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It wasn’t until late in the 2024 election cycle before President Joe Biden’s administration decided to do something about illegal immigration and the border crisis. By then, it was much, much too late.

In May, the GOP members of the House Committee on Homeland Security estimated that, before the end of fiscal year 2024, the Biden administration will have been responsible for 10 million illegal immigrant encounters at our nation’s borders. With catch-and-release policies and backed-up immigration courts dealing with specious asylum claims, that’s not a border crisis; it’s officially a border catastrophe.

President-elect Donald Trump ran on fixing this — and using a legal power he didn’t during his first term, deploying the U.S. military to remove those illegally in this country, to begin to stop the bleeding.

Americans approve. Not that the presidential popular vote matters any — that and $5.69 will get you a Big Mac and literally nothing else — but Trump leads in the tally without even trying. He’s already won 312 electoral votes, which basically means he carried every state he targeted. That’s a mandate to do something about the border, and Democrats, not wrongly, are freaking out.

This shouldn’t be ugly, mind you. This is the will of the people: They’re fed up with a cynical open-borders policy encouraged by a party that believes demographics is destiny. Democrats realize this, too. And, in a viral clip from a CNN panel discussion on Monday, liberal activist Paul Rieckhoff let on what the strategy is going to be: thwart the will of the voters by making enforcing the law as painful as possible.

The discussion came after Trump confirmed on Truth Social that he was “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program,” as Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, according to Fox News.

This is wholly legal, but the last time it was done was the 1950s and on a smaller scale — roughly 1.3 million illegal immigrants. However, drastic times call for drastic measures, which is why voters have given Trump a mandate.

The problem, of course, is that Democratic politicians left and further left are lining up to announce that they’ll do anything possible to get in the way of enforcing the law:

Thus, Rieckhoff — who served in the military — argued that our men and women in uniform would be meeting resistance on the streets of our own country while enforcing our own laws. Remember when they said we were the ones prepping for Civil War II? To hear Rieckhoff tell it, that apparently changed Nov. 5.

“The challenge of sorting through them is mammoth. We had a hard time doing it in Iraq, OK?” he said.

“Our troops have had a hard time doing it in Afghanistan, trying to ask them to sort through who’s who and implement a policy like this, hold on, here in the United States is like nothing we’ve ever seen. I mean, hold on. Maybe the only precedent we have is internment camps during World War II against Japanese-Americans.”

And there we have it: Not only would this be street-fighting like in Iraq or Afghanistan, it would be like the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. Except these people aren’t citizens — or even in this country legally — and can be deported. But other than that, totally similar.

Enter the voice of reason at CNN, conservative commentator Scott Jennings: “You’ve twice now insinuated that Trump’s going to send the military to round up American citizens, which is totally false,” he said. “There are 1.3 to 1.6 million illegal immigrants in this country today who have already received deportation orders from a court. You can start there.

“There’s another population, as Marc [Lotter] said, that have either committed violent crimes in the United States or committed violent crimes where they came from. You can also do that. That has nothing to do with the people in your neighborhood, has nothing to do with the person in your office, and has nothing to do with whatever the hell you’re talking about. It has to do with getting people out of the country who do not belong here.”

However, here’s — alas — where Rieckhoff makes a good point when he asked how Jennings would deploy the military to deport these illegal immigrants.

“I would use the military in conjunction with local officials, local law enforcement, county sheriffs, people who know their communities, because I assume a lot of the local sheriffs and jailers are going to be the people who end up housing some of these folks before they are deported,” Jennings said.

Rieckhoff didn’t notice that he’d hit on something here and kept on asking how Jennings would handle the military deployment logistically. Jennings again noted, “There are millions of people who came into the country illegally who have already received deportation orders or who have committed some other crime while they’ve been here. The fact that you want to leave them in place is mind-boggling to me.”

“That is not what I said. That is not what I said,” Rieckhoff responded.

Host John Berman then interjected and asked Rieckhoff what he thought the mandate was from the election.

“I think the voters were saying, do something about it. I think broadly across partisan lines, there is almost universal need for people to do something about it. What you do about it is a totally different story,” Rieckhoff said.

Later in the discussion, Rieckhoff continued his rant: “The idea that any of that’s going to happen in abstract without protesters and other Americans getting involved is delusional. I mean, if you go into any American city and start setting up encampments to put whoever in there you want, there are going to be citizens who are going to protest. There are going to be journalists. There are going to be a multitude of fraught and really daunting challenges for a 19-year-old holding a weapon in an American street.”

Jennings again tried to get the other options from the guy who’s on there because he supposedly knows military stuff: “What’s the alternative? To let the crisis continue?”

“It’s not deploy the 82nd or let the crisis continue,” Rieckhoff said. “There are plenty of middle grounds.”

He’s lying. There are no “middle grounds.” And he let you know it in bold neon signage by falsely claiming, earlier in the discussion, that we’re going to treat Latino citizens like FDR treated Japanese-Americans.

This is the Democratic strategy for dealing with illegal immigration: make enforcing the law so painful, so horrifying, that we don’t. Then we maybe talk about shutting down the border occasionally if there are so many crossings a week, say, or maybe appoint a few more immigration judges, so asylum cases get heard sometime before 2035.

That’s your middle ground. Anything else, and you’re putting children in cages like Japanese internment camps, and Democrats aren’t going to take it, which is why they’re going to make enforcement of the law a matter of, at the very least, low-level civil war. And then conservatives stop, because we’re the cruel ones.

There will be no cooperation from state and local officials, as Jennings said. Quite the opposite. The party that got voted out because of its failure to protect our border is now lining up to ensure that failure persists — because to them, that failure wasn’t a bug, but a feature of their national policy.

They will fight the will of American voters. They will fight the law. And now that it’s gotten so bad that the military has to get involved, they will fight the military.

That is how sacrosanct the right to illegal immigration is to Democrats. There is no peaceful middle-ground solution. This is a preview of what it will take to simply enforce immigration law in America, for heaven’s sake. And if it sounds ugly when you read between the lines of a CNN panel discussion, just wait until you see what it looks like in practice.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.