ICE, Defrosted

Read this summary of the activities of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by No Labels at RealClearPolicy and decide for yourself whether you think it should be abolished, especially in the absence of an alternative. This observation from President Obama, spoken recently in South Africa and safely out of the hearing of Democrats who think otherwise, is also instructive:

But Mr. Obama, sounding a lot more like Mr. Trump than like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told his South African audience that “it’s not wrong to insist that national borders matter, [that] whether you’re a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed.” He added that “newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home. Those are legitimate things, and we have to be able to engage people who do feel as if things are not orderly.”

This, too, is instructive:

Since President Trump was inaugurated in 2017, ICE arrests have increased while border arrests have decreased. According to NBCNews.com, the Border Patrol made 311,000 arrests last fiscal year, a decline of 25 percent from 416,000 during the final year of the Obama administration. During that same period, ICE made 143,000 arrests, up 25 percent from the year before.

which, as I have repeatedly pointed out, does not support President Trump’s “border wall” at all. Law that goes unenforced is a wish not a law. The statistics above suggest that the future of immigration enforcement will depend on means other than the Border Patrol, not entirely surprising considering the large number of illegal immigrants who merely overstay their visas, more or less permanently.