EDITORIAL: ICE needs to actually focus on national security

Yahoo

23-07-2025

Editor's note: This editorial originally ran in fellow CNHI paper Enid, Oklahoma, News & Eagle.
If the goal for Immigration and Customs Enforcement is to remove the 'worst of the worst' undocumented immigrants, we fail to see how the detainment of Oklahoman Octavio Mota meets that goal.
Mota is most certainly an Oklahoman. Having immigrated with his family when he was 2, mostly growing up in Enid before a recent move to Stillwater so his fiancee could study at Oklahoma State University, Mota has been a green card-holding legal permanent resident for much of his life. While ICE used some misdemeanors to make its arrest — the kind of offenses that by all accounts probably could have been expunged by now — Mota is not the 'worst of the worst.' According to reporting from The Frontier, he's someone who works, pays taxes and was raising a family.
'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' President Donald Trump posted to his social media in June. 'In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!'
Yes, a lot of American industry leans heavily on immigrant labor and it's little shock that it's often jobs that many natural born Americans seem unwilling to do. Words and deeds, apparently, are very different in these cases because White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has pushed a huge quota onto ICE in an effort to make a campaign promise of 'mass deportations' a reality.
The reality is that ICE is now operating like the IRS. There's a reason the IRS is more likely to audit someone making $50,000 a year than millionaire tax cheats — the people making 50K a year don't have lawyers on retainer, they can't drag audits out for years and tie up the system. ICE, in an effort to meet its quota, is going for low-hanging fruit regardless of the human cost because it's easier than infiltrating criminal organizations.
Few people would argue that our borders should not be secured or that criminal gang members should not be deported. If your argument is that people should behave themselves once they come to this country, we'd argue it should be pretty easy for anyone to weigh the justice of penalizing a youthful indiscretion like public intoxication against violent crimes or trafficking. How could it not be better for society if a father remained here to raise his child, do work that others won't and contribute to the tax base? If your argument is that people should be allowed to immigrate but must do it 'the right way,' you're ignoring how increasingly and intentionally difficult that has become.
When people like Mota are deported or threatened with deportation, it means Miller's agenda isn't so much about national security than it is about an effort to reduce the number of brown people in the country. We don't think that was part of the campaign promise.
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