Conrad Black: Immigration Enforcement Is Trump’s Mandate, and Fine-Tuning It Is the Right Move

Commentary

The controversies over the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have had exaggerated publicity and impact on political perceptions. This is essentially because of the political opponents’ orchestrated or confected hatred of the president, and the anti-Trump bias of most of the U.S. national political media. President Trump had a clear mandate to end illegal immigration and did so, and he has received appropriate credit for it from the public.

The Biden administration admitted 12 to 15 million illegal immigrants, most of them simply flooding in, uncounted and anonymous, and including more than 500,000 individuals convicted in their former countries of violent crimes.

Readers will recall that the Biden administration’s homeland security secretary repeatedly claimed that the border was secure. Furthermore, some cities gave themselves over to the spurious and unconstitutional concept of “sanctuary cities.” Police were specifically instructed not to cooperate with ICE, an illegal defiance of federal law. This was a straight effort to import a class of largely welfare-dependent grateful illegal voters to sustain a permanent leftist incumbency which is largely hostile to any recognizable and traditional version of the USA.

Less destructive and partisan, and a semi-believable matrix for such a policy, was the idealistic notion of a “world nation,” a country that would largely reflect the variety and diversity of the whole world. This was supported not only by anti-white elements in the United States, but also by those skeptical of and hostile toward traditional American values and the generally accepted precepts of America as a country of respect for human rights, democratic free enterprise, and generally Judeo-Christian values.

Whether motivated by class envy, racist antagonism, or authentic sentiments of fraternal goodwill towards all mankind, the ambition to transform the United States into a multi-ethnic melting pot that would submerge completely its traditional character and ethnicity caused millions of Americans to be either enthused or complacent about unlimited and undocumented immigration.

Despite the leftist biases of the national U.S. political media—heavily reinforced by the leftward educational biases generated by the radical left teachers’ unions and the capitulation of most of higher education in many respects to American self-hate lacquered with a veneer of academic justification—the majority of the American public finally grasped the threat to their own welfare and to the character and ambience of American society that they had known and wished to preserve. Crime rates soared, and education and social services were terribly overloaded. Donald Trump won a clear mandate to end illegal immigration and round up and expel from the country all those who had entered illegally and committed, or been believably accused of committing, serious crimes in the United States.

In general, Trump’s opponents rallied behind practically unlimited immigration, for the reasons enumerated, and have focused on what their allies in the media could successfully represent as excessive administration recourse to force against authentic fugitives from injustice seeking only a chance to make a new start in a new country. The Trump administration brought some of the current problems in Minneapolis on itself by making very little distinction—apart from illegal entry into the country—between those convicted of serious crimes either in the United States or their former countries and those authentic seekers of a better life who, since arriving in the United States, have been law-abiding and honorably employed.

Minneapolis became the most belligerent of sanctuary cities, and intensive ICE activities there were easily transformed into immense public controversies envenomed by the death of two protesters. The circumstances of these deaths are being reviewed. The administration claims it is only rounding up and deporting, in the president’s phrase, “the worst of the worst,” while the Democrats claim that ICE randomly seizes those most easily found who entered the country illegally, no matter how unexceptionable their subsequent behavior. The administration will have to establish that the president’s claim is accurate.

The arrival in Minneapolis of border chief Tom Homan has already reduced tensions and is separating the expulsion of violent criminals from anything that could be construed as inhumane treatment of authentic and law-abiding fugitives. Under Homan, the usual Democrat allegations that ICE acts as a Gestapo when eliminating violent illegal immigrants will not resonate well. Presumably, the president will become more lenient with unobjectionable people who entered the country illegally.

Minneapolis should never have become so explosive, and is now settling down. Trump has a good policy which is now, belatedly, being fine-tuned.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.