[By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner. Published June 18, 2019]
The media outrage is itself outrageous.
President Trump’s renewed pledge to deport huge numbers of illegal immigrants is inspiring anger, but it’s hardly righteous. If, as a Homeland Security adviser has explained, the targets of Trump’s deportation plans will be those illegal aliens who have failed to show for their assigned court hearings, then Trump is morally, ethically, and legally justified in deporting them. The tut-tutting chorus might as well spare us their faux moral histrionics.
The immigrants Trump is targeting are people who have broken American law not once but twice. First, they entered the country illegally, without papers. Second, when given a court hearing (where they could, for example, make bids for asylum or otherwise make a case for being allowed to stay), they again thumbed their noses at the legitimate authority of their generous hosts. Such poor guests deserve no sympathy, no matter what circumstances they came from.
The United States bends over backwards in trying to afford due process of law to immigrants. It holds them to comparatively lenient standards for turning illegal entry into legal status (see, for example, chain migration). Still, a sovereign nation has every good reason to protect borders and to insist that it know who is crossing its border and why. No matter what status or poverty these aliens claim to be escaping, simple respect for their new host nation demands that they pay heed to its legal procedures.
No American can skip court hearings with impunity. Why should immigrants, especially illegal ones, be allowed to do so?…
[This is important. We can show human sympathy without letting our laws be ignored or disrespected, or our borders treated as unimportant. To read the rest of this column, please do follow this link.]
