With Donald Trump officially having been sworn in as the 47th president of the U.S., the deportations of illegal aliens he promised during his campaign are finally underway.
According to Border Czar Tom Homan, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested hundreds of illegal aliens during Trump’s first day in office. This came on the heels of a Wall Street Journal report published shortly before the new administration took office claiming that a deportation operation had been scheduled in the city of Chicago during Trump’s first day in power. Ultimately, the raid was called off due to concerns about the safety of law enforcement officials. This action makes sense considering the leak. However, the initial report sparked predictable outrage from anti-borders groups and politicians including from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has vowed to obstruct the new administration’s immigration policies. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson used his favorite political tactic, pulling out the race card to express his opposition to the president’s immigration policies.
"We’re going to stand up, and we’re going to protect undocumented individuals," Johnson said, according to Fox 32 in Chicago. "We’re going to protect Black folks, brown folks, Asian folks…”
While the race-baiting from America’s worst sanctuary mayor is shameful, it is also indicative of the type of resistance the Trump Administration will receive as it seeks to rebuild America’s sovereignty and restore the rule of law to our immigration system. Anti-borders activists and politicians will attack those who support the Trump Administration’s agenda as racist, xenophobic, and bigoted. This is one way they will attempt to use accusations of racism to obstruct the mass deportations that the American people voted for last November.
Another tactic anti-borders forces can be expected to use was evident at the Washington National Cathedral the day after the inauguration.
At the inaugural prayer service, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde called out the president over his deportation plans, while also caricaturizing illegal aliens as lowly servants. Budde said that those in the country illegally were “scared,” and described them as “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants.”
Beyond the elitism of Budde’s characterization of illegal aliens as mere peasants is the emotional blackmail she attempted to deploy against the president. Taken to its logical conclusion, Budde is essentially asking the president, who had just sworn an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the U.S., to violate his oath and refuse to faithfully execute immigration laws because those who have violated these laws are now scared of the consequences. But according to the scriptures to which Budde allegedly adheres, “rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.”
Budde’s remarks were not just random comments by a woke preacher, but indeed are the entire ethos of the anti-borders movement. The animating principle of the anti-borders movement is that enforcing immigration law is mean and cruel, and that those who violate it should not have to face any consequences for their lawbreaking. It is impossible to imagine this argument being used in any other area of law, and it shouldn’t be used in immigration either.
Still, there are those in positions of power and influence in Washington, D.C. who can’t fathom the reality that there’s an administration in charge who wants to faithfully execute and enforce federal immigration law. CNN anchor Dana Bash acted perplexed when Homan, a former Immigration Reform Law Institute senior fellow, calmly explained to her the administration’s intent to enforce immigration law against illegal aliens, even those who haven’t previously been convicted of violent crimes.
"ICE is going to uphold the oath they took,” he said. “They're going to enforce the laws enacted by Congress and signed by a President. And they’'re going to do that without apology.”
Homan is exactly right. Those who enter the U.S. illegally should be subject to removal as the law requires. Law enforcement should not have to wait for illegal aliens to commit depraved crimes in order to remove them as the law requires. The Biden Administration allowed more than 10 million illegal aliens to enter this country during their four years in office. The only way to restore the rule of law in our immigration system is to remove as many of them from the country as possible and secure our borders. If anti-borders advocates do not have the stomach for mass deportations, then they should not have spent the last four years flooding our communities with illegal aliens. It is the height of irony that the people who will express the most outrage about the coming mass deportations are the reason they are so necessary.
Not only are deportation raids necessary, but they are also righteous. In order to secure the safety, security, and sovereignty of the American people, the federal government must remove the large number of aliens who have entered the country illegally, and no amount of emotional manipulation from the anti-borders crowd should get in the way of that mission.
William J. Davis is a communications associate for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration
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