MAGA’s ‘Omelet’ Excuse for DHS Thuggishness
They admit that mass deportation is impossible without egregious abuses—but want it to go ahead anyway.
WITH THE KILLING OF ICU NURSE ALEX PRETTI seventeen days after the killing of Renee Good—both shot to death by federal agents in broad daylight on the streets of Minneapolis—it has become overwhelmingly clear that Donald Trump’s mass-deportation regime cannot be sustained without a repressive state machinery that endangers the lives and tramples the rights of legal residents and citizens of the United States, just as critics had been warning. Since the surge of Homeland Security agents in Minneapolis began, the city has seen many other disturbing incidents. In one, 56-year-old ChongLy Thao, U.S. citizen, was led from his house half-undressed in freezing weather by federal agents who failed to realize that one of the individuals they were really looking for was already in prison. In another, a legal asylum seeker from Ecuador, with a pending immigration court case, was detained with his 5-year-old son whom he had just picked up from preschool. Several video clips have shown ICE and Border Patrol agents harassing Minneapolis residents and demanding to see their papers for no reason other than the color of their skin or the accent of their speech.
When defenders of Trump’s immigration policies can’t deny these incidents or spin them into oblivion, they’re reduced to minimizing them, as when MAGA-friendly pundit Wilfred Reilly summed up Thao’s ordeal as, “an un-injured man was briefly out in the cold.” Or they treat such abuses as inevitable—as simply the price of the mass deportations voters supposedly elected Trump to carry out. It’s the can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs argument. There’s no “nice-looking” way for mass deportation to work, the argument goes, especially after the Biden administration let in “tens of millions of illegals.” (Which, in MAGA’s warped reasoning, includes people who entered legally as asylum seekers under Biden: “it sucks,” but “it’s Joe Biden’s fault, or those who rode his autopen,” sighs Fox News columnist David Marcus.) Such arguments are often accompanied by lamentations that too many Americans, even Trump voters, are too spineless and “pussified.”
Here’s a case study in the omelets/eggs argument: Colin Wright, a Manhattan Institute fellow, in a tweet to his 284,000 followers, dismissed “isolated instances of ICE errors or overreach” as irrelevant: “No system is perfect. When you’re trying to deport millions of people there will always be errors. . . . We have a big mess to clean up and potentially not much time to do it in.” In a follow-up post, Wright stood his ground and clarified what he meant: the deportations need to be completed by the end of Trump’s second term.
One might think the admission that an effort to speedily deport millions will inevitably result in “mistakes”—with consequences that include broken lives, separated families, and the anxieties and humiliations of official harassment based on race, ethnicity and accent—would lead to the conclusion that such an effort shouldn’t be undertaken. But in the omelet calculus, all such harms are understandable, if not justifiable,
What, then, is the urgency that justifies this brutal formula?
For starters, there’s the false notion—sincerely held by some, employed as a propaganda tactic by others—that we are facing a massive crime wave driven by illegal immigrants. In reality, notwithstanding some high-profile, tragic cases such as the murder of nursing student Laken Riley by an illegal migrant from Venezuela, most research suggests that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans and that increased unauthorized immigration does not result in higher crime rates.
Other justifications for the omelets/eggs principle include the usual Stephen Miller-type Great Replacement fantasies and “Democrats flood [the] country with illegal aliens for votes” fearmongering. Given overwhelming evidence that illegal voting by noncitizens is vanishingly rare, some, including Wright and MAGA-friendly tech tycoon Palmer Luckey, have shifted to arguing that the real issue is census apportionment of electoral votes:
In truth, though, that’s another phantom menace—and if the effect did exist it would boost the electoral votes of red states such as Texas and Florida as much as blue ones such as California and New York.
The argument that deportations must be carried out quickly because the window is likely to close after 2028 is especially chilling. In essence, it tacitly concedes that aggressive mass deportations are broadly unpopular—and calls for proceeding full speed ahead anyway, public opinion be damned. Currently, ICE is on track to catch up with ISIS in negative approval ratings, and Trump himself is rapidly losing ground on immigration, once an issue where he had his strongest advantage.
That stands to reason: For all the ‘we voted for this’ talk, poll data showed all along that, despite widespread concerns about securing the border, most Americans had little appetite for a hardline ‘they all have to go’ approach. In a Pew Research Center poll of U.S. adults last March, there was a strong consensus for the deportation of illegal aliens who had committed violent or even nonviolent crimes. On the other hand, relatively few wanted to deport people who were here illegally but were gainfully employed, who had been brought to the United States as children, or who had U.S. citizen spouses and/or children. Yet those are precisely the kinds of people who are currently being rounded up by ICE (only about 5 percent of whom are violent criminals while 73 percent have no criminal convictions at all).
In one notorious case, a landscaper who has been in the United States since the 1990s, had no criminal record, and is the father of three Marines was not only detained for deportation but beaten by ICE agents during his arrest. In another newly surfaced horror story, a 70-year-old woman from Iran who was denied formal asylum but allowed to stay in the United States twenty-six years ago, and who remained in perfect compliance with all the conditions of release, was abruptly placed in detention for several months without adequate medical care. It’s very likely that today, after such publicity, support for deporting all illegal immigrants would be even lower than in the March poll.
People may endorse the mass-deportation agenda for a variety of reasons, including the deluded but genuine belief that it’s necessary to save democracy. But regardless of the motives, it inevitably leads to an authoritarian or even totalitarian mentality—the conviction that we can’t afford to get too fussy about civil rights violations if we want to achieve the desired goal. As Joseph Stalin’s henchman Nikolai Yezhov put it during the Soviet Union’s great purges of the late 1930s, in a Russian variation on the omelet/eggs proverb: “When you chop wood, chips fly.”
Can someone please clarify something for me: As I understand it, if a state policeman shoots you to death for no legitimate reason, your family could file a civil suit against that policeman and the state; but that if a federal agent shoots you to death for no legitimate reason, you cannot file a civil suit against that agent and the federal government. Is that correct? That your civil rights are protected against a state's actions, but not against the federal government *unless the federal government chooses to make it so in your particular case*???