COMMENTARY As long as a do-nothing Congress does nothing to fix a wrecked immigration system, the right and left keep holding the issue — and most Americans — hostage to unreasonable extremes.
Monday gave us symmetrical soundbites of America’s immigration insanity.
We had Democratic Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy telling NPR that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, or ICE, “should not be deporting people at all.”
Then, President Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Homan, told CBS News that “every undocumented migrant is on the table” for deportation.
Tune up that slide guitar and sing along once more, folks:
Deport-nobody clowns to the left of me, deport-everybody jokers to the right — here I am, stuck in the middle with most Americans.
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As new polls are reminding us, most Americans are decent enough to scorn the indecencies Homan and the right are committing in their deportation frenzy — from tagging innocent migrants as “terrorists,” with no due process, to wrenching apart law-abiding families with longstanding ties in communities like South Florida.
But those surveys also point out that most Americans, spooked by the U.S. southern border crisis that marred former President Biden’s tenure, still back Trump’s general effort to ramp up deportations of migrants living here illegally, especially those with proven criminal histories.
So what are those Americans hearing from Clancy and the left? Maybe some reassurance that while they decry Trump’s gratuitous deportation cruelty, they too recognize the need for some modicum of immigration control?
In your silly centrist dreams, pal.
There's no question ICE has the right to deport undocumented migrants. The issue is whether it should exercise that duty more judiciously and humanely.
No, the left seems determined to keep feeding the right more oxygen on immigration — to hand MAGA more pretexts for claiming that Democrats want to leave America’s borders open to an invasion of foreign gangbangers.
In his NPR interview, Clancy was defending a Milwaukee County judge, Hannah Dugan. The Trump administration arrested Dugan last week for allegedly obstructing ICE agents who’d come to her court to detain an undocumented migrant facing misdemeanor battery charges.
It was fair for Clancy to question Dugan’s arrest. The ICE agents did not have a judge’s warrant; she appeared to be in the right to tell them not to raid her bench until they had one.
But Clancy couldn’t leave it there.
Reasonable target
Rather than also acknowledge that the undocumented migrant ICE was chasing was a reasonable deportation target, he went self-righteous radical and asserted ICE has no right to deport anybody — that “ICE should be abolished,” he said, echoing liberal protesters across the U.S. this year.
For just about any independent voter who helped put Trump over the top last November, Clancy’s nationally broadcast comments must have made the same fingernails-on-the-blackboard noise as a chorus of “Defund the Police!”
There’s actually no question that ICE has the right to deport undocumented migrants if it follows due process. It’s called border enforcement; every country in the world practices it, which Clancy, a former Peace Corps worker, should know.
Ignoring that reality is the sort of liberal petulance that’s music to the ears of petulantly conservative anti-immigration crusaders — if only because, especially at this moment, it risks driving Americans back into their arms.
The real question is whether ICE should exercise its duty more judiciously and humanely.
Whether it ought to ferret out the undocumented migrants who are societal liabilities, and pass over those who are assets — like the honest agricultural, construction and hospitality workers doing the jobs most Americans today won’t touch, but are too often stymied in their efforts to secure legal status thanks to a wrecked immigration system that a do-nothing Congress won’t fix.
The answer there is an unequivocal yes — if only because ignoring that reality risks hurting our economy, wasting federal resources and saddling America with the image of a nativist dystopia.
Which is exactly where Homan and the immigration right are taking the country — while taking Trump’s first-100-days approval ratings down, too — as ICE races to meet Trump 2.0's draconian deportation quotas.
Most Americans see enough undocumented migrants on a regular basis — one may have just mowed their lawn today — to know the vast majority are not the traffickers, rapists and murderers MAGA is berserkly screaming they are.
Meaning, they’re not the alleged migrant felons whose mugshots cover "illegal alien" posters lining the White House lawn this week as a reminder of Trump’s demonization of immigration.
The only good thing about morbid displays like those is that polls show they're driving Americans back into the immigration middle.
