My colleague Jerry Kammer has written a blog post appealing for wisdom at the helms of the nation's two primary border enforcement agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It's a valuable piece, and merited being said.
I can't say I know the acting heads over at CBP, but I do know the acting chief of ICE; he is an intelligent and sober man who wouldn't willingly lead the troops astray, though of course there is always the possibility of an untoward field incident — a reality in any kind of police work in any agency at any time.
There is another side to the story, too, though.
Open borders advocates and migrant advocacy groups have not only had their way in seeing immigration enforcement fundamentally suppressed in the past eight years; under the Obama administration, the inmates ran the asylum. It can be expected that they won't take the transition to a Trump era easily, any more than the Democrats or the media have found themselves able to.
Given that bias in the media where immigration enforcement is concerned is a near-foregone conclusion (see, for instance, David Seminara's blog post on the BBC and sanctuaries and Kammer's open letter to New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer, here and here). I have little doubt that migrant advocacy groups will use this built-in echo chamber to do all that they can to influence public opinion by making the men and women who enforce our immigration laws, whether in the interior or at the border, look like a B-movie cast of "Agents Gone Bad".
In truth, that was my take on the Philadelphia columnist whose article moved Kammer to write his plea. My belief that the open-borders left will stop at nothing was reinforced by a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by the president of the National Council of La Raza comparing the new executive orders insisting that U.S. immigration laws be enforced with antebellum slave laws.
It was a shabby piece that should never have seen the light of day, but for the fact that the Post's editorial board are fellow travelers on the open-borders road. The comparison was both specious and offensive, and I'm sorely disappointed at the quiescence of traditional civil rights groups for not objecting at the top of their voices. Every nation under the sun has immigration laws designed to protect its citizenry, ensure its sovereignty, and exercise a meaningful choice about the foreigners permitted to reside on its soil. Are they all, then, engaged in a global "slave trade" conspiracy? Of course not. Apparently, only the United States is to be singled out for having a president who has the temerity to insist that its laws be obeyed.
I think we can expect many more months of tiresome tirades, ill-conceived analogies, and, worse, deliberately distorted stories with key facts withheld or obscured that are designed to make the agents doing the hard work of enforcing immigration laws look like unfeeling thugs. I worked among such agents for a very long time, and I know the truth to be very different. Theirs are among the hardest jobs in American law enforcement today.