RIGHT SPEAK: Democrats Shift From Supporting Legal Immigration To Urging Open Defiance Of U.S. Laws

Hyperbole about routine procedures for illegal immigrants who have already received deportation orders goes beyond amnesty pleas.

Part of the problem involved in the raids that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were scheduled to carry out on Sunday was presidential hype. President Donald Trump has been using the prospect of a massive effort to arrest illegal immigrants as part of his standoff with House Democratic leadership. During the negotiations between the administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Trump postponed the sweep at least once.

But after House Democrats — with the conspicuous exception of the “squad” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat — voted for funding to alleviate the desperate situation at the border after a massive surge of illegal immigrants crowded detention facilities, Trump ordered the raids to commence.

Both Sides Are Exaggerating

To judge by the president’s boasts and the avalanche of statements from Democrats denouncing the raids, you might think ICE is in the process of trying to round up all of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and then ship them all back to their countries of origin. Indeed, the dramatic denunciations of the raids by Democratic presidential candidates, members of Congress, and mayors, and governors of so-called sanctuary cities and states more than matched Trump’s hyperbole.

These Democrats depicted the raids as extraordinarily cruel toward illegally present foreigners, describing families as living in terror of a knock at the door in terms that were once reserved for visits by the Gestapo or the KGB. They universally decried the fate of apprehended illegal immigrants as unjust and pitiable, as when the administration vainly sought to deter the flow of illegal immigrants by a policy of “zero tolerance,” in which those illegaly crossing the border with children were arrested.

Both the mainstream media and Democrats portrayed the prospect of ICE “separating families” as unpardonably cruel and insensitive. ICE’s efforts to track down illegal immigrants earned it not just opprobrium from Trump’s critics but widespread calls for its abolition, with Ocasio-Cortez characteristically going one step further with a demand for the end of the Department of Homeland Security. But the truth about these raids is far less dramatic than the rhetoric being heard on either side of the political divide.