The U.S. Could Decide To Just Stop Deportations

The right says that they have no choice but to “enforce the law” and round up those here illegally. False: just give people a way to legalize their status.

By Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs

The Trump Administration is about to massively escalate the brutality of immigration policing. Congress, with little pushback from Democrats, has tripled the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to a whopping $29.9 billion. The administration is encouraging states to build huge new prison camps for immigrants (“detention centers”) and is promising to swarm cities with 10,000 new ICE agents, more than doubling the number there are now. The most highly-publicized prison camp, Trump and his cronies have gleefully bragged, is now located on a desolate stretch of Florida swampland surrounded by alligators and designed to instill fear in immigrants across the country. The administration has made it clear that it is not confining its efforts to deporting those with criminal records, but will be on the lookout for gardeners, housekeepers, construction workers, restaurant workers, middle-school science teachers  and mothers with YouTube cooking shows, too. “If you’re in the country illegally, you’re on the table,” said U.S. Border Czar (his official title, apparently) Tom Homan. “You’re going to see immigration enforcement on a level you’ve never seen it before,” Homan has promised. “We‘re not going to be like the last administration who told ICE you can‘t arrest somebody for simply being here illegally.”

The bad news is: this will result in a police state in which armed agents are constantly demanding people’s papers. U.S. citizens will be swept up, people will die in horrendous conditions, the ranks of ICE will be filled with psychopaths and abusers as hiring standards drop. But there’s also going to be major backlash. Trump’s vicious, aggressive immigration enforcement has already soured public opinion. Public belief that immigration is a good thing has surged to a record-high 79%, and the number of people who believe there should be fewer immigrants is plummeting. Support for Trump’s approach to immigration is “particularly low with Hispanic adults, 21 percent of whom approved of Mr. Trump’s approach on the issue.” That might not sound too surprising, but one of the most notable political trends of the last few years has been the rightward swing of Hispanic voters, meaning that Trump is squandering the political gains his party made with them by terrorizing their communities. Democrats should be loud and aggressive on the immigration issue, but unfortunately many have become convinced that this is a losing issue for them and they should pivot to emphasizing Border Security.

I’ve emphasized previously the cruelty of the Trumpian right’s approach to immigration, which I think is morally indefensible. But here I want to address a defense that the right makes of its approach, namely that they are simply enforcing the law. Confronted with the human costs of their mass deportation regime, officials like Homan will give some variation on the following response: that’s very sad, but it’s not my fault, because these people are here illegally and my job is simply to enforce the law. I think this is how a lot of the new ICE recruits, attracted by $30,000 signing bonuses, are going to rationalize the job to themselves. They will know that they are tearing families apart, keeping old people and kids in cages, destroying lives. And these things will seem tragic. Some of them may even have consciences and feel twinges of guilt. But, they will say to themselves, after all, these people are here illegally. I’m just following the law, the law says they can’t be here, what choice do we have? When mass deportation begins to look morally unconscionable, its defenders will insist that it’s simply a recognition that “a country must have a border in order to be a country” or “the law says we must do this, so if we didn’t do it, we would be violating the law.”

The idea that a country must have militarized borders in order to exist is false, as I have shown before. But so is the idea that we have to deport people in order to be in compliance with the law. If you are present in the United States without valid immigration status, the government can deport you. But it doesn’t have to. You are a “deportable” alien. But the government has the legal discretion as to whether it wants to deport all the people it has the legal authority to deport. This is an important distinction, because it means that “the law made me do it” is not an excuse. The law gives the government the right to do it. It doesn’t make it mandatory.