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In final months of the Biden administration, migrant crossings over the U.S.-Mexico border had reached their lowest levels since 2020. However, President Donald Trump pledged to make cracking down on immigration a key issue in his second term. He already enacted a range of new executive policies intended to ramp up arrests and deportations of undocumented persons nationwide. Some of those policies, like permitting ICE agents to enter schools and churches, have met immediate resistance from state and local governments.
ICE said it arrested over 5,500 individuals in the first week of Trump’s second term, but those mass arrests have also swept up legal non-citizens, Native Americans and even full U.S. citizens, leaving many communities in fear regardless of their immigration status.
Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette dives into why he says President Trump is making immigration into a much larger issue than it actually is, and why he says all Americans should be ashamed of his behavior.
The following is an excerpt from the above video:
In Trump’s world, straight white men are constantly being victimized by, take your pick, wokeism, immigration, globalization, racial preferences, multiculturalism, people of color, etc. But not to worry, Trump has come to liberate you and to help you get even with everyone and everything that ever wronged you, real or imagined. As Trump used to say to supporters on the campaign trail, he is your retribution.
That explains the flurry of executive orders and about-faces in policy, but Trump is moving too quickly and applying too much brute force. He’s ruling like a tyrant, not an elected leader of a constitutional republic, and as a result, he’s making mistakes and overstepping.
Right-wing trolls will say that the reason I’m so upset about Trump’s defacement of our country’s laws and traditions is that I’m Mexican American. They’re half right. The Mexican part isn’t happy at once again being treated like a piano, that’s for sure. But it’s the American half that’s really pissed at Trump’s petulant tantrums and the havoc they wreck. See, if you love America, you ought to hate the way that the Mad King is defacing it.
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