WHY HAS TRUMP EMPHASISED STRONG IMMIGRATION POLICY IN HIS ADMINISTRATIONS?
The Big Beautiful Bill passing in the Senate, and as we’ve established, the Senate has officially passed the GOP’s tax and spending cuts bill (also known as the Big Beautiful Bill) by a vote of 51-50 – with vice president JD Vance breaking the tie! It now heads back to the House, where it will first go to a Conference Committee and then the full house. But, to begin with, I’d like to pose a question to you (our viewers). Have you ever wondered what prompted the emphasis on immigration policy from Trump – both in his first presidency with the famous “build a wall matra”; and even in this administration with the mass deportations, completing the border, and even (recently) the plans to build a detention centre dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”? All of this tells us that clearly, immigration policy is very central to the Trump administration’s focuses, and so why?
Here’s what comes to mind: when we think of war on the national sovereignty of a nation – that is its authority to govern itself, we tend to typically discuss this in light of an external threat; like an invasion or colonisation. Seldom do we see a government not only be culpable in the undermining of its national sovereignty but also be a chief architect in the problem. Despite the problems we’ve seen in different governments and administration, such as improperly allocated funding, incongruous responses to conflict, or even corruption, despite all of this, every citizen should at the very least be able to say that its government is not adamant on placing its citizens as a second concern to the citizens of other nations, and even destroying its nation. And yet, under the Biden-Harris administration, Americans were denied this basic privilege or hope. The border crisis (and subsequent security, economic and political issues) were an inside job orchestrated by the Democrat establishment, and was constantly chipping away at America’s sovereignty. In fact, this was so blatant that we saw the Biden-Harris administration fight Texas (which is another border state), when it sought to secure the border itself!
RECAPITULATION: THE BIDEN-HARRIS ADMINISTRATIONS WAR ON BORDER SECURITY
In more detail, the Lone Star State was embroiled in a dispute with President Joe Biden over razor wire barriers. Seeing the massive wave of illegal immigrants flooding into the United States, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made attempts to mitigate the situation. He then signed into law a new border security bill that gave Texas state law enforcement very broad authority, such as the ability to arrest migrants who enter Texas illegally. It also allowed local judges to order the deportation of these illegal immigrants out of the country. Texas Governor Greg Abbott also ordered the Texas National Guard to put up the concertina wire barriers on the border with Mexico. However, the Biden administration had its federal officers begin to cut the barbed wire in order to get to the migrants and process them into the country. The Biden administration also sued the state, leading to a US Supreme Court 5-4 ruling that allows federal agents to take them down. However, undeterred by the court order and the Biden administration’s criticism, Governor Abbott said that he would add more razor wire to make sure the state is “doing even more to secure the border.” Especially because the court ruling seemed to not explicitly prevent the state of Texas from adding more razor wire. Here’s a recapitulation.
Well, interestingly, in reacting to the Supreme Court ruling, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said immigration law enforcement is a federal responsibility and Texas’s actions hamper those efforts. By contrast, Governor Abbott’s tough stance on border security was praised by Republicans. In fact, a group of 25 GOP governors issued a joint statement accusing President Biden of failing to secure the border and backing Mr. Abbott’s efforts. In addition, former President Donald Trump told supporters at a January 27 rally in Las Vegas that if he were elected president, he will do everything in his power to support Texas’s border efforts. And thank God he has been re-elected. But, here was the crucial sentiment at that time on the Biden-Harris’ approach to immigration policy.
This case then developed from being an immigration case and proceeded to significantly challenge the state of the union – and this is speaking to its conglutination. In essence, following this back-and-firth from the Biden-Harris administration, Texas Governor Greg Abbott then openly defied the White House and invoked Article 1 section 10 of the US constitution as a reason to ignore the Biden Administration’s demand that the State government cease erecting a border barrier along the Texas-Mexico border.
This development was bold and yet also relatively unexpected, because Republican-controlled state and local governments rarely show any willingness to oppose federal usurpations of local authority. For decades, the standard operating procedure of Republicans has been to instantly surrender the second anyone in Washington utters the phrase “supremacy clause” or the Supreme Court makes a ruling. Democrats, on the other hand, routinely scoff at federal supremacy, such as with “sanctuary cities.” That was thus a peculiar instance in which a Republican-controlled state government has not immediately bent the knee in the name of national unity and “law and order.”
But, then looking at Texas Governor Abbott’s declaration in invoking Article 1 section 10 of the US constitution, the declaration made the case that the Biden administration has been ignoring federal immigration laws and illegally withdrawing border-control operations from the Texas-Mexico border.Governor Abbott stated that (quote): “Under President Biden’s lawless border policies, more than 6 million illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border in just 3 years. That is more than the population of 33 different States in this country. This illegal refusal to protect the States has inflicted unprecedented harm on the People all across the United States.” (end quote)
But, then Governor Abbott said that the US Constitution provides a remedy for the situation: the Framers included both Article IV, § 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.
But, the final paragraph of the declaration from Governor Abbot is where it got interesting. Abbott writes: (quote) “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfil the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense. For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”… So in this text, Governor Abbot was essentially saying that federal supremacy in this case had been rendered null and void by a federal refusal to enforce federal law. And expectedly, concerns began to ensue about the state of the union.
Well, based on this recapitulation, responding to the immigration crisis is clearly a necessity, because poor immigration policy under the Biden-Harris administration not only caused a porous border, but threatened American sovereignty to the point of almost even fragmenting the union. Evidently, strong immigration policy is first and foremost about preserving the sovereignty of a nation; which is why it has been a key strategy for the Trump administration to address the border crisis and associated concerns, like the security issues (where gangs hijack buildings and citizens are murdered), or economic issues (where the federal government reduces spending on Medicaid by removing illegal immigrants from the beneficiary roll) – which is where the big beautiful bill comes in.
THE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL AND IMMIGRATION LAW
Now, according to president Trump, the One, Big, Beautiful Bill delivers on his promise to Make America Great Again! And as far as immigration law is concerned, it focuses on accomplishing four things: (1) to permanently secure American borders; (2) to deport at least ONE MILLION illegal immigrants a year; (3) to finish Phase Two of the border wall; and (4) to hire 10,000 new ICE agents & 3,000 Border Patrol agents.
Why are these focuses important? Let’s begin with the first and third focuses, being to permanently secure American borders and to finish Phase Two of the border wall respectively. In unpacking this focus, I’d like to frame the discussion to emphasise why borders matter. Now, when it comes to frustrations with less secure borders, driving the growing outrage in Europe and North America is the ongoing elite push for a borderless world. Among elites, borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of our age — and, as with other such ideas, it has shaped the language that people use. The descriptive term “illegal immigrant” gave way to the nebulous “undocumented immigrant,” then it was just “immigrant,” or the entirely neutral “migrant” — which is a noun that obscures whether the individual in question is entering or leaving.
In addition, today’s open-borders agenda has its roots not only in economic and political factors — the need for low-wage workers who will do the work that native-born Americans or Europeans supposedly will not, and the desire to flee failed states — but also in several decades of intellectual ferment, in which Western academics have created a trendy field of “borders discourse.” What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries are mere artificial constructs, methods of marginalisation designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatize and oppress the “other” — usually the poorer and less Western — who arbitrarily ended up on the wrong side of the divide. Well, this view (part of the woke border discourse) assumes that where borders are not drawn, power is not exercised — and yet, immigrants pouring into nations like the UK and Czechia wield considerable influence by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western grievance politics – and New York Representative Zohran Mamdani is perhaps a notable example.
Yet the truth is that formal borders do not create difference — they reflect it. Therefore, the so-called elites’ continued attempts to erase borders are both futile and destructive. This is to say that borders — and the fights to keep or change them — are as old as agricultural civilization. In ancient Greece, most wars broke out over border scrubland. Throughout history, the trigger points of conflicts have traditionally been such borderlands — this includes the methoria between Argos and Sparta, or the Alsace-Lorraine powder keg between France and Germany. These disputes did not always arise, at least at first, as efforts to invade and conquer a neighbour. Rather, they were instead mutual expressions of distinct societies that valued clear-cut borders — not just as matters of economic necessity or military security but also as a means of ensuring that one society could go about its unique affairs without the interference of its neighbours.
But, perhaps one of the greatest proofs that borders matter (in addition to Trump’s election victories) is that there are nations in the EU threatening its existence through euroscepticism, as nations demand more control over their borders. Their argument is typically that the EU’s approach to migration weakens nation-states and their sovereignty. And we saw this especially with Germany demanding to have greater control of their immigration policy.
And so, the need to resist the elitist and ultra-liberal claim of the nobility of borderlessness is crucial, and certainly reflected in the Big Beautiful Bill through the focus on securing American borders. Not to mention, if God conceptualises and respects borders, nations ought to do the same.
But, let’s then proceed to the second and fourth focuses of the OBBB on immigration, which is to deport at least ONE MILLION illegal immigrants a year and to hire 10,000 new ICE agents & 3,000 Border Patrol agents (respectively); and let’s begin by standardising the understanding of President Trump’s approach to deportations. In essence, it can be summarised as being two-fold: first, is the deportation of illegal migrants, which will culminate in millions of illegal migrants being jettisoned from the US. Secondly, is the focus on especially criminal illegal migrants, who have been found guilty of crimes in the US (in addition to entering the country illegally) but have likely been released through the Biden-Harris “catch and release” policy; or have never even been charged, but are wanted persons.
This is important to clarify because for the longest time the left tried to curate the narrative that Trump lied when he said he is ONLY planning on deporting illegal migrants guilty of committing crimes – but, of course, this misses the crucial context that entering a country illegally is indeed ALSO a crime. And so, the focus on deportations does place emphasis on migrants who have committed especially violent and heinous crimes (in effort to correct the ills produced by the “catch and release policy” of the Biden Harris administration), HOWEVER, the plan is the deportation of all illegal migrants.
Then, as far as enforcement of this deportation approach is concerned, we have seen numerous measures put in place. For instance, the Trump administration shuttered the use of CBP One, which was a President Joe Biden-era app meant to help process migrants seeking to apply for asylum in the US. The Department of Homeland Security issued memos to repeal limits on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents imposed by former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. And, in addition, federal officers swept into sanctuary cities on President Trump’s first full day in office, nabbing more than 300 illegal migrant criminals — including an attempted murderer and a child molester — to hold them for deportation. But, here’s president Trump discussing the policy further.
It’s a fair approach to deportations. It focuses on enforcing the laws that demand compliance with legal conditions for entering the US, it prevents family separations by deporting the entire family together, and it does not close off America to people with hopes of living in America and contributing good to the society. Furthermore, president Trump gives a crucial response to the annoying question on “deportations and migration law being difficult to implement because there are always peculiar circumstances”. He stated that irrespective of the peculiar circumstances and different cases, the US (like any country) SHOULD have laws and regulations that serve as a reference and form precedent on migration related matters. And this is not only true but also important because, firstly, strong leaders do not back out of making tough decisions because they are difficult, otherwise the status quo would never change and only worsen!
Secondly, president Trump’s response serves as a crucial refutation to Democrats and liberals who have tried to use the “difficulty and peculiar circumstances” argument to suggest that these perceived challenges become a reason for a rescission of president Trump’s approach to deportations and legal immigration. But, clearly, having and enforcing laws for legal migration in the ENTIRE NATION would benefit more people than the few that would be inconvenienced by enforcement of these laws; like in cases where one relative has legal status and does not want to be separated from the family, in which case they have the option to be deported with the rest of their family.
WHAT IS THE JUSTIFICATION AGAINST THE DEPORTATION OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS?
Therefore, the question that those who oppose Trump’s approach to deportation have not answered is: what is the justification against the deportation of immigrants who have entered the US illegally, and also who have committed crimes? And there certainly is no legal justification, besides the Biden Harris having invented laws to keep illegal immigrants while also having policies like “catch and release” which ensure that immigrants who’ve committed crimes are released back to society. However, as far as legal justification is concerned, deportations are not only legally permissible, but even deportations of children of illegal migrants do not get citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
Ultimately, under president Trump, strict immigration is not just about protecting the borders of the US and allowing due process to adjudicate who enters (which is essential), RATHER, we are learning more and more that those who are strict on immigration understand the price that is paid by even those from outside their respective nation. In fact, we saw the same attitude from President Trump’s Border Tzar, Mr Tom Homan.
