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Some Republicans are turning against this policy, but there’s no other way to undo the harms of unchecked migration and reassert the law.
Can a country allow mass lawbreaking and retain its integrity? For almost any crime you can think of, the answer is no. No country would allow people to walk into another person’s house or let them drive on the wrong side of the road. Yet many politicians behave as if they have no choice when it comes to mass illegal immigration. It appears that even some Republicans are losing their will to deport illegal migrants and reverse the lawbreaking trend.
Their hesitation is understandable, since the public has little stomach for the reality of deportations, and the tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have turned off many would-be supporters. A Gallup poll in June found that the share of Americans who support deportations has fallen to 39 percent from a recent high of 47 percent in 2024, while the share who oppose them has risen from 51 percent to 58 percent. On cue, Republican politicians are distancing themselves from the policy, going well beyond condemnations of the worst ICE excesses. Representative María Elvira Salazar became the face of this shift last week when she released an ad excoriating the president for detaining illegal migrants who “had no criminal record”—meaning those whose only crime was to cross the border in the first place.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Free Press
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Douglas Murray is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.