Every country carries out deportations, the end point of a bureaucratic process that determines someone’s eligibility to stay in a country. Sometimes — say, if they’ve committed a terrible crime — that process will play out while they’re behind bars. In many other cases, it’ll be in a series of hearings in front of immigration judges in between the person continuing to live their life. Deportation is the very last stop on the train, the end of the line if someone’s case for staying in the country proves unpersuasive, when all appeals have been exhausted.

What deportation is not meant to be is a punishment or a threat, and certainly not one made against your political opponents. You would struggle to find examples of deportation being treated like this anywhere in the Western world and certainly in the United States in its recent history.

Yet in only half a year of Donald Trump’s presidency, that’s exactly what deportation has suddenly become: a threat that American politicians and their supporters now casually and regularly make against their political opponents, with only the thinnest pretext that they’re motivated by any actual violation of the law. And in fact, it’s gone beyond just a threat and is being actively, explicitly wielded as a form of punishment against people for their political speech.