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2) Check those stats a bit more closely. The vast majority of "deportations" were people turned away at the border.
So if China or some other country decided to send 10 million people here for whatever reason, you think our official policy should be to welcome then in and provide them food, shelter, etc...?
What about 100 million people?
Should they also be given citizenship and right to vote in addition to food/shelter?
You could conquer a country without a single shot fired.
I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.
What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it.
And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.
What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you? People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.
Deporting people who are in the country illegally is a no brainer. If you don't want that, get the law changed. Until then, it's not wrong to deport them.
Now, that doesn't mean deportation should be the only or even the main method of immigration enforcement (personally, I like the idea of putting more burden on employers).
> And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.
Oh of course, it's always too different if you want it to be. That way, you can continue to feel righteous.
Enjoy this little cognitive dissonance:
You could also change the law make them legals eg. after X years of work, no criminal record and citizenship tests.
This would completely disable the current ICE gestapo and would have prevent soo much suffering. But i can imagine what you must be thinking now: But they came here illegally, this is harm to our society enough.
I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems. Unfortunately neither party in my country is keen on that idea.
> People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.
People thought that once they were told to think that. It's an easy sell to blame everything wrong on the scary dirty foreigners. When people are dissatisfied populism wins, regardless of whether the talking points are rooted in reality. The responsible thing to do is try to get people on board with populist ideas that help rather than hurt.
It's a seductive idea, but it's the attitude of an authoritarian technocrat. However, the US is supposed to be a representative democracy, which requires being sensitive to the problems voters have, as voters see them. And that's probably a big part of Trump's actual appeal. My understanding is at his rallies and in his rhetoric, he gave the appearance of being responsive to many concerns that had been willfully ignored or denied for a long time (for instance: free trade dogma, which destroyed a lot of things and insisted people be satisfied with the easily-quantified cheap junk they were being given).
> People thought that once they were told to think that.
Don't pretend your thoughts are any more independent than those of the people you're othering.
What the GGP was advocating was much broader than that. What's sympathetic about the Dreamers is the non-consensual nature of their position (their parents took them here) and many of them have little to no connection to the country they'd be deported to.
That logic doesn't apply to, say, the 3.5 million illegal immigrants that arrived between 2021 and 2023 (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...), but those are people the GGP would "document not deport."
1. Entering a country without proper documentation is a crime. Therefore all "undocumented immigration" is by definition criminal.
2. Removing criminals is paramount to a safe society and a justice system that is respected.
3. "Documenting them and letting them live" undermines legal immigrants who likely worked very hard to integrate culturally, establish themselves, and do the proper LEGAL paperwork. These legal immigrants have stringent reporting requirements, need to be careful about even minor crimes (excessive speeding tickets even!) etc. How is your proposal remotely fair to them?
I don't understand why this is a controversial opinion at all. I have yet to meet a legal immigrant that isn't okay with booting anyone that isn't legal out. A country without border control is NOT a country.
It's a shame those people had to work so hard to be treated like their neighbors. That's not a reason to deny others that treatment though.
> I have yet to meet a legal immigrant that isn't okay with booting anyone that isn't legal out.
Yeah they tend to skew pretty reactionary. That tends to sort itself out after a generation or two.
> A country without border control is NOT a country.
I didn't say we shouldn't have border security. In what universe is a goon squad going door to door checking for undesirables "border control"?
Ultimately, you have to fix the incentives. Fine the people hiring them, making it uneconomical, and you will remove the main incentive for people to enter the US illegally.
Our politicians have simply seemed fairly uninterested in holding business owners accountable.
Make E-verify the federal minimum standard for ALL employers nationwide.
Fine the shit out of all businesses that don't comply. Fine the shit out of employers that hire illegal labor. We know who they are.
You don't deport them, you give them no reason to stay here because there'd be no work for them.
* They didn't jack up the budget to a size larger than most countries' militaries
* They didn't target primarily Republican cities and states out of vengeance for how those cities and states voted
* They didn't explicitly target people here legally
* They didn't send bands of masked men house to house to kick in doors without warrants
* They didn't implement Kavanaugh Stops, which makes racial profiling legal
* They didn't implement a "Papers, please" policy
* They didn't crow about their cruelty on social media or make funny memes about immigrant families being destroyed
* They didn't broadcast that agents had "absolute immunity" even if their agents killed people
* They didn't use fascist iconography and phrasing in their press releases and design systems
* They didn't create a situation in which businesses and schools had to shut down because their employees and students were afraid to leave their houses because even though they were U.S. citizens, they had darker colored skin or spoke with an accent
* They didn't try to end birthright citizenship
I mean the list goes on and on. It's not the same at all. That's why they didn't attract the same publicity.
We could have "solved" immigration decades ago with enough punative treatment of employers but didn't want to.
If you want to actually stop it you could just ramp up punative treatment of employers over the next 5 years while keeping other policies at Obama or Bush era.
Half the undocumented without us family members would self deport gradually whilst jobs dried up. Offer amnesty to productive people with family roots and no criminal record and you end up with a microscopic undocumented pop.
Meanwhile DSHS is tweeting a pic of an island paradise with the caption America after 100M deportations. There are around 12M undocumented but about 100M non-whites if you have trouble interpreting their meaning or intention.
2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.
How is that currently working out for all of Europe? Hint: not well at all.
> 2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.
You've made a lot of ambiguous accusations right here. Can you please give specific examples?
Its extremely easy to do better than they are. Biden and Obama did in fact do this and successfully. They are not trying to do it well, they are trying to do it cruelly. The cruelty is the point.
That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.
Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff.
Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad, to the point that I think that language is way too mild, but here we are I guess.
Hardly with president convicted of sexual assault (among other things).
You're clearly not reading enough and are a part of the problem if you believe what you're saying to be true.
Sure, just walk away for not even a month’s pay, back to a country you’ve not lived in for decades.
Oh, and there’s a good chance some roided-up high school dropout is going to snatch you and stuff you in a van when you go to the immigration office to begin this nice, civilized process so that he can make quota.
Yeah, I’d be uninterested in drawing the attention of the immigration enforcement machinery right now, too.
If the government wanted people to take the carrot, they shouldn’t be so quick with the stick, even at immigration courts where people were doing their best to follow the laws.
Over the Holidays they even increased the exit bonus to $3000: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/12/22/increased-incentives-dhs...
Yet another reason why I find the haphazard comparisons to Nazi Germany/Gestapo so farcical.