High school valedictorian ordered back to Mexico by the Trump administration!
This was the sort of headline I expected when President Donald Trump soared to victory in 2024 on a platform of mass deportations. During Trump’s first term, the legacy media and Democrat Party’s go-to strategy to turn the public against the enforcement of our democratically passed immigration laws was to characterize the average illegal immigrant living in the United States as one whose contributions to our country surpass those of the average American citizen.
For example, here is an excerpt from a 2017 press release from Senator Dick Durbin:
Dreamers embody everything that America should stand for — they are valedictorians, honor students, college graduates, engineers, soldiers, teachers, and the future of our nation.
Such glowing, broad characterizations of Dreamers — or illegal immigrants as a whole — are as simplistic as claims that paint all illegal immigrants as violent criminals or rapists. Yet, while the former is often accepted in mainstream discourse, the latter is swiftly condemned as “bigoted” or “factually incorrect” and pushed to the margins of online platforms. This double standard reveals a bias in left-wing newsrooms against American citizens.
For two decades, this bias has manifested in media narratives — spanning both liberal and some conservative outlets — that disparage hardworking Americans as lazy. These accusations often serve as a pretext for advocating the importation of cheap labor, both legal and illegal. This condescension toward American workers, coupled with bipartisan proposals for amnesty from open-borders Democrats and corporate-aligned Republicans, fueled the working-class revolt that propelled Donald Trump to two presidential victories.
Recently, however, the Trump administration appears to have deviated from a core campaign promise: the mass removal of individuals residing in the United States in violation of immigration laws. Instead, President Trump has prioritized spending resources and political capital on deporting individuals legally residing in the United States.
This began with the warrantless detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and green card holder at Columbia University, with the Department of Homeland Security citing him as a “flight risk.” Furthermore, the State Department argued that deporting Khalil was necessary because he posed a serious risk to America’s foreign policy.
Regardless of one’s stance on the Gaza conflict, research into Khalil’s conduct during last spring’s protests at Columbia University undermines these claims. According to Newsweek, a Jewish peer of Khalil’s had this to say about his conduct:
When people hurled insults and profanities at me and my classmates, Mahmoud was the first to step in and de-escalate the situation. He never raised his voice, never used harsh language, never resorted to aggression — he spoke calmly and respectfully, shielding students, including me, a Jewish student, from harm.
The second of President Trump’s errors was the snatching of Rümeysa Öztürk off the streets on March 25 by ICE. Given no due process and accused of no crime, Öztürk now sits in a Louisiana jail for publishing an editorial in her school newspaper that criticized Israel.
These punishments levied against Khalil and Öztürk — along with hundreds of other international students who have had their visas revoked — harkens back to the time when one of our nation’s worst presidents, Woodrow Wilson, used the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 to criminalize the speech of those against U.S. involvement in the First World War. At least during Wilson’s time, they were using this aggressive expansion of the federal government’s authority against those who criticized the foreign policy of the United States, whereas today, our government uses it against those who criticize the foreign policy of a foreign nation.
To illustrate how misguided these arrests were, consider if the Biden administration arrested legal residents who were critical of funding the war in Ukraine. Under the justification provided by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, these patently unjust arrests could have been justified by Biden as defending America from those who seek to thwart our national security aims.
My colleague Nate Jackson has touched on how aspects of these cases raise concerns about the federal government’s adherence to due process. This concern is legitimate and has been addressed extensively — if not obsessively — by The Patriot Post’s ideological adversaries in the mainstream media. Which is why it is worth considering how the Trump administration’s errors will have severe ramifications for the accomplishment of Trump’s core campaign promises and the prospect of future immigration restrictionism.
First, Americans have not demonstrated any substantive desire for legal immigrants to be deported, even if they committed a sin as egregious as criticizing our foreign policy or that of a foreign nation. President Trump is spending an enormous amount of his limited political capital on an issue unrelated to that on which he ran, i.e., mass deportations.
Every day and every dollar Trump spends on deporting a legal resident without due process is a day and dollar Trump is not spending on deporting one of the at least 20 million people illegally residing in our country. Fortunately, so far, this White House has stemmed the flow, cutting apprehensions at the border down from nearly 130,000 last April to less than 10,000 this past March.
This reduction in apprehensions is a direct result of the credible threat Trump has made that a migrant’s long journey across the U.S.-Mexico border will result in a swift deportation. However, if the administration fails to drastically increase its deportation numbers, the threat of deportation will lose its credibility, eventually leading to a resurgence of illegal migration.
Furthermore, stemming the flow of illegal migrants into the U.S. is not enough — the flow must be reversed. Deporting merely 11,000 individuals in a month is not going to be enough. In fact, relying solely on the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove illegals from the country’s interior will prove inadequate if Trump truly wants to achieve his goal of mass deportations. To achieve his core campaign promise of returning Biden’s migrants to their respective homelands, President Trump must call on Congress to make E-Verify the law of the land while simultaneously cutting all benefits doled out by the federal government to illegal immigrants. Coupled together, the jobs will dry up and the goodies will disappear, creating a powerful incentive for illegal immigrants to return home.
Unfortunately, President Trump can only achieve these victories if he enjoys Republican majorities in Congress. By misreading his mandate and pushing executive actions that the public did not vote for, he sets the stage for a Democrat takeover during the 2026 midterms. This outcome would inevitably end in frivolous impeachment trials, derailing half of Trump’s time in the Oval Office.
Second, by deporting immigrants (whether legal ones or illegal ones) without due process, President Trump is giving ammunition to the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center, which scream “FASCIST” every time a president decides to prioritize national sovereignty over cheap labor.
One of the biggest hurdles to implementing an immigration policy that defends national sovereignty and cultural integrity is countering the voices in the media, think tanks, and academic world that deem immigration restriction as a racist, bigoted policy. By prioritizing the removal of green card holders and visa recipients while simultaneously suggesting that the “homegrown” are next, President Trump is giving his detractors a clearly constructed narrative of a president who is violating individual rights to pursue his hyper-nationalistic aims.
This indifference toward the rights of due process that noncitizens and citizens enjoy will create massive setbacks for the public’s reception of a future anti-immigration platform. The electorate will rally around birthright citizenship. They will signal favorability to increased legal immigration in public opinion polls. And they will be more susceptible to the creation myth that the United States was founded and built by immigrants. Thankfully, President Trump has walked back the revocation of student visas, but I fear the damage to his image — and to immigration hawks more broadly — has already been done.
The Trump administration was handed a mandate to close our borders and deport millions of illegal immigrants. Ham-handedly detaining and deporting legal residents will prove to be political poison. In the short term, President Trump may get personal satisfaction in his testing of his Article II authority, but in the long term, the American people will ask if it was worth it.
