The era of open borders is over in America, a fact many people are having trouble coming to terms with. Over the last two weeks, Oklahoma schools have come under fire for two things: asking for proof of citizenship and publicly committing to following the law.
A recent story by the Hill lays out the dichotomy of approaches forming between schools in states that intend to side with the rule of law and those that are choosing to obstruct it. While blue state school systems are willing to go to extreme lengths to aid and abet illegal immigration, we in Oklahoma are making it clear that our schools are not sanctuaries.
What we’re doing is simple and straightforward. In order to gain access to a government-run, taxpayer-funded school system, we are asking that parents provide proof of citizenship or legal residency status in this country. Further, we have also agreed to cooperate with the federal government’s immigration enforcement investigations and operations as needed.
The anti-border leftists who have attacked us have smeared these policies by trying to conjure up images of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducting operations at elementary schools, but that simply isn’t the case.
The reality that no one in the anti-border crowd wants to acknowledge is that schools were already on the front lines of the immigration crisis long before President Donald Trump was reelected. We want people to provide this information because illegal immigration has already crippled our school systems. It has cost us $474 million in Oklahoma, based on our best estimates, but it will likely be well over that once the dust settles.
The simple fact of the matter is that American public services paid for by American taxpayers should be exclusively for the American people. That wasn’t a radical or controversial statement when I first became an educator, and it should not be one now. I know that it isn’t controversial to the vast majority of the millions of Oklahomans I work for.
And yes, we’re happy to work with the Trump administration. It’s a simple matter of cooperation with law enforcement. If ICE is conducting an investigation, then every entity should be cooperating with it — especially those entities receiving taxpayer dollars.
America’s immigration laws are going to be enforced. Our immigration system is no longer going to be a joke. Those who temporarily benefited from the abuse and impeachable, faithless execution of those laws are going to reconcile themselves with going back.
The act of being here illegally is in itself illegal. We have to get back to that understanding as a people because even those who paid thousands of dollars to the cartel to get smuggled in knew they were getting smuggled in. It’s really easy to know that a drug cartel or a coyote is not a legitimate travel agent.
The question is how we want to go about this. Public entities such as school systems can work with ICE in an orderly way to ensure that families are kept intact and that these removals go about in an orderly way where possible or not. If we want the former, then cooperation with law enforcement needs to happen.
However, to the degree that ICE might need to conduct operations in some schools, we simply don’t know how many foreign gang members or foreign criminals of high school-eligible age are in this country or which of them have children who are being educated in our schools. We can’t know because our border was wide open for four years under the Biden administration, and now the Trump administration has to set things right.
At the same time, those who clamor about the well-being of children under a professional law enforcement operation now seem to have very little to say about the literally countless children who were trafficked, assaulted, and abused by the cartels because of the previous administration’s wide-open border.
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If you have problems with immigration law, you’re free to disagree with it, but those laws are set by Congress and must be faithfully executed by the executive branch in accordance with the dictates of the Constitution. The rule of law entails that duly enacted law should be enforced.
I understand that this is going to be unpleasant for many people in the equation. However, hard cases make bad laws and bad policies, and we’ve had both for far too long in this country. All they have done is yield more hard cases, and we can’t sustain things as they are. At some point, the cycle must end, and the law either has to mean something or it means nothing.
Ryan Walters is the superintendent of the Oklahoma State Department of Education. You can follow him on X: @RyanWaltersSupt.