Donald Trump’s campaign promise to deport “violent criminal illegal aliens” won him votes, but has now become a far broader effort ensnaring millions of law-abiding people living and working productively in all parts of the country.
And who are these dangerous foreigners?
They’re watching your kids. Building your homes. Cooking your food when you go out to eat. So please don’t be too surprised when the cost of basic services climbs even higher under a president who is already wreaking havoc on the economy with his on-again, off-again tariffs.
The architect of this campaign is White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
The right-leaning Washington Examiner reports that Miller gathered ICE leaders in Washington to berate them for not arresting more people. An exasperated Miller asked “what do you mean you’re going after criminals?” and demanded that the ICE field office directors explain “why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” to arrest immigrants.
This was after ICE had already sent agents to arrest people at their immigration court hearings, after it began sending masked cops out to make detentions, after ICE ended its sensitive locations policy to allow it to detain people in churches and hospitals, after a blitzkrieg operation to send hundreds of people to a Salvadoran mega-prison. None of this is nearly enough for Miller.
It was clear to anyone paying attention that Trump’s second term would make it a focus to detain and deport as many people as possible — even if it meant mainly targeting regular long-time residents and actually deemphasizing enforcement against dangerous criminals, which the administration has done via pulling federal agents away from functions like investigating drug trafficking and child sexual exploitation.
This is what Trump himself said so frequently, and his rallies infamously featured those “mass deportation now” signs.
Unfortunately, a lot of people do not really pay attention, or only hear what they want to hear from political figures. This attitude was neatly exemplified by Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ming Li “Carol” Hui, a longtime resident of Kennett, Mo., who was detained by ICE in April. “No one voted to deport moms,” Cowart said of the heavily Trump-voting town where Carol was raising her three American-born children.
The problem is that these folks, unwittingly or not, did vote to deport moms, and they should understand that. It’s a shame that these realizations have come only after so much damage has already been done, and after innocent community members have been punished for some voters’ ignorance.
Who is going to take the low-paying jobs that undocumented immigrants filled? Who will take care of your kids or clean your home?
There was never going to be a system that somehow only nabbed the really bad guys and excluded all of the “good guys” that people believed would be exempt from Trump‘s explicit promises. It was always going to be an effort to bump up the numbers that Miller wants at all costs.
Miller does dislike immigrants because they are “criminals,” but precisely because they are immigrants. If Miller can expend the exact same amount of resources to capture and deport 100 law-abiding families versus a few hard-core criminals, he’ll pick the families every time, because that just means fewer immigrants overall, his ultimate objective. It’s not and never was about safety.
