An article published Monday in The New Republic by Edith Olmsted said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “biggest operation to date was also a huge failure.”
The “failure” in question? That during a month-long operation in Massachusetts, ICE arrested 1,461 illegal aliens — of whom 54 percent had “criminal convictions or charges.”
“Meanwhile, 277 detainees, or about 19 percent, had received final orders of removal or deportation,” Olmsted wrote.
It’s the same narrative peddled by activist Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who said in a post on X: “Wow. Just 54% of all the people arrested during this operation had a criminal record at all.”
In fact, the spin is a familiar sleight of hand: by focusing on whether an illegal alien has committed additional crimes beyond illegal entry, the implication is that immigration law is only worth enforcing if the individual has committed a violent crime.
This isn’t a new tactic, either. In February, NPR’s Sergio Martínez-Beltrán ran a story lamenting that “ICE has arrested scores of migrants in the U.S. who have no criminal records.” He highlighted the case of an 18-year-old who entered through Biden’s CBP One app — a loophole that allowed thousands of migrants to enter temporarily while awaiting an immigration hearing despite no vetting. The app had become a de-facto catch-and-release mechanism.
In January, NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez and Nicole Acevedo reported “Immigration authorities made close to 1,200 arrests in just one day, and nearly half of those detained don’t have criminal records …”
Gutierrez and Acevedo contend that only 52 percent of them “were considered ‘criminal arrests.'”
“The rest appear to be nonviolent offenders or people who have not committed any criminal offense other than crossing the border illegally,” the duo write without a hint of irony.
But anyone who came here illegally is by definition a criminal. Every one of these individuals broke the law the moment they entered the United States unlawfully. That some of them also committed violent or serious cries doesn’t negate the criminality of the rest — it just underscores the danger of allowing any alien remain.
But the media’s narrative is telling: Immigration law enforcement is only justified if an illegal alien is also a violent felon. Anything less is treated as though it is cruel or excessive.
Gutierrez and Acevedo hint as much, writing “Administration officials and President Donald Trump have stated repeatedly that they would prioritize the detention and deportations of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes, but the latest numbers may be casting doubts around such promises.”
Meanwhile Olmsted invoked the arrest of an 18-year-old “student” who was arrested “just days before graduation” for being in the country illegally.
This type of reframing is designed to make immigration law unenforceable in practice — because under this logic, anyone who is sympathetic becomes untouchable. But that is not how a sovereign nation functions. Laws are not suspended simply because someone has a compelling backstory and no country can survive if it allows its borders to be treated as suggestions rather than limits.
In fact, most Americans understand this. A January Ipsos/Axios poll found 66 percent of Americans support deporting illegal aliens, while CNN’s Harry Enten reported in April that 56 percent of those asked in a CNN poll supported mass deportations for all illegal aliens.
“The American people have come a long way on this issue, much closer to Donald Trump,” Enten said.
They’ve become that way for a reason — you cannot have a country when it’s overrun by foreigners. The American people aren’t deciding who gets to stay — they are deciding whether this country remains a nation governed by laws, or whether we surrender to an emotional blackmail campaign run by open-borders ideologues in the propaganda press.