A reality check on mass deportation in Colorado
By Jon Caldara
Let the meaningless battle over mass deportation in Colorado begin.
Watching our cities virtue-signal on immigration is the best free entertainment your tax dollars can buy. The war of words and chest beating is worthy of a reality show.
On one side, you have Denver’s Mayor Mike Johnston playing a modern-day Paul Revere. With those hideous Redcoats marching on Denver, his cry of “ICE is coming” will rally the Highland moms (who apparently cannot be messed with) and his own police force to take up arms to protect the immigrants who are bankrupting his city.
On the other side, you have cities like Castle Rock, those dirty British sympathizers, who have made it clear they welcome the motherland’s ICE agents and will help them scoop up the trespassers.
I hate to burst both bubbles, but there won’t be mass deportations.
My old man used to tell me things are “easy to get into, hard to get out of.” He meant as a warning of going into debt, contracts, business deals and, perhaps most of all, marriage to the wrong person.
There are many political mistakes that are easy to get into and hard to get out of. The welfare and entitlement state, which will bankrupt the country is the perfect example. Throw in Vietnam, Afghanistan and the drug war if you like. President Joe Biden’s dereliction of duty in welcoming more than 10 million migrants as they flood across our border ranks right up there.
Easy to let them in, nearly impossible to get them out.
I assume violent Venezuelan gang members are the exception and most of these immigrants want to be good hardworking additions to our society. Even so, there is something very different compared to the immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Those immigrants of old, legal or not, came to a land of opportunity that had no governmental safety nets. It was sink or swim. Those who couldn’t swim went back.
The Biden invaders by contrast are given food, shelter, health care, education and, perhaps, voter registration at great costs to every level of government. They, unlike in most other nations, are also given due process. That is not only expensive but painfully, painfully slow.
History questions issues, like whether bottling up the whole naval fleet in Pearl Harbor was a bad strategy. History will have no questions about the buffoonery and absenteeism which let this invasion happen.
There will be deportations. But there won’t be many relative to the millions let in. Enough, though, that the press and progressives will weave a narrative of bulldozers scooping up humans off the street to dump them into overflowing cattle cars.
Likewise, deporters will soon learn large-scale expulsion is an aspiration. The reality will be disappointing. It’s taken nine decades (starting with FDR) to grow this leviathan of bureaucracy. Even Superman Trump can’t reverse it in four years. Courts, activists, intransigent municipalities and endless red tape will grind the process to a snail’s pace.
If all the saber rattling could stop for a moment and if Mayor Johnston’s Highland moms put down their AR-15s, we might see there is a middle ground we all can get behind: deporting violent criminals.
I pity any politician who opposes the deportation of foreigners who have committed violent crimes. They won’t be a politician for long.
That doesn’t mean arresting every jaywalker who happens to have dark skin as the identity politics industrial complex will surely assert. But it does mean no longer releasing violent criminals into the public, but to ICE, instead.
I think this point was well articulated by my friend, snazzy dresser and first elected district attorney for the newly created 23rd Judicial District, George Brauchler. He clearly said there is nothing in his job description about serving as an immigration enforcement official and, therefore, he won’t be doing it. But he went on to say anyone, citizen or not, who commits a crime in his town will be dealt with harshly and expediently.
Translation: I’m not going to catch illegal migrants for the Trump administration or Castle Rock. But when one’s done a crime in my territory, I’ll happily hold him until the Feds come pick him up.
And that strategy is not mass deportation. It’s selective deportation. And that’s the first tiny step of getting us out of a situation that was too easy to get into.
