Many people think the Trump administration is unique in its immigration policy. Perhaps they forgot Barack Obama’s deportation record high 2 million Mexicans, or about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, or that the Mexican Repatriations of the 1930s which saw 1 million Mexicans deported.

Susana Muñoz is not letting anyone forget.

Muñoz attended Iowa State in the ’90s and received her Ph.D. in higher education. She spoke as the afternoon keynote speaker at ISCORE to hundreds of ISU students and faculty.

“People say the immigration system is broken,” Muñoz said. “But it’s not broken, it’s doing exactly what it was made to do.”

According to Muñoz, the system functions to inhibit the full integration of immigrants and treat them as second class citizens. She was also critical of how U.S. foreign policy engineers the circumstances which force people to immigrate.

“Our U.S. policy and involvement in wars pushes people to our borders,” Muñoz said. “We need to acknowledge our involvement in these people’s lives.”

Muñoz is an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on the experiences of undocumented Latinx students and activists in the U.S. She’s been an especially active speaker since the 2016 presidential election.

“Since that election I’ve spoken before audiences on fourteen different occasions,” Muñoz said. “It’s different speaking here, though. It feels like a homecoming.”

Muñoz reminded the audience that the undocumented Latinx community aren’t the only ones being targeted by corrupt immigration policies, and stated Somalians are three times as likely to be deported than immigrants from South America or Mexico.

Muñoz believes problems within systems of immigration, prison and labor are rooted in racism and desire for power.

“No other sustained aspect of U.S. history illustrates how white supremacists and capitalists dictate policy than immigration,” Muñoz said.