When liberals denounce Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, they often cast his immigration agenda as a case in point.

Back in June, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee decried the president’s “mass deportation operations” as the “stepping stone” to his “radical attempts to seize absolute power.” In the same statement, they condemned the administration’s deportation of noncriminal immigrants “as cruel,” lamenting the harms that it imposed on “law-abiding families.”

Personally, I agree with both of these indictments of Trump’s policy. But it’s important for Americans to understand that they can accept the first one, even if they reject the second: In other words, you don’t need to share liberals’ moral objections to large-scale deportation in order to accept that Trump’s handling of that task is intolerably authoritarian.

For many liberals, the most morally horrifying aspect of Trump’s immigration agenda is its consequences for the undocumented and their loved ones. Armed agents forcing children from their homes, breaking up families, and exiling hardworking people pursuing the American dream — all this seems needlessly cruel.

For precisely that reason, it strikes many progressives as evocative of fascism: The government appears to be tormenting a vulnerable minority population for the sake of tormenting a vulnerable minority population. Thus, from the left’s vantage point, the humanitarian critique of deporting non-criminal immigrants — and the anti-authoritarian critique of Trump’s approach to deporting them — can look like one in the same.

But not all Americans share these intuitions. A significant segment of voters (in some — though not all — polls, a majority) favor large-scale internal immigration enforcement. To them, liberals may sound as though we are equating “authoritarianism” with “the implementation of policies that I don’t like.”

Indeed, some voters may feel that large-scale deportation efforts are the opposite of undemocratic. After all, immigration laws are the byproducts of democratic governance: Our elected representatives chose to put certain restrictions on migration. When people violate those laws, they undermine the electorate’s sovereignty over an issue of public concern. From this viewpoint, deporting law-abiding immigrants may generate sad stories and ugly scenes. Yet were America to adopt the rule, “if you make it past the border, you can stay forever, so long as you don’t commit any crimes,” it would only encourage further subversion of its laws.

I think this line of thought puts too little weight on the welfare of the undocumented, the economic benefits of immigration, and America’s capacity to deter unlawful inflows through border enforcement. But voters should know that they don’t need to agree with liberals about all that in order to reject Trump’s immigration policies.

The case for deeming those policies authoritarian does not hinge on the righteousness of cosmopolitan moral assumptions or economic theories. Rather, that case rests on the myriad ways that Trump’s immigration agenda is egregiously undermining Americans’ civil liberties and democratic freedoms.

Below, I will detail five reasons why even conservative voters should consider Trump’s handling of immigration anti-democratic.

1) The administration is openly flouting due process

Even those who favor strict immigration enforcement should support immigrants’ due process rights. After all, it is due process that prevents the government from deporting lawful US residents (either by mistake or design).

Yet Trump has explicitly called for ending due process in immigration cases and taken various actions consistent with that authoritarian ambition.

During his first term, he declared that the government should be able to deport undocumented immigrants “with no judges or court cases.” Since taking office a second time, the president has sought to curtail legal protections for those accused of being in........

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