Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Destroying Families

One late night in October 2025, I received a message asking for help for a struggling mother. The week before, her husband had left their apartment to buy groceries for his young family, including infant formula for their five-month-old son. His wife, who was struggling to breastfeed the baby, stayed home and waited for him to return. Instead, masked and unidentified men seized him on the street on his way to the store, forced him into an unmarked vehicle, and drove away. Panicked and confused, he managed to call his wife the next day but could not explain where he was or what would happen next. As her husband was the family’s sole breadwinner, she was suddenly alone: with an infant, with no income, and unable to communicate effectively in English. Only later did she learn that her husband—who had lawful temporary immigration status to live and work in the United States—had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and thrown into jail with no hearing.¹

As part of a small grassroots immigrant advocacy organization, I responded to my fellow volunteers. We started the quick help to find groceries, infant formula, a breast pump, and diapers for the terrified mother. Though she was very grateful for the help, we were left with no solution to reunite the father with his family. Unfortunately, stories like the one I just told—parents abducted while driving to or at work, students afraid to walk to school, US citizen children forced to leave the United States to reunite with deported parents, and children left behind to care for themselves—have become so common that they hardly register as news anymore.

This new reality feels like a dystopian fiction, but examples of cruelty toward immigrants and their families are quickly becoming the norm. And though the current Trump regime is driving this destruction, the truth is that we are living with the predictable consequences of a legal and political infrastructure created decades ago.

Although the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 is often remembered as the “amnesty bill” for its legalization program for certain agricultural workers, its true legacy is more complex. IRCA became a keystone in the foundation of oppressive law and policy targeting immigrants: strengthening the bureaucratic, ideological, and infrastructural systems that now enable the Trump regime’s continued destruction of immigrant families.

On its face, IRCA seemed like one of the most significant pro-migration measures in the United States. Labor shortages had been caused by the US government’s racialized targeting of Latino immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, beginning with the 1924 Immigration Act and continuing through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In response to these shortages, and with strong support from free-market champion President Ronald Reagan, the US Congress passed IRCA with three prominent goals: (1) creating strict prohibitions against employers hiring undocumented workers; (2) increasing anti-migration enforcement measures at the border; and (3) offering legalization to certain undocumented agricultural workers already in the United States.

To be sure, the collective memory of IRCA centers on the third goal. It is often recalled as a moment when Congress and the president generously offered a path to immigration status stability for undocumented agricultural workers. But this narrative obscures the statute’s design and its consequences. In addition to the effects of the employer verification and border enforcement provisions, the legalization requirements were limited, onerous, stratified, and deeply gendered.

In fact, IRCA’s two primary legalization tracks—the general amnesty program and the Special Agricultural Workers program—were calibrated to benefit men with long work histories in agriculture or other formal sectors. Women, whose labor was often performed in the home or the informal economy, were systematically excluded. Children, too, were left without independent status, and IRCA contained no provisions to ease the migration of eligible workers’ families.

Thus, IRCA produced a legalization system organized around a narrow, male-coded vision of the immigrant worker. And in so doing, even this “generous” bill left wives, partners, and children outside its protections.

This gendered exclusion was not incidental. By offering status primarily to male workers while denying it to their families, IRCA created a structure in which women and children remained dependent on—and vulnerable to—the sociopolitical winds of the immigration system, deepening the patriarchal origins of immigration law. IRCA thus drove those left out of the narrow eligibility requirements, including many women, deeper underground in the shadows of the undocumented population. By separating the legal status of men from the dependency of their families, IRCA hardened gendered vulnerabilities, destabilizing households.

Today, this fragile family structure is exploited as the Trump regime disappears and detains tens of thousands of migrants, including those with lawful status, tearing children from parents and partners apart from each other.² In fact, in their violent fervor, ICE has apprehended United States citizens; and, despite public claims that enforcement targets people with criminal convictions, the majority of those people detained have no criminal record. The effect is that thousands of families—many of whose members have been in this country lawfully and long-term—are sent adrift.

Even more enduring than its legalization provisions was the infrastructure created by IRCA. Employer sanctions (which later evolved into the E-Verify program), along with increased border militarization, helped set the stage for normalized surveillance and violent enforcement.³ And by constantly threatening removal, IRCA normalized family separation. Thus, long before the first Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance and Family Separation policies in 2017 and 2018, IRCA created the bureaucratic pathways that established family separation as a tool to deter migration and punish immigrants.

Just a decade later, in 1996, Congress transformed IRCA’s foundations into a punitive enforcement apparatus through three statutes passed: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Together, these laws created mandatory detention, expanded grounds of removability, introduced expedited removal, eliminated many forms of judicial review, and excluded immigrant families from the social safety net. The 1996 laws hardened IRCA’s logic into a tool of punishment, operationalizing the idea that undocumented immigrants were criminals, welfare threats, and national security risks.

And furthering the purposes of IRCA, the 1996 statutes helped fuel the rise of a behemoth immigration prison industry, buoyed by expanded removability provisions. An inevitable byproduct of this punitive enforcement regime was the forcible separation of parents, partners, and children, and the destruction of their families.

Seen through these decades of recent history, today’s scenes of street abductions, unconstitutional apprehensions and detentions, children too afraid to attend school, and mothers left alone and unsure how to feed their infants are unsurprising. These crimes were planted in the earliest seeds of immigration federalization, fortified by IRCA and its progeny, and expanded through the Zero Tolerance and Family Separation policies of the first Trump administration. Indeed, the Trump regime has only revived and normalized the use of family separation as governance, deploying state violence in everyday spaces like grocery stores, courthouses, schools, and workplaces, abducting and separating parents, caregivers, and children.⁴

The migrant family separation crisis produces devastating, lifelong trauma. Bureaucratic ineptitude and purposeful opacity often make it difficult, if not impossible, for families to locate their loved ones. And women—who disproportionately carry the burden of caregiving and are often left alone when partners are kidnapped—are pushed into deeper poverty and isolation.

This is authoritarian governance. Fascism uses state power, fear, and rigid definitions of national belonging to justify tearing families apart, treating the separation of parents and children as an acceptable tool of the state. Moreover, this is not a relic of US history rooted in slavery, Indigenous family destruction, or the internment of Japanese Americans. The Trump regime deploys these logics openly. There is a clear line from the earliest phase of immigration law—from the infrastructure created by IRCA to the fortification in the 1996 statutes—to the current horrific reality.

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Thus, despite its lore of generous legalization provisions, IRCA is a key component of the complex structure that terrorizes families today. By institutionalizing immigrant illegality, producing gendered vulnerability, and enabling later punitive expansions, IRCA enabled the Trump regime’s current campaign of family separation. The US government’s message is clear: the family is not a unit to be protected but a target to be dismantled.

To prevail against the current crisis, we must understand that these tactics are not unprecedented. They are the logical culmination of a centuries-long project to control immigrant life through surveillance, punishment, and fear. To break this emerging authoritarian infrastructure, we must insist that every family, regardless of immigration status, is entitled to safety, dignity, and the full protection of the law.