Voluntary deportations gain steam
On Monday, the Trump administration announced it is tripling its bonus to $3,000 for illegal aliens who voluntarily self-deport, along with free travel back to their homeland. Liberals can hardly complain about this Christmas gift to those who crossed our border and remained in our country in violation of our laws.
Many illegal aliens are willing to self-deport. Since Trump became president on Jan. 20, a remarkable 1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily returned to their home country, according to data released by the Department of Homeland Security, although some dispute this total.
Involuntary deportation costs an estimated $17,000 per individual, so it makes sense to share the savings in a way that everyone comes out ahead. There is room to sweeten this pot further while still trimming the overall expense.
The average lifetime cost of an illegal alien for American taxpayers is $100,000, with some estimates higher than that. The demands placed by these migrants on government entitlement programs, remedial education in schools, law enforcement and our health care system are far greater than the $3,000 being offered for them to return home.
Self-deportation is the primary method by which President Dwight Eisenhower achieved the largest deportation in American history, in 1954. It would have been unthinkable then for liberals to interfere with the president in removing aliens from our country.
CBS News had prepared a smear piece against Trump’s forced deportations and scheduled it to air on its “60 Minutes” show on Sunday evening. But merely two hours before airing, the newly installed CBS editor-in-chief pulled its one-sided story off the air, illustrating that Trump is winning on this issue.
Another victory for Trump came last Thursday, when Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan was convicted of a felony count of obstructing federal agents seeking to arrest an illegal alien who was in her courtroom on battery charges. Dugan sent the federal agents in one direction while leading the illegal alien to exit by a private jury door to evade arrest.
It is safer to arrest a suspect in a courtroom than to try to catch and handcuff him on the street, which was a point emphasized by federal prosecutors during the short trial of Judge Dugan. She has continued to collect her full salary of about $175,000 as a judge despite being a felony defendant, and she vows to appeal her conviction.
Liberals are appalled by the jury verdict, as they are accustomed to juries in D.C. rendering every verdict against Trump and his supporters. D.C. and Virginia grand juries have even refused to indict opponents of Trump, despite how indictments are nearly always automatically rendered as prosecutors request.
But Wisconsin is in middle America, and the 12 mostly rural counties that comprised that jury pool are nothing like D.C. Few if any of those jurors in Wisconsin are federal employees, as D.C. juries predominantly are, and Trump won Wisconsin in the last presidential election.
Conservatives who were once disappointed at Trump for not building a full border wall during his first term in office, because Congress failed to fund it, are seeing that deportations have nearly as strong an impact as a wall would.
There has been a 93% decrease in apprehensions at the southern border near San Diego, a 50-year record low of only 1,793 apprehensions. During the Biden administration a year ago, there were more than 24,700 apprehensions for the same two-month period.
The termination of the catch-and-release program, whereby the Biden administration would senselessly release illegal aliens in the United States after capturing them, is cited as one reason for the disappearance of nearly all of the illegal crossings. But surely the high-profile deportation program by the Trump administration is the single biggest factor.
Still, some say that the deportations need to go faster in order to meet the goals set by Trump. There have not been as many raids of illegal-alien workplaces as expected.
Where illegals have been arrested en masse and deported, it appears that Republican areas like Omaha, Nebraska, have been targeted more than Democrat strongholds like Los Angeles and New York. The much-publicized raid on a food plant in June in Omaha was in a swing district Democrats hope to capture in the midterm elections.
The thousands of Democrat loyalists who staff the Department of Homeland Security still have their jobs, and have not been replaced by conservatives. Those staffers appear to be picking regions for deportation for political reasons, rather than to meet Trump’s goals.
Activist judicial rulings have also hindered deportations from Democrat strongholds. For more than two months the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to resolve an emergency petition on this issue by Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, despite quickly ruling in his favor nearly two dozen times on other issues.