So far, the Trump administration has removed roughly 2 million illegals from the country. 600,000 have been deported while around 1.4 million have self-deported.
The Biden administration had created an app which helped illegal immigrants navigate and find their way into the US and the benefits system. President Trump had the app reconfigured so it is now a self-deportation app. Illegals who self-deport through the app receive a free plane ticket and $1,000 in cash and may be eligible to reapply for legal entry in the future. Of course, liberals hate it.
Liberals are just short of saying, “You know who else had a self-deportation app that gave people free money and plane tickets? Hitler!”
Angry videos flood the news and social media, crying families, distraught spouses, and scenes of fathers or husbands being arrested by ICE. Cars are smashed, and illegal immigrants are wrestled to the ground as they resist arrest or attack agents. These stories are inevitably followed by reports lamenting how deportations “tear families apart,” a phrase repeated ad nauseam.
What these reports ignore is that these individuals are in the country illegally, working illegally, or have violated the terms of their residency. Once those terms are broken, their presence becomes illegal, and to restore the situation to one of legality, they must be arrested and deported.
Another favorite line from the liberal left is, “It’s not that ICE is deporting people, it’s the way they’re doing it that I object to.” This hollow statement, endlessly echoed in the media and by Democrats, is a lie. No matter how an illegal is arrested, they are triggered.
They express outrage when an illegal immigrant is arrested in front of his family, on the way to work, on the way to school, after his daughter’s birthday, or while a relative is in the hospital. The implication is that there should be laws or conventions protecting criminals from arrest during certain activities. But in reality, if someone commits a crime, whether it’s murder or violating immigration law, law enforcement is authorized to arrest them regardless of whether they’re mowing the lawn or reading to cancer patients in a hospital.
The media and social media frequently frame immigration enforcement as racially motivated, asking, “If it’s not about race, why don’t we see white people being deported?” There are two simple answers to this question.
First, of the estimated 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States, only about 500,000 were Europeans or Australians as of 2023. The number is likely considerably lower today, as Europeans have become more cautious about violating U.S. immigration laws. Most of these cases involve visa overstays, many of them inadvertent, and they are usually discovered at the airport when the individual attempts to return to Europe at the end of their visit. Statistically, Europeans and Australians make up only about 2.5 percent of the illegal immigrant population.
Second, not every deportation is filmed or shared online. The videos that circulate typically come from outraged liberals who oppose ICE enforcement, and these same people are not outraged when white people are deported. As a result, those cases are rarely recorded or posted on social media.
The media often misrepresents arrests by claiming that a person was deported for whatever activity they happened to be doing at the time, such as going to work, taking a child to school, speeding, having a burned-out taillight, or committing a minor offense like shoplifting, rather than for their actual immigration violations. The true violation is being in the country illegally.
In many cases, the individual is discovered during a traffic stop or another minor incident, but how they are found is irrelevant. Once authorities determine that a person is in the country illegally, the law clearly states that they should be arrested and deported.
Other social media users and media outlets often attack deportations by expressing outrage over videos showing ICE agents celebrating the number of arrests they made in a day. But there is no crime in taking pride in one’s work or feeling job satisfaction. The criticism in these videos seems to suggest that deportations are acceptable only if the officers carrying them out are miserable while doing their jobs.
Liberals often express outrage over “tearing families apart,” “kids in cages,” and false claims of “deporting citizens.” If an entire family is in the country illegally and taken into custody, adults and children are often held in separate detention facilities for the same reason children are not placed in adult prisons, protection and safety of minors. Would liberals prefer that children be kept in adult prisons instead?
In other cases, one or both parents are illegal while the children are not. In such situations, the illegal parent is arrested, but the legal or citizen child is not. Surely, liberals would not prefer that authorities arrest the entire family, including the citizen children, rather than only the members who are here illegally.
In several high-profile cases, a parent was arrested while the child, a U.S. citizen, was placed under temporary care. When authorities contacted the other parent to retrieve the child, that parent refused because he or she was also in the country illegally. When an illegal parent is deported, they are given the option of taking their children with them, but when they choose to do so, liberals become outraged again, accusing the government of deporting citizens. Would they be happier if U.S. authorities kept the children and deported only the parents?
At the end of the day, liberals are not truly angry about “the way deportations are done.” Their real issue is that they oppose deportations altogether. If they genuinely believed the current system was authoritarian or inhumane, they should be encouraging illegal immigrants to self-deport.
Instead of trying to convince people that only Hitler or Trump ever enforced immigration laws, the media should be running campaigns that promote voluntary compliance with U.S. immigration rules, just as they did with mask and vaccine compliance.