Column By John Young
We have film. Let it roll. Splice it just so.
Start with a mounted menace: Masked and armed ICE agents advancing on horseback across a soccer field in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park. It’s quite a show – scary as hell. Ah, but no one to chase down and manhandle, just frightened summer campers.
Cut to a sun-beaten landscaper in Santa Ana, Calif., thrown on the pavement — pinned, punched, detained. What a danger to us, this laborer. It turns out that his three sons are U.S. Marines.
Cut to agents in Kansas City as they bash the window of a car — the driver, frozen in fear, is then yanked through the shards. The officers show no concern that flying glass might leave two children bloody in the back seat.
So many scenes. So many.
A group called the Save America Movement is recording things like this. It dispatches mobile response teams with support staff to assist immigrants who are being arrested. Most importantly, it provides video.
Let those images, the faces of mass deportation, find eyeballs. On YouTube. On TV. On TikTok. On Instagram. All over. Let people sample what “mass deportation” really means.
It’ll be a useful message for Democrats in the 2026 election.
“Mass deportation” sounded good to many when the Mouth that Roared came down the golden escalator into history.
Americans now understand what the term means. As a result, an increasing number of people are offended. Check the polls.
The latest Gallup poll finds that only 35 percent of Americans support the administration’s approach to immigration. Sixty-two percent disapprove.
Even more strikingly, the same poll finds that 79 percent say immigration is good for the country and only 30 percent want immigration decreased. So much for the power of the “great replacement theory.” Support for “build the wall” bromides has also plummeted.
What has grown, according to the poll, is support for liberalizing the means by which undocumented individuals can become citizens.
So, voila: On the issue they have sought to exploit like few other matters, the Republicans are out of sync with the electorate. The Democrats should take this and run with it.
Americans increasingly are alarmed by what they see: the disappearance of people who are legally in this country, the ignoring of fundamental constitutional principles like due process and habeas corpus.
More significantly, Americans are reminded of the ways in which immigrants serve this country. And they recoil to see this president place peaceable and productive individuals, though undocumented, atop his “most wanted” list.
Last month, ICE arrested Moises Sotelo, who for 31 years has made rural Newberg, Ore., a much better place. He has an industry-recognized vineyard management company that employs 10. He’s a pillar of his church. He has two grown children who are citizens, a status he couldn’t attain as of yet because of Republicans who treat the words “pathway to citizenship” like the ultimate sin.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who happens to reside in Newberg, wrote about how the people of his town, a GOP stronghold, have shaken off any love affair they might have had with mass deportation and have come to Sotelo’s defense. Crowdfunding for his family has raised more than $25,000. Spurred by Sotelo’s arrest, a billboard in town now declares, “Losing immigrants hurts us all.”
Well, score one for the indiscriminate police state. Sotelo is being deported.
Not only are we talking about the fates of productive individuals. This president and his minions in Congress are spending unconscionable sums for what most Americans now say is wrong.
The Horrible, No Good Budget from Hell includes an unconscionable $20 billion boost for ICE – more than tripling its budget — and going hog-wild on border security, detention, and deportation. As Kristof points out, the spending spree makes ICE the most expensive law enforcement agency in the country.
J.D. Vance, the robot vice president, said during budget deliberations that whatever Congress was debating – Medicaid, education, housing, name it – “everything else” was “immaterial” to the build-up on immigration and the swath ICE can cut through communities.
Let’s put that BS to the test. Americans have that opportunity when a new Congress is elected in 2026.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
