Immediately after President Donald Trump announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will soon start deporting illegal aliens who have final deportation orders, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris published a series of tweets expressing her extreme opposition to the idea of deportations.
According to the California senator, deportations “violate our values,” are a “shameful stain on our country,” are “outrageous” and are “deeply reprehensible.” Her justification for these statements was that deportations are “cruel,” in that they “push people into the shadows and sow fear and danger in communities across this country.”
Perhaps Harris meant for these tweets to show the world how humane, charitable and thoughtful she is. Instead, however, they demonstrate that Harris fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of deportations, and the status of the illegal and criminal aliens who are being deported.
Contrary to what Harris and other advocates for illegal aliens claim, ICE does not deport people in order to terrorize “vulnerable groups.” Neither does ICE “[round]people up by ethnic group,” as Harris also claimed. Instead, ICE deports people for two main reasons: to uphold the rule of law and to protect American citizens.
Without enforcing deportations, our immigration laws are meaningless. Illegal aliens, by definition, have broken our nation’s immigration laws. Accordingly, just as we all expect people who break the law to be punished for their actions, there is a repercussion for breaking our nation’s immigration laws: deportation. Without the deterrent effect of deportations, our laws would be meaningless and our borders would be in worse shape than they already are.
Deportations also keep Americans safe. A FAIR study found that data from the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) demonstrates that “illegal aliens commit crimes at a much higher rate than the rest of the population.” And in some states, illegal aliens are on average more than five times as likely to be incarcerated.
This fact is all too real to people like Uvalde, Texas, Mayor Don McLaughlin, who detailed the security concerns of his small border town that is now overrun by illegal aliens. Or for Steve Ronneback, whose son was brutally murdered by an illegal alien in Arizona. This is why the majority of deportees are convicted criminals: in the 2018 fiscal year, 57 percent of the 256,085 illegal aliens that ICE removed were convicted criminals.
Even the most hawkish immigration proposals prioritize the deportation of criminal aliens over all other illegal aliens – a fact that, when combined with the United States’ unique practice of affording due process to those who enter illegally, undermines Harris’s picture of ICE indiscriminately targeting innocent migrants.
The willful ignorance that Harris and other advocates for illegal aliens display towards the true nature of deportations shows that they do not care about American citizens. Instead, they only care about trumpeting their virtuosity to the world, often at the expense of the people who elected them. Our immigration crisis will never end until the elected representatives in Washington, D.C., understand that feeling good about themselves cannot take precedence over their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.