anyway. The deportees, meanwhile, had been quietly pushed across the border into Togo, several of them not Togolese, which put them beyond the reach of the Ghanaian court hearing their case.
Mexico
Mexico occupies a category of its own. It is America’s largest trading partner, its partner against drug cartels, and the front line of border enforcement. As has long been the pattern, Mexico has given more, and more willingly, than any partner Washington has asked anything of, and has been repaid in the usual currency. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum deployed 10,000 National Guard troops to the border and has transferred 55 high-level traffickers into U.S. custody, among them Rafael Caro Quintero, wanted for four decades in the killing of a DEA agent. Her government advanced tariffs of up to 50 percent on Asian goods to answer Washington’s complaints about Chinese transshipment and agreed to guarantee Rio Grande water deliveries when Trump threatened tariffs over the 1944 water treaty. Mexico has also received nearly 190,000 repatriated nationals under its “México te abraza” (Mexico embraces you) reception program and quietly took more than 18,000 deportees who were not Mexican at all.
The strategy bought results. Trump paused tariffs on USMCA-compliant goods repeatedly, once announcing he did so as an accommodation “out of respect for” Sheinbaum. What cooperation never purchased was the safety of Mexicans inside the United States. Seventeen Mexican nationals have died in ICE custody or during ICE operations since May 2025, four of them at a single California detention center. The most recent, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Houston resident of 35 years with no criminal record, was shot by an ICE agent on his way to work in July 2026, after agents reportedly mistook him for a Guatemalan citizen.
Before any of these cases reached a courtroom, Mexico worked through every instrument diplomacy offers, sending 11 diplomatic notes demanding investigations, ordering consular visits to detention centers increased from weekly to daily , raising the deaths with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and writing to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Nothing changed, and in July 2026 it moved into American courtrooms . Mexico filed criminal complaints with state prosecutors, referred the cases to the Department of Justice, announced civil suits against the companies that operate the detention centers, and sent cease-and-desist letters to the facilities where its citizens died, beginning with Adelanto.
When Diplomacy and Cooperation Dies
Leverage only works when the United States believes that its ally could walk away from the table. U.S. officials well understood that South Korea, despite the $4.3 billion committed to Ellabell alone and 20 more Korean projects underway on American soil, could build its next 20 plants in Poland or Vietnam rather than in Georgia.
Mexico cannot make that threat, because it shares a 2000-mile border with the United States and its factories sit within a day’s truck drive of American assembly lines, so it cannot relocate any of it. It has also run out of leverage. Every concession over the past decade became the starting point for the next negotiation, until cooperation was no longer requested but assumed. Mexico has given everything and has little left to withhold, which is why a lawsuit is what remains.
What emerges in these examples is therefore not an equal enforcement policy but rather a Trump-era price list. Consular protection is a serious prerogative, and each of these governments was entitled to exercise it. The trouble is that intervening worked only in proportion to what each had to offer, so the shackles came off in Atlanta and stayed on in Amritsar for reasons having nothing to do with the men wearing them.
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Deportation Has a Foreign Policy Price
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.