Trump is handling deportations all wrong

I hear folks asking, what’s wrong with deporting people who are in the country illegally as someone who is both the grandson of a legal Mexican immigrant who came to this country more than a century ago and the son of a retired cop who was on the job for 37 years? I’m the perfect person to answer that question. I respect the rule of law, and yet, I recognize the contributions made by immigrants to this country.

We need immigrants now more than ever, as long as they come legally. If the question is, what’s wrong with supporting the undocumented, my answer is simple, absolutely nothing. There’s nothing wrong with that concept. Generally speaking, anyone who is in the country illegally, either because they cross a border without permission or overstayed a visa is good to go. They’re 100% deportable. But it’s also true that a cornerstone of our criminal justice system is the discretion that police and prosecutors have over who they decide to arrest and prosecute. I’m all for deportations, as long as we also preserve the discretion. You see, just because all the undocumented can be removed doesn’t mean they should all be removed. Some should be able to stay.

They earn their right to be here. Also, it’s important to accept the fact that we’re never going to be able to deport our way to a secure border or a fair immigration system. We remove migrants, and a few weeks later, they come back. Just because we have the right to deport people doesn’t mean there’s some magic number out there of deportations that will fix a broken system. That’s what I believe, and it’s what I’ve long believed, and there’s more too. In fact, we’re just getting started. I believe that when conducting deportations, there needs to be guard rails and a code of conduct for the authorities the Trump administration, which began with more than 1500 pardons for people who were tried and convicted of participating in the violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, now sermonizes the rest of us about the virtues of respecting the rule of law, while this group has declared a deportation free for all, they’ve thrown out the rule book and disregarded the protocols.

For instance, immigration agents have no business trolling schools, churches, hospitals or courthouses looking for undocumented people. They’re doing all that under Trump. I believe that’s a really bad idea for immigration officials to set a daily, weekly or monthly quota for removals, or have one set for them by the White House, as appears to be the case now with the Trump administration, if immigration agents feel intense pressure to apprehend a certain number of undocumented immigrants, well, they’re likely to get sloppy and make mistakes. US born Latinos or those with legal status, will get caught up in the net, and racial profiling will become rampant, a strategy that might just get results in the private sector is likely to only get messy when implemented in the public sector. And finally, I believe the real problem with the immigration debate is not that there is too much cruelty or too much leniency, it’s that there’s not enough honesty.

Americans are a proud people. We’re much too proud, in fact, to admit our dependence on undocumented labor. We can’t get very far in fixing a problem if we can’t even be honest about what the problem really is and how we got here. Immigrants keep coming because we keep hiring them to do jobs that we don’t want to do. It’s always been this way. Why not just accept that fact and then fashion a solution that takes into account our depends on foreign labor, which is only getting worse. So you see, there’s a right way to do deportations and then there’s a wrong way. Now take a wild guess which way the Trump administration is doing them. You.