Callously deporting longtime U.S. residents is yet another failure of Trump’s immigration reform efforts | Editorial
We must address the daily arrest — and potential expulsion — of hundreds of people who have lived quietly and productively in this country for years, the Editorial Board writes.
President Donald Trump’s myopic military intervention that has successfully slowed the flow of undocumented migrants into the United States does not mean he has fixed the mess this country’s outmoded immigration system has become.
If lapdog Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weren’t so busy restoring the discarded names of military bases that humiliatingly honored traitorous Confederate Civil War generals, maybe he would find the spine to tell his boss that highly trained soldiers and Marines shouldn’t be used as border guards.
About 1,600 federal troops have been deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border, most of them Army military police who will be used primarily to enhance surveillance efforts. About 500 Marine engineers will repair and reinforce fences and other physical barriers. They will perform their duties as required, but that’s not what they signed up for.
It’s not even clear their presence is needed. The monthly number of illegal border crossings had already plummeted from a record high of nearly 250,000 in December 2023 to less than 60,000 in August 2024. That’s a 77% decline during the Biden presidency. Trump says about 8,000 migrants were caught illegally crossing the border in February. That’s a 14% decrease from last August.
Mexico has also stepped up its efforts to reduce illegal border crossings. Trump credits his tariff threats for Mexico doing more on this, but our southern neighbor’s deployment of nearly 15,000 federal and state forces at 301 border checkpoints actually began in 2023. From January to August 2024, Mexican authorities detained more than 950,000 undocumented migrants, a 132% increase from the same period in 2023.
But reducing illegal crossings is only one aspect of our immigration crisis. We also must address the daily arrest — and potential deportation — of hundreds of people, many of whom have lived quietly and productively in this country for decades. There are better ways to treat people the Trump administration indiscriminately refers to as “criminals.” Immigration reform shouldn’t mean flattening the degree and severity of the offense within America’s system of justice to make one punishment fit all.
Consider the case of Emine and Celal Emanet, two undocumented Turkish nationals who have lived in the United States since 2008. They were handcuffed and arrested in February at their popular kebab restaurant in Haddon Township because their visas to be in this country expired years ago. “My dad, he’s never gotten a parking ticket,” said their son, Muhammed Emanet.
The couple has since been released, but cases like the Emanets’ could be resolved before they become calamitous if Congress under the leadership of a committed president would break through this nation’s crippling partisan divide to overhaul our archaic immigration regulations.
Congress must pass comprehensive legislation that would make the borders more secure, speed up the judicious handling of immigration applications, and also provide a sensible path to citizenship for otherwise law-abiding residents of this country.
That task would be easier if Republicans and Democrats would stop treating immigration as an election season dog whistle and start treating it as a concern best resolved through bipartisan collaboration. There’s a model they could follow. Twenty years ago, Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, which covered almost every immigration concern we are confronting today.
Their bill failed, as did similar legislation in subsequent years, but even after Kennedy died in 2009, McCain didn’t give up. In 2013, he was among a group of senators dubbed the Gang of Eight (four Democrats and four Republicans, including Sens. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.)) that won Senate passage of a border security bill that included a path to citizenship for most persons living in this country without authorization, if they paid a fine and followed other stipulations that were spelled out in the bill.
There are better ways to treat people the Trump administration indiscriminately labels ‘criminals.’
Unfortunately, the Republican-controlled House accused Democrats and the Gang of Eight of trying to grant “amnesty” to lawbreakers who didn’t deserve it, and Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) never brought the legislation up for a vote. That was during Barack Obama’s presidency when House Republicans considered any bill he supported dead on arrival.
That toxic relationship between Democrats and Republicans hasn’t gotten any better.
So far in his second term, Trump has not encouraged bipartisanship. Instead, he has used the GOP majority in both houses of Congress to place henchmen in charge of vital federal departments where they can better ensure his way is the only way.