Op-ed: Trump’s Pressure on Sanctuary Cities Is Working

It was not long ago that Washington’s establishment experts announced that the crisis on the U.S. southern border was unfixable. They claimed illegal mass immigration was a historic phenomenon, an unstoppable force that no president could halt. Typical was the Cato Institute’s David Bier, who wrote two years ago in the New York Times: “Biden Can’t Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It.” Precisely because these open-border illuminati should be held accountable for their irresponsible pronouncements, view a sample of what Bier wrote:

The data highlights how much of a distraction pinning all migration trends on the executive branch truly is. What’s the point in developing a nuanced understanding of the situation when you believe that all that’s needed is a new person in the Oval Office to proclaim “Stop!” to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Bier actually asserted that it did not matter whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump were in the White House because mass illegal immigration would continue. He totally dismissed the power of strong presidential messaging to the world, backed up by executive action, that U.S. federal immigration law would be enforced. As events clearly demonstrated, when Trump returned to the White House, Bier’s yearning, huddled masses quickly figured out that the United States would no longer tolerate waves of economic migrants storming across Mexico to enter our country illegally. Bier’s lack of such a fundamental apprehension should disqualify him as a serious immigration analyst.

By contrast, the journalist Todd Bensman, now working for the border czar Tom Hohman, traveled throughout the Western Hemisphere and reported regularly that U.S. presidential words and deeds were the key determinants in the “go or no-go” decisions of millions of clandestine migrants. It was not distant political upheaval, crop failures, or climate change. Biden told migrants to come, and he would let them in. Trump told them he would detain them and send them back. There is not much subtlety in that.

After the U.S. southern frontier was secured, open-border advocates next asserted that the Trump administration would never succeed in forcing out Biden’s millions of unlawful immigrants. It was another version of the same mantra: forget the rule of law and embrace America’s banana republic status; after all, the country needs the migrants, regardless how they arrived. It is a continuation of the left’s longstanding campaign to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

When it comes to domestic enforcement of federal immigration law, if success is only measured by deportation numbers, the open-border crowd might have a valid argument. After all, even with stepped-up ICE deportations, federal officials can probably only remove about 600,000–700,000 a year, which is a large number, but not nearly large enough. That is why presidential messaging is again crucial, and Trump is staying on script. All the Sturm und Drang surrounding ICE deportations is a booming voice of warning to the entire illegal population network across the country. A Trump-hostile media, right on cue, regularly amplifies the warning by making a human rights drama out of each ICE operation, stressing or inventing outright stories of “hunting down” illegal migrants.

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[Read the rest at The American Conservative]