Abstract
This chapter shows how the COVID-19 pandemic was deployed as a racially neutral moral panic in the U.S. to obscure the explicitly racialized moral panic that has motivated the implementation of racially exclusionary immigration policies during the first Trump administration. We analyze policies listed in the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) catalog of U.S. immigration policy changes enacted during the first Trump administration that used the COVID-19 Pandemic as an excuse to ban, limit, and exclude migrants from entering the U.S., and thus expanded the exclusion of brown and black immigrants in the U.S. We identify three ways in which the first Trump administration expanded the exclusion of brown and black immigrants in the U.S.: through (a) the transnationalization of illegality, (b) the bureaucratization of illegality in the U.S., and (c) the use of cruelty as deterrence.