Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart reads today like a love letter — and a warning — a tale of hunger and hope in a country supposedly flowing with “milk and honey.” For many Filipinos, the United States is the bastion of democracy, the place where everything is just and right, where the law is bounded by restraint, due process, and civic decency.

Snap out of it, and take off the rose-colored glasses.

Donald Trump sells his brutal immigration crackdown as a long overdue retaking of sovereignty, a return to order after years of lax control. Yet his critics see something else — profiling, overreach, and the casual expansion of state power in the name of “security.” Alas, that word is doing a lot of dirty work these days.

Let’s be blunt. Trump’s ICE agents have been operating like thugs. In another century, they would be wearing white hoods; today they wear masks. In some ways, it is worse. Racist members of the Ku Klux Klan had to hide their faces because they knew they were criminals.

Today, Trump’s toy soldiers wear masks, flaunt their guns, and act as if their badge is a permit for impunity. When an ICE agent can murder Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis and still be defended as part of “enforcement,” the message to immigrants is clear enough: You may be lawful, you may be harmless, but you are disposable.

Filipinos might be tempted to treat this as background noise, a border story centered on Latin American migration. And why not? Filipinos are rarely the public face of “illegal immigration.” But once rough enforcement is normalized, it becomes a governing style, not an exception.

How about perspective?

About 4.6 million people in Trumpland identify as Filipino alone or in combination, based on 2023 US Census Bureau estimates. The largest communities are in key states. California has about 1.6 million (38 percent), Hawaii about 270,000, and Texas about 208,000. Indeed, Filipinos are part of the working machinery of America.

Among Filipino immigrants, the naturalization rate is about 74 percent, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The Philippines accounted for 44,760 newly naturalized US citizens in 2023, placing it among the top countries of origin. Likewise, Filipinos largely migrate through lawful channels. Many wait years and spend a fortune for the privilege of doing things “the right way.”

The problem is what this climate of fear under Trump’s figurative mistress of darkness, Kristi Noem, is doing to everyday life. No immigrant can feel safe when hospitals, schools, and even churches offer no refuge against ICE’s iron fist, applied even to citizens.

Then there are the Filipino TNTs (tago nang tago or always hiding) estimated at 294,000, around two percent of the total unauthorized population. Filipinos are not the symbolic target of Trump’s crackdown, but they are in its blast radius. Why?

Filipino communities, we have to understand, are often mixed status. One household may include citizens, green card holders, students on visas, and relatives with unresolved status. Against this backdrop, a crackdown does not need to target Filipinos as a group to hit them directly; it only needs to raise the risk for one family member.

Democracy is measured by restraint, not muscle, and restraint is the one quality Trump lacks — at home, where he has turned enforcement into intimidation, and abroad, where he openly toys with expansionist fantasies — from declaring himself the de facto ruler of Venezuela to floating the idea of seizing Greenland, its alliance with Denmark and NATO be damned.

Trump is literally unhinged, yes? The soonest America and the world realize this the better for our own sanity.