Across the country, immigration enforcement raids have sparked growing protests. Militarized federal agents, often in a confusingly ramshackle assortment of gear and uniforms, have been met by angry crowds shouting them down with chants of “shame!” Over the weekend in Los Angeles, the federal government for the first time since 1965 deployed the National Guard over the objection of a state’s governor. President Donald Trump “is sending 2,000 National Guard troops into LA County — not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said on X on Sunday. “He’s hoping for chaos so he can justify more crackdowns, more fear, more control.”
The division and disorder on display are the culmination of an absurd premise which has long gone unchallenged: the whole concept of immigration restriction. This policy of segregation by place of birth presents a choice between three basic options. You can muddle along with de facto nonenforcement, putting swaths of the population and economy into a legal gray area and creating underground black markets. You can take the Trumpian tact of aggressive enforcement against millions of people, at the cost of civil liberties and social peace. Or you can confront the elephant in the room: the reality that these laws are unjust, unnecessary and an affront to the freedom of not just immigrants, but also citizens and our democratic republic. Mass removal is a profoundly unnatural fit for a country purporting to be free.
When the government sends paramilitary-style law enforcement units into people’s neighborhoods, this is no longer some abstract argument about “the border.”
Mass deportation and large-scale immigration enforcement require nothing less than a police state, and the more of a crackdown you demand, the more obviously it will look and act like a police state. When the government sends paramilitary-style law enforcement units into people’s neighborhoods, this is no longer some abstract argument about “the border.” It’s Boyle Heights. It’s Queens. It’s Milwaukee. It’s San Ysidro. It’s armored vehicles and flash-bangs outside your grocery store.
The administration’s frequent line — including from Trump himself — is that only United States citizens possess legal and constitutional rights, such as due process. This is wrong as a matter of law and at best dubious as a matter of morality. Making the mere entry and presence of people illegal, turning millions who’ve committed no other offense into marginalized outlaws, undermines the foundations of a free society.
But suppose, for argument’s sake, you care only about the freedoms of native-born Americans. Any attempt to seriously enforce restrictionist immigration laws impinges on your liberties. The enforcement of such a sweeping prohibition, the division of society it entails, can only be accomplished with a massive enforcement machine to match. And citizens can be, and frequently are, caught up in that machine’s grinding gears.
Those horrified by the more physical means of enforcement may imagine that other, less direct methods can be sufficient to “secure the border.” But policymakers have attempted for decades to impose administrative barriers to accomplish the exclusionary goal with fewer actual arrests.
All 50 states now issue REAL ID-compliant identity cards, which are checked constantly in daily life. E-Verify, tenant screenings, banking rules and benefit restrictions are all burdens created to make undocumented life less desirable in hopes that people will simply leave of their own accord. Yet, millions remain, because even such burdens pale in comparison to tin-pot dictatorships, civil war or simply grinding poverty. When the paperwork fails, the boots arrive.
To make mass deportation a reality, the government inevitably must send militarized agents into peaceful neighborhoods to sweep up cashiers, day laborers and housekeepers. It must unleash tear gas and violence in the streets when communities push back against raids on apartment buildings and local restaurants. It must intrude on personal relationships and violate privacy, freedom of association and economic liberty. It must tear away parents, traumatize innocent kids and shred trust in the law.
These destructive social dynamics always show up in the context of enforcing victimless offenses.
To keep the assembly line of deportations moving, the government needs to trample due process with the truncated procedures offered by executive branch immigration courts, created to sidestep the independence of regular federal courts. It diverts law enforcement agencies from chasing real criminals. And it wastes tax money and sabotages the economy — all to no real benefit except morally repellent abstractions about bloodlines and race.
These destructive social dynamics always show up in the context of enforcing victimless offenses. Aside from marijuana use (another absurdly unenforceable federal prohibition), undocumented presence is probably America’s most common victimless offense — unlike violent crimes or property crimes, which immigrants commit at a lower rate than native-born Americans, and which can and should be prosecuted in their own right. Claims about drains on resources ignore their real economic contributions to the tax base and exclusion from benefits. Social Security, for example, is actually subsidized by immigrants, including undocumented immigrants who still pay taxes.
There is one truth on the other side of the equation: it is indeed corrosive to have laws on the books which go unenforced and widely flouted. That has been the reality of our immigration regime for far too long. But we now see that the solution isn’t to tear apart our society while trying to enforce bad laws. Instead, we should repeal them. Every time we ban peaceful, voluntary conduct — crossing a border, renting a home, taking a job — we expand government power and shrink liberty. The trade-off is unavoidable.
Across history, one of the main arcs of moral progress has been the advancement of legal equality regardless of arbitrary, immutable characteristics. Nothing is more arbitrary or immutable than your place of birth or whom you were born to. Our civic creed insists all are created equal. Anything else shackles us all to illiberal impositions and societal dysfunction.
Push hard enough on mass deportation and Americans will meet ICE with human chains to protect their neighbors. Tear apart people’s lives and communities, and they will start to fight back. Try to commandeer regular police, and states and localities will refuse. Produce endless horror stories and scenes of dystopian authoritarianism, and you can’t keep pretending this is merely about building a wall through the desert.
This has never been about just controlling the border, it’s about controlling America, and at the end of the day Americans are not a people who like to be controlled. The reconstruction of a post-Trump America will require a radical liberalization of immigration laws. Our aspirations to be a free country and our reality of being a nation of immigrants are, and always will be, inseparable.
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