The Mass Hysteria Over Deportation: The BorderLine

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There were 959 carjackings in Washington, D.C., last year—up from 148 in 2018. Shoplifting is so bad that stores in some neighborhoods have closed. The CVS on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House, keeps Charmin toilet paper and trash bags in locked cabinets.

Not surprisingly, though, to the dismay of progressive activists, it’s not just conservatives who want crime prevented, prosecuted, and punished. After a disastrous experiment under far-left District Attorney Chesa Boudin, even ultraliberal San Francisco had had enough of rampant lawlessness and fired him back in 2022.

On Tuesday, almost-as-woke Los Angeles replaced its deliberately feckless, far-left District Attorney George Gascon with a “former federal prosecutor who ran on a platform of ‘restoring safety and justice,’” according to local station KTLA.

In elections across America, the Democrats tried to reduce everything to identity politics. Anyone voting against their candidates, they claimed, did so because of racism or misogyny, not because they preferred conservative policies.

But the truth is, people of all races and both sexes don’t like being victims of crime. It’s a universal value.

Just as they prefer ineffective alternatives to punishing crime, the American Left does not want immigration enforcement either. If she had been elected, Kamala Harris had promised to support a Senate border bill that she claimed would have fixed the border she and Joe Biden broke.

Not only would the bill have failed to do that—as I explained here in a previous column—but it would have made taxpayers foot the bill for lawyers so millions of economic migrants Biden let in could make unmerited or fraudulent asylum claims and drag them out in immigration court as long as possible.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which used to defend free speech for Americans, now seems focused on promoting gender ideology and the rights of illegally present non-Americans. With the balloons barely deflated from the election night parties, they and other activists are already rolling out a legal campaign to stop President-elect Donald Trump from carrying out his duty—and his electoral mandate—to enforce our immigration laws.

We’ve seen the people of Los Angeles and San Francisco belatedly reject woke ideology that gets in the way of enforcing the law. Imagine if the people of Washington, D.C., got so mad at the rampant crime and incivility in their streets and pressured the mayor to do something. Imagine the police chief then stood up a special task force that assigned more officers to high-risk areas and arrested offenders. Imagine if prosecutors did their jobs and put the guilty behind bars.

The result would be that crime goes down, repeat offenders are locked up, and people feel safer. Would we call this scenario “mass law enforcement”? No, it would just be competent law enforcement.

In the same way, should Trump and his future homeland security chief instruct federal officers to do their jobs, it will be nothing but restoring the status quo before Biden and his secretary of homeland [in]security, Alejandro Mayorkas, decided to ignore the law and facilitate the largest influx of illegal immigrants in the history of our country.

For four years, Americans saw the results of the Biden administration refusing to enforce the law—from more preventable crimes to overtaxed schools, housing, and hospitals. They saw millions of inadmissible foreigners allowed to enter the U.S.—despite having no visa—and then stay indefinitely through quasi-legal fudges of the law. They saw inadmissible aliens being fed, housed, and paid using our tax dollars.

It turns out that “Latinos want a strong economy and a border that doesn’t allow criminals from around the world to cross it and establish themselves permanently, living off taxpayer largesse while contributing nothing but menace and mayhem,” the New York Post concluded. (They also don’t like being called “Latinx,” no matter how much white progressives tell them to.)

Because Biden left a four-year deficit on national immigration law enforcement—at the border and inside the country—the Trump administration will have to catch up. There are over 1.3 million illegal aliens with official removal (deportation) orders still in the U.S. They’ve had their due process, and now they should be removed. If a court’s decision to deport them isn’t carried out, there is no rule of law.

Overlapping with the 1.3 million aliens with removal orders are around 435,000 aliens who have been convicted of crimes in the U.S. and another 230,000 or so with pending charges. The backlog of asylum cases at the Department of Justice’s immigration courts has grown to 1.5 million. The asylum case backlogs waiting to be processed at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services before being sent to the immigration courts are nearly as big. And don’t forget, millions of the aliens paroled or released by Biden over the past four years are expected to file asylum claims to add to the pile.

These massive backlogs are part of a giant mess deliberately created by those who want to thwart the intentions of Congress through executive overreach and arrogance to open our borders to virtually anyone. Someone, sometime, has to clean it up. That someone has just been elected, and that sometime is now.

As our elected leaders do their jobs, and as the men and women sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution and the rule of law get back to business, expect all eyes to be on them. There will be hyperbole, spin, selective media coverage, and even outright lies in much of the national media that will make the press’ partisanship during Trump’s first term look like objectivity. Expect to see photos of government facilities—most likely built by Biden to process illegal aliens into the U.S. as part of the “Mayorkas Migration Machine”—falsely labeled Trump’s internment camps, or worse.

Expect people who understand why alleged human sex trafficker Sean “Diddy” Combs is detained for public safety reasons not to understand why detention should also apply to illegal aliens caught at the border until we know their identity and their criminal records and we have full resolution of their immigration cases. Expect reporters and left-wing media pundits to wring out the thesaurus for new adjectives to make routine law enforcement sound like a dystopian novel from the 1930s.

But don’t believe the hype. The rule of law is the rock on which this republic is built. A return to that now will seem odd at first, but it is proper, long overdue, and deserving of public support.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.