By almost any definition, democracies are based on the government implementing the will of the people as expressed in elections, but the people have spoken and suddenly, that will must be denied by any means necessary.
In the history of American politics, few things were more clear than President Donald Trump’s pledge to conduct mass deportations should he be reelected in 2024. Over and over again, he spoke about his plans on the campaign trail, making it a centerpiece of his speech to the Republican National Convention that July. As he put it, “The entire world is pouring into our country because of this very foolish administration. The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them. They’re coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions, and insane asylums…That’s why to keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country. Even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower from many years ago. He was a moderate, but he believed very strongly in borders. He had the largest deportation operation we’ve ever had.” As Stephen Groves characterized it in terms of the choice before the American people in the Associated Press afterwards, “‘Mass Deportation Now!’ declared the signs at the Republican National Convention, giving a full embrace to Donald Trump’s pledge to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history…Trump, when pressed for specifics on his plan in an interview with Time Magazine this year, suggested he would use the National Guard, and possibly even the military, to target between 15 million and 20 million people — though the government estimated in 2022 there were 11 million migrants living in the U.S. without permanent legal permission. His plans have raised the stakes of this year’s election beyond fortifying the southern border, a longtime conservative priority, to the question of whether America should make a fundamental change in its approach to immigration.” To some, even some Republicans, the President’s promises were so extreme, they were said to be impossible to achieve, or as NPR put it “the Trump administration’s own track record reveals why that will be difficult, if not impossible, to execute.” In their view, the President’s first term “reveal[ed] how bureaucratic hurdles slowed the process, limiting the administration’s ability to ramp up immigration enforcement to match the administration’s rhetoric.”
Back then, these challenges included a lack of facilities to detain illegal immigrants before they were deported and ICE being “unable to arrest or remove as many unauthorized immigrants as previous administrations, falling short of the massive deportation apparatus that Trump’s advisers sought.” In addition, “Trump faced constant pushback from the Democratic majority in Congress, which at times blocked Trump’s immigration policy proposals. Federal courts also blocked Trump’s moves, including a push for fast-track deportations. Now Trump’s former immigration advisers are laying out ambitious plans for a second term, including new approaches to enforcement that go well beyond what his administration tried before. Trump himself has talked about enlisting local law enforcement and National Guard troops to extend ICE’s reach, while some of his allies have even floated the idea of ‘staging areas’ or detention camps near the southern border that would allow the administration to arrest, detain and deport unauthorized immigrants by the millions.” Perhaps needless to say, the experts weren’t convinced this approach would work even as they routinely positioned it as a choice before the American voter, as “in some immigration analysts and former ICE officials say the Trump campaign’s goal of deporting many of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. will be expensive and logistically challenging — if it is feasible at all.” “They’re not going to reach the numbers they’re talking about,” said Sarah Saldaña, the director of ICE during the final years of the Obama administration said with complete confidence. “It’s not going to happen.” Even so, immigration activists steadily warned their constituents that something big was going to happen one way or another should President Trump be re-elected. The ACLU, for example, devoted an entire section of their website to “Trump on Immigration,” noting “If given a second term, Donald Trump promises to decimate American communities by targeting immigrants who are already contributing members of society and blocking new immigrants from coming lawfully to the United States. Trump has made clear that he will double down on what he did during his presidency — without regard for the law, decency, or common sense. Indeed, Trump has promised to be far more aggressive in a second term, emboldened by close advisers, like Stephen Miller, to launch a ‘shock-and-awe blitz’ of executive orders and actions that will target millions of immigrants and their families and threaten the freedom and security of everyone in the United States. ‘Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,’ Miller told The New York Times in November 2023.”
Despite these protestations, it’s equally clear that progressives believed immigration authority rested with the executive branch under our system of government, or at least that’s what they argued while President Biden was in office both in the public square and in court. At the time, the President was refusing to secure the border and enforce immigration law, leading to Texas Governor Greg Abbott declaring that his state at least would do so for itself. In 2023, the Governor initiated Operation Lone Star, an $11 billion program to help secure the border on their own, but Democrats cried foul almost immediately, claiming it was not within the state’s power to interfere with immigration at all because such authority rested with the federal government alone. That July, Texas Representative Joaquin Castro announced that he was leading “87 House Democrats, including the full Texas Democratic delegation and the chairs of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, and Congressional Asian-Pacific American Caucus, in a letter calling on the Biden administration to assert its authority over federal immigration policy and foreign relations to investigate Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border operation and pursue legal action to stop the extraordinary cruelty against migrants detailed in recent reports from the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle, and the New York Times.” In an open letter, they wrote, “We ask that you immediately intervene to stop Governor Greg Abbott’s actions and, as appropriate, pursue legal action given the serious and credible allegations of harm to migrants, interference in the federal enforcement of immigration laws, and violations of treaty commitments with Mexico. Operation Lone Star’s programs and policies, specifically the recent erection of razor wire or buoy walls, pose a huge danger to migrants and impedes the ability of our border patrol offices to safely and humanely treat migrants as well as to comply with relevant federal and international laws. As Governor Abbott continues to escalate his efforts on the border, we urge you to take the above actions and stop this horrific abuse of power.” The Biden Administration responded by suing the state to remove a portable system of buoys to block migrants, declaring the efforts “unlawful.” “We intend to seek the appropriate legal remedies, including the removal of such obstructions in the Rio Grande,” Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim said in a statement, clearly supporting Representative Castro’s position that immigration enforcement was the purview of the federal government and states could not interfere even to enforce existing law.
That, however, was then and this is now, as they say. Rather than accepting the results of the election as demonstrating the will of the people (what the Associated Press described specifically as raising “stakes of this year’s election”) and their own prior arguments that immigration enforcement is the domain of the federal government under the Chief Executive (what Representative Castro and his colleagues described as a “horrific abuse of power” if the states were to step in), Democrats are suddenly arguing the opposite on both counts, insisting that they have the power to interfere with federal immigration efforts. In addition to amping up the rhetoric by insisting ICE is a modern day Gestapo, a private army of storm troopers operating on behalf of President Trump, Democrat governors and mayors in Minnesota, Illinois, and elsewhere, supported by their counterparts in Congress, have all taken upon themselves some hitherto undiscovered power to dictate to the federal government, making demands that ICE cease operating in their jurisdictions and putting in place obstacles to make that happen. While recent media attention has focused on Minneapolis, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker claimed last year that state and local laws now trump federal laws in a bizarre inversion of the supremacy clause and their own arguments less than three years ago, “We have a law on the books in Illinois that says that our local law enforcement will stand up for those law-abiding, undocumented people in our states who are doing the right thing, and we’re not going to help federal officials just drag them away just because.” In the state’s largest city, Chicago, officials have refused to allow the police to respond to ICE with assistance when necessary, even when agents have been under attack, and have attempted to limit ICE actions in the city with the authority of the Mayor’s office. In fact, while police were actively responding to an incident in October when ICE was “attacked and rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars,” the dispatcher told responding officers, “Per the chief of patrol: Clear everybody out, we’re not responding over there.” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has even gone so far as to attempt to dictate where ICE can operate, signing executive orders that supposedly establish ICE free zones. “Today, we are signing an executive order aimed at reining in this out-of-control administration,” he said during a news conference. “The order establishes ICE-free zones. That means that city property and unwilling private businesses will no longer serve as staging grounds for these raids.”
Over the weekend, progressive protestors, who have been bleating that the First Amendment entitles them to impede ICE operations with protests, apps, and everything else, went so far as to violate that very same First Amendment for other people by invading a church service of all things. Rather than condemn an obviously illegal and unconscionable trespass, Democrat state lawmakers claimed this complete disregard for the rights of others was “essential” and “must continue.” While many conservatives like myself have long argued that the sort of democracy Democrats have been claiming is at risk for a decade, isn’t the same sort most of us know, love, and cherish, it has gone largely unnoticed by the mainstream media that progressives have now abandoned all pretense that their prior positions meant anything beyond political expedience and the never ending quest for political power. By almost any definition imaginable, democracies are based on the government implementing the will of the people as expressed in elections with the courts acting as arbiters, but the people have spoken and apparently, that will must be denied by any means necessary, up to and including violence and outright nullification of federal laws. Nothing they said before on the topic matters, and all of their claims that our democracy is at risk at the hands of a fascist President completely vanish because they are now the ones risking it by embracing fascism themselves. I once claimed that the Democrats believe democracy is whatever they say it is, and now they’ve proven it for all to see. The only thing they care about is power. The power to do what they want and what they believe their voters want. The rest of the American people have no say, whoever they elect in however clear a manner and with whatever clear an authority. At the risk of repeating myself, if they weren’t so dangerous, it would be impossible to take them seriously anymore.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 