I will begin with a statement that may seem like pointless virtue signaling, so I hope readers will stick with me. The statement is simply that I think we should care about how immigrants are treated, whether they are legal or not.
Now, I don’t think this statement is especially controversial – most people don’t want immigrants to be abused. But it can seem controversial depending on the context. So why am I saying it?
I have been concerned about the treatment of immigrants for a while. I was concerned, for example, when President Barack Obama was deporting 3.1 million immigrants over his eight years in office, a number far in excess of what the Trump administration has carried out.
According to DHS, between Trump’s January 2025 inauguration and December, the administration had deported 605,000 illegal aliens. ProPublica reports that ICE also detained 170 U.S. citizens during the year, which is true, but according to The New York Post, 130 of them were arrested for interfering with or assaulting officers. Only about 40 or so were detained accidentally or erroneously, and just half of those people were held for more than a day; most were released in a few hours.
By contrast, in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (bookings), and four mistaken removals of U.S. citizens. When President Obama’s Director of Intergovernmental Affairs was questioned about the Obama record on immigration and replied: “What the president is doing is enforcing the law of the land.”
To her credit, one person who noticed the problem back then was Maria Hinojosa, whose 2011 Frontline special “Lost in Detention” should be viewed to get a sense of how many of the same issues upsetting people now were happening then, but with much less bitter opposition or controversy.
I don’t remember hordes of people demonstrating violently then, putting themselves between ICE officers and immigrants. I don’t remember masked citizens putting up check points to keep ICE agents out.
Even if you lauded all those actions now, you have to admit they weren’t happening back then. And back then, Obama was deporting millions more immigrants than Donald Trump has been able to deport. I don’t remember the Democrats in Congress shutting down the government to force changes in ICE then.
So too, I don’t recall a host of Catholic bishops falling all over themselves to stand boldly against the Obama administration. A Google search turned up only one USCCB position paper done by a lawyer on immigration enforcement, a host of praises of Obama for delaying some deportations, and an article in America magazine titled “Catholic bishops urge end to Obama administration’s surge of deportations.”
Which is less overwhelming than the title promises, because, as it turns out, “the bishops” were in fact one bishop and an auxiliary bishop. This was not exactly an overwhelming flood of criticism.
Even the website of the Minnesota Catholic praised President Obama’s “deferred action” executive order, but did so reassuring people that Obama wasn’t too extreme. “Most people with whom I spoke,” writes the author of the article, “who were initially opposed to the president’s action, supported it when they heard what it did and did not do.”
The author continued:
The confusion surrounding the executive action is emblematic of an immigration debate that has been distorted both by the impassioned dislike of President Obama and a media culture that, unfortunately, turns most political debates into either/or policy choices. . . .Commentary on and reaction to the president’s action has generated more heat than light and has fit into the false parameters of the public immigration debate: Either open our borders to all comers and grant “amnesty,” or deport all those who are here. The president’s order is not “amnesty” in the popular sense of the term, which would mean forgiving undocumented persons, requiring no penalty of any kind, and providing them with lawful immigration status.
In other words, not to worry, Minnesotans, President Obama isn’t crazy. He’s not granting amnesty!
This does not make every Trump deportation morally justified. There were concerns about dividing families then, and there should be concerns about dividing families now. I will not pretend that I can provide a suitable answer to the immigration reform the country needs in a sound bite. That’s the job for others. My concern is that during Obama’s presidency, there was relatively little outrage about these deportations.
He was even given an honorary degree at Notre Dame, despite his record on both immigration and abortion. But when Trump became president, coverage of immigrants in cages were suddenly all over the news – even though those cages were a holdover from the Obama administration.
When Joe Biden was elected, the rage died down, but immigrants weren’t any better off. Even those being let into the country without documentation were being suckered into a bad deal for someone else’s benefit, forced to hide their undocumented status indefinitely, making them perpetually at risk for bribery and extortion, never able to complain about poor treatment.
The media were more interested in their being bused to New York and Chicago, where their treatment was arguably better than in the overwhelmed detention facilities in Texas.
So, if the next president is a Democrat, and the situation for immigrants does not improve, are we still going to see violent protests in the streets? Will Catholic bishops be outspoken in their criticism? Or will they retreat into the relative silence we have come to expect on abortion? Will Democrats shut down the government then if ICE deportations continue? Will the people out on the streets throwing themselves at ICE agents continue to do so?
Do these people really care about immigrants? Or are they just enjoying a feeling of meaningfulness joining in the latest cool thing? What about when media coverage dries up and it’s no longer “cool”? Will they still be there to support the people rather than merely a partisan ideology?
That’s my concern. Because their record is not promising.
