Isn't "freed and flown home" the same thing as "deported"? These were routine professionals doing a job they took in good faith under rules and norms that have held for a century or more.
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Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty. We're punishing people who are part of the workforce contributing to our country's economic output.
Seems like the real question is, what do we get out of this? Because it doesn't appear to be aligned with security or prosperity. It's just needless suffering, bureaucracy, and wasted resources.
Deterring irregular economic migration? If the government adopts a non-formal policy of not prosecuting non-criminal non-violent workers, it's implicitly saying it's fine to people to violate immigration laws and come here to work, as long as you don't cause trouble. You might think this is fine because free movement of labor is good or whatever, but that's not what most Americans want.
I feel like we should be honest - Americans are perfectly comfortable picking and choosing when laws get enforced. We do it all the time. We don’t treat every law as sacred. Enforcement is selective in a million other areas, from antitrust to wage theft to pollution. Nobody insists those must be pursued to the letter every single time.
So why single out immigration as the one area where “the law is the law” trumps any rational or humane appeal? It starts to look less like a principled stand on legal consistency and more like a cultural preference. One that just happens to line up with race and class anxieties rather than some universal devotion to the rule of law.
Similarly with immigration, the purpose of the legal formalities is to constrain immigration volume. If you think those volumes are not high enough, you can advocate to increase them. In 60% of polling this issue, Gallup has found that the support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34%, and was under 10% from 1965-2000.
As to the rationales for limiting the volume of immigration, they are two-fold. One, people don't buy the argument that immigrants are good for them economically. Economists have lots of theories about public policy that people don't buy, like the idea of getting rid of corporate taxes: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Two, people have cultural preferences and want to limit the scope of cultural change. That's a perfectly legitimate rationale for limiting immigration. People in the Bay Area would be pretty upset if internal migration made Mountain View culturally more like Alabama. People in Wyoming would be upset if immigration made their town more like New Jersey. And those are people in the same country!
You are defending a criminal.
- it is not normal for the military to be sent to cities and locations that are run by political enemies to round up people
- putting people in concentration camps (that's what they are) is not normal.
- deporting people without due process is not normal
- using the military for policing duties is not normal
You're a lawyer. All of this should horrify you.
The USA was on the right path with decreasing immigration by making its neighbors more wealthy. Guess who ended that? The Trump regime creates problems which then only the Trump regime can solve, which is a game older than politics. And you're falling for it, hook, line and sinker.
For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
> The U.S. is an outlier in allowing deportable people to remain free pending their deportation proceedings.
The US is an outlier in relying wholesale on an illegal workforce without representation and without healthcare or access to the legal system to keep their economy afloat.
> For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Sorry, and given that this is a point of law, you are utterly wrong on this, which makes me wonder what else you are wrong about where you are so confident.
https://www.vera.org/news/what-does-due-process-mean-for-imm...
Have a read, and maybe adjust your priors a bit.
> Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
You keep saying that, here and elsewhere. But it just isn't true.
> As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
That is very much not true and you know it. The biggest problem with US immigration law is that it is (1) ridiculously complex (2) dealt with by understaffed entities (3) kept in place because industry and agriculture more or less depend on it and (4) effectively makes the country a vast amount of money.
If you're so horrified by it then you can blame your parents for picking a country to emigrate to that was soft on emigration. You can't pin this on the emigrants, many of whom were in the USA well before you were even born.
Meanwhile, you're on the record as a lawyer that argues incessantly on behalf of a government that is doing their level best to destroy the justice system that you've grown up in and that you - ostensibly - support. An extrajudicial assassination or two - let alone 11 - doesn't even cause a raised eyebrow, and mass deportations without so much as a chance of legal review doesn't either.
Here you're conflating "law" (the rule supposed to be followed) with "policy" (the mechanism used to enforce that rule). One can be broadly in favor of controls on aggregate immigration and still horrified at the means[1] chosen.
You really don't see how reasonable people might disagree with you?
[1] In this case[2] rounding up working engineers doing a job we all agree we want done via means that have been the norm since the 50's.
[2] The literally masked secret police force and salvadoran gulag things are sore points too.
Quite a few people by now, as a percentage of the total given the numbers involved. Oh, sucks to be them I guess...
> My understanding is the number of legal citizens and residents detained and deported is nonzero, but close.
Well, those people would be the innocent ones then, and 'close' isn't good enough for legal purposes. Wouldn't it be just too bad if you were the one to be deported as a result of one of these razzias? Or would you see your own deportation as taking one for the good of the country?
> Everyone being deported broke the law in some form or another.
Allegedly broke the law.
Would you forego all law enforcement in your own country because of a nonzero error rate?
There are other alternatives. Many countries have rational immigration rules and enforcement.
> Would you forego all law enforcement in your own country because of a nonzero error rate?
A blatant false dilemma.
None have birthright citizenship. None have an ongoing global amnesty program like the USA. AFAIK, All have administrative deportations without jury trial. Some countries require dual registration of every resident by landlords and tenants to verify residence.
I think the republican right dreams of the type of immigration controls that are common in Europe.
>A blatant false dilemma.
The dilemma is forced if "close isn't good enough". It is a reasonable conclusion from the statement.
If you believe this, then there’s nothing to discuss. In your ontology, my stance is equivalent to having absolutely no law enforcement whatsoever.