Hold on to your hats people. More importantly, hold on to your American dreams.
By the time that most read this editorial Donald Trump will have been the nation's 47th president for a full working day. He promised us that the first day would be full and eventful. One of the events would be the launch of a full scale effort to rid the nation of undocumented and illegal immigrants (yes, there is a technical difference though all, bottom line, are indeed illegal).
That this is being written before the first day we can still assume that the new president got things done, and perhaps without the distraction of non-stop Fox News in the Oval Office.
The first act in the campaign aimed at ridding the United States of the unwelcome is "Operation Safeguard."
Operation Safeguard is billed as a law enforcement plan of the United States Government scheduled to be activated on January 21, 2025, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting as the lead agency. Its objective is to rapidly detain and expel undocumented immigrants living in urban areas in the United States.
The first target is Chicago.
Now before all this it is interesting to note reports in the last few days stating that deportations under President Joe Biden in 2024 reached a decade high, surpassing any number that President Trump achieved in any year of his first term.
According to ICE, more than 271,000 immigrants were deported from the U.S. over the last fiscal year.
The bulk of these deportees were recent arrivals who were shown the door under a new streamlined process adopted by ICE.
According to reports, the bulk of 2024 deportations involved illegal migrants who were apprehended by border officials as opposed to those arrested in the country's interior. About 82 percent of immigrants deported were arrested by border officials.
President Trump is looking more at the interior. Chicago certainly qualifies.
The interesting thing about all the deportations under Biden is that they are only now becoming widely known. There are a few reasons for this, not least the fact that many in Biden's party would feel uncomfortable with the rapid expulsion of so many people who are obviously facing the crisis of their lives.
Also the fact that they had barely entered the country means that most Americans were not even aware of their presence.
It's a different matter in the "interior" where all too many undocumented people are known, are part of communities, work hard, pay their taxes, do not commit crimes beyond being illegal, and are raising kids born in the United States.
Most Americans are not out and out anti-immigrant. They do want to know who the new arrivals in their midst are and where they came from. They want to feel confident that the new arrivals were checked, vetted at a border that is orderly and secure.
Problem is you are never going to have an orderly and secure border so long as the nation's immigration system is such a mess. That is a matter for Congress, but don't hold your breath on that count. The broken immigration system can be traced back to the reform of 1965. We're talking sixty years at this stage and six decades during which band-aid measures were applied when in fact the system required radical surgery.
But back to 2025 and Operation Safeguard, the first of an expected slew of operations.
You have to wonder that if the point of this operation is to ensnare as many undocumented men, women and children as possible that it would not be advertised so loudly in advance.
But of course that's the point: "loudly."
Donald Trump is not a quiet man. He wants the world to know what he wants to do, what he intends to do. Fair enough. He is, in certain respects, an open book.
He might not be able to fulfill every promise he made to voters, but it won't be for the lack of show, song and dance.
There will be headlines, sounds and images of the undocumented being pulled in and shown America's door. But because of all the advance noise, perhaps not as many as some might expect.
Because of all this advance ballyhoo some ICE agents will knock at the doors and get no response; no response because those who might have been behind those doors have fled deeper into the aforementioned interior.
Oh well, better luck next time when there will be more headlines and images that even some who support mass deportation, voted for it, might find stressful.
And as all this proceeds Congress will continue its fiddling. America should work better than this.
