Here we are, still fighting with illusions created by the term "illegal immigrant". Legal/illegal is a false binary.
Millions (if not most) of the immigrants who have arrived here in recent years entered through ports of entry or presented themselves to Border Patrol to initiate the immigration process, and have pending immigration cases or asylum claims working their way through the courts. All perfectly legal. Guess what bucket they fall into?
And what exactly are we trying to deter in those cases? Nothing that should be deterred in the first place.
Want to deter illegal border crossings? Sounds good, but we're already pretty good at it. Apprehension rates have been pretty consistent over the years (before and after Trump)
What problem are we actually solving with more "deterrence"?
Reducing the backlog in immigration courts? Fair enough. I agree that's a problem worth solving. But the solution is straightforward: increase the system's capacity to process cases in a timely manner by hiring more immigration judges and implementing a few easy legal reforms.
Instead, we're building a nationwide network of detention facilities, pouring a military-grade budget into an immigration enforcement agency with serious accountability problems, and incentivizing aggressive enforcement through high quotas and broad discretion. The predictable result is the kind of situation we're seeing now, where ICE detains people as they show up for their damn naturalization ceremonies and is quickly turning itself into a domestic military/spying agency.
It's deterring immigration, period.
Net migration has turned negative for the first time in decades. The total US population declined for the 1st time in history in 2025. If that's not turned around, and fast, we're cooked.
Millions (if not most) of the immigrants who have arrived here in recent years entered through ports of entry or presented themselves to Border Patrol to initiate the immigration process, and have pending immigration cases or asylum claims working their way through the courts. All perfectly legal. Guess what bucket they fall into?
And what exactly are we trying to deter in those cases? Nothing that should be deterred in the first place.
Want to deter illegal border crossings? Sounds good, but we're already pretty good at it. Apprehension rates have been pretty consistent over the years (before and after Trump)
What problem are we actually solving with more "deterrence"?
Reducing the backlog in immigration courts? Fair enough. I agree that's a problem worth solving. But the solution is straightforward: increase the system's capacity to process cases in a timely manner by hiring more immigration judges and implementing a few easy legal reforms.
Instead, we're building a nationwide network of detention facilities, pouring a military-grade budget into an immigration enforcement agency with serious accountability problems, and incentivizing aggressive enforcement through high quotas and broad discretion. The predictable result is the kind of situation we're seeing now, where ICE detains people as they show up for their damn naturalization ceremonies and is quickly turning itself into a domestic military/spying agency.
It's deterring immigration, period.
Net migration has turned negative for the first time in decades. The total US population declined for the 1st time in history in 2025. If that's not turned around, and fast, we're cooked.