“We have to be honest with the American people. We are going to have to deal with the reality that people who are here illegally will be deported. That’s the law. And it’s something that we have to enforce.”—Barack Obama
I snagged the chart from the Migration Policy Institute. The number of deportations under Obama were lower overall than the two prior administration, but note the emphasis on removals relative to returns.
What’s the difference between removals and returns? Removals are formal deportations where an individual is ordered to leave the United States by an immigration judge or through a legal process. The individual must be removed from the US after they have been apprehended by immigration authorities, e.g., Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Returns are voluntary departures where an individual agrees to leave the US without the formal deportation process. This happens when a person is apprehended but not formally removed through a legal proceeding. Instead, the individual is allowed to return to their home country without facing an official removal order. This process is handled primarily by CBP.
With respect to these numbers, we should reflect on how few illegal aliens were returned and removed during Trump’s first term. During Trump’s first go around, ICE deported approximately 935,000 individuals, including removals and returns. That’s remarkably low given the hysteria over Trump’s immigration policy. Remember the moral panic? Trump was Hitler. He was throwing brown people into concentration camps. The regime was separating families. The CBO were brownshirts. ICE were Gestapo.
It’s weird, because I lived through Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and I don’t remember any hysteria over returns and deportations during their presidencies. Sure, there were those who complained. But there was no hysteria. During Clinton’s second term, deportations averaged 1.7 million a year—nearly twice as many as Trump deported during his entire first term. Where was the moral panic?
What explains such a drastically different perception and reaction? I explained this in a recent article, but I will summarize my conclusion here. But before I do, I need to emphasize that it is not a party thing. Trump and Bush are both Republicans. Yet the response to their immigration policies were radically different.
The progressive media carried Bush in many respects. They clearly favored him in 2000 in his run against Gore. Their coverage of the steal in Florida favored Bush. They perpetuated the WMD lies and were cheerleaders for the Second Gulf War (just as they were cheerleaders for the First Gulf War). They promoted the Swift Boat smear against the Kerry campaign. They obscured the irregularities in that election.
There’s a reason why the media treated Bush and Trump differently. Trump is a populist and a nationalist and therefore a direct threat to the globalist agenda. In contrast, George Bush was a globalist and a neoconservative, which the progressive media promote. It isn’t because Trump is a Republican, but the wrong kind of Republican.
Which brings us to the explanation: the globalist agenda has moved into the next phase: open borders and mass immigration in order to disorganize nation-states. We see this in Europe, as well. There, the Islamization of the West is more obvious. But it’s a happening here, as well.
When Clinton, Bush, and Obama deported tens of millions from America this was useful because that was the phase of transnationalization focused on regional and global trade agreements, entrenching the global financial system, and offshoring capital and work to export processing zones across the Third and Second (then no longer communist) Worlds. It was useful to appear to have the back of the American worker by being tough on immigrants, cover while they were destroying the industrial base on which the American worker depended. They made up for the devastation with cheap products from China, as well as easy money and credit cards.
Having established the foundation of the New World Order, the second shoe to drop is the creation of a borderless world. This explains the manufactured hysteria over Trump’s policies. Through the use of the universal injunction and hobbling Trump’s presidency, globalists have effectively thwarted his immigration policies.
It was Joe Biden’s role to open the borders. He telegraphed the strategy during the 2020 debates. In so many words, he told immigrants and the human trafficking networks to get ready—immigrants were welcome in America. Schumer went on the record saying that, because native fertility rates are so low, we needed immigrants to replenish our ranks. Biden’s pick of Alejandro Mayorkas was a signal to the traffickers.
Today, they’re coming after Trump even more aggressively on the matter of immigration. They have to keep the millions that flooded into our country here—to make voters of them, to drive down the wages of native-born workers, and to disorganize communities. Trump is confronting a vast apparatus that is driving down his popularity by making it difficult for him to deliver on his campaign promises.
And that means that the apparatus is making it difficult for the electorate to have what they voted for.
freedom and reason 