The Necessary Limits of Mercy
Editor's Note
We are in the midst of a deep struggle over whether the United States retains the moral and political authority to govern itself. In a cold civil war, the decisive battles are rarely fought over first principles directly; they are waged through language, procedure, and moral framing. The destructive Left understands this well: By recasting enforcement as cruelty and procedural restraint as justice, it seeks to transform the nation’s own moral inheritance into an instrument of paralysis.
A little over one year into the Trump administration, public polling suggests that Americans are losing their appetite for mass deportations. National attention has settled on scenes designed to provoke moral alarm: stories of children sent to detention facilities or deported, videos of immigration raids conducted by masked ICE officers, and the highly publicized deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Footage implying even minor misconduct now travels quickly through national outlets, while deportations of individuals without serious criminal records are increasingly framed as injustices against the “hard-working” and the “law-abiding.”
The result has been a measurable softening of public support for immigration enforcement. A recent poll by Reuters shows that 58 percent of respondents believe ICE has gone too far, while the president’s approval rating now stands at 38 percent. These figures reflect not simply concern about specific incidents, but a growing tendency to treat enforcement itself as suspect. Restraint, then, is the default moral position.
Many voters believe the Trump administration has executed immigration law with great tenacity. The numbers tell a different story. A New York Times analysis found that Trump removed only 230,000 people from the interior of the country, with an additional 270,000 at the border. While interior removals steadily declined under Barack Obama’s presidency, Obama still conducted 238,000 interior removals in his first year. By contrast, during President Biden’s tenure, the high-water mark of interior removals was 50,000, even as more than ten million illegal migrants entered the country.
Given that Biden’s flouting of immigration law led directly to Donald Trump’s second election, it’s hard to argue that deporting roughly two percent of those who entered illegally under Biden is “too aggressive.” But with the barrage of reporting from legacy institutions like the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal, the disconnect between the scale of Trump’s immigration enforcement and the public’s perception of it makes sense.
In their coverage of current ICE operations, the legacy media and the regime appear to be conducting standard journalism aimed at exposing cruelty or overreach in federal law enforcement. They make superficially-neutral claims about ICE brutality, due process, and inhumane living conditions in detention facilities. But these criticisms are anything but neutral, nor are they made in good faith.
Consider the recurring accusations of due-process violations in immigration enforcement. These claims are less about genuine procedural concern than about exploiting a well-known American reflex. From the earliest period of British settlement, the right to a fair trial has occupied a central place in the nation’s legal imagination. The media, aware of this deep-seated reverence for procedural justice, has framed the Trump administration’s refusal to grant court hearings to certain detainees as evidence of systemic overreach, inviting moral outrage where a legal distinction is being made.
Tellingly, the same voices now demanding maximal procedural scruples for immigration enforcement were largely silent about the denial of due process to January 6th protesters. Many openly celebrated it.
The same imbalance appears in the outrage over ICE officers wearing face coverings in the field. The claim that anonymity emboldens lawlessness is hardly controversial; it is the underlying assumption in every discussion of masking during public disorder. During the Black Lives Matter riots, looters and vandals routinely concealed their identities, just as campus activists did when they violated conduct codes and set up encampments at universities. Yet in those cases, masking was treated as incidental or understandable; only when law enforcement masks up does it become illegitimate.
Another recurring objection to ICE, voiced by liberals and some conservatives alike, concerns the deportation of so-called “non-criminal” aliens, individuals whose only violation is unlawful presence in the United States. This argument tends to come from two quarters: Republicans attentive to donor or institutional pressure, and liberal reformers who oppose enforcement practices without rejecting enforcement in principle. In both cases, deportation is framed as an unjust and even cruel removal of hard-working, family-oriented migrants who came in search of economic opportunity. The concession is always the same. The nation may enforce its borders, we are told, but only a criminal conviction is said to justify removal.
This sort of claim is virtually identical to those made by self-described open borders advocates. In proposals for open borders, caveats that those with criminal histories should not be allowed to come to the United States are commonplace. Effectively, the only thing separating leftists like Rachel Maddow or Dan Crenshaw from libertarian Bryan Caplan is when legalization happens: at the border or after entry through selective enforcement and periodic amnesty.
It’s not a bug that these arguments over procedure, masking, and the deportation of non-criminals have so much sway with the American people. It’s a feature.
The Moral Foundations of American Enforcement
“America is great because America is good.” Attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, the line has been repeated so often it risks meaning very little. In context, however, it carried a sharper claim. In one of his texts surveying the culture of the new America, Tocqueville wrote that he didn’t understand the secret of our nation’s genius until he entered its churches and heard its pulpits “flame with righteousness.” What he encountered there was a moral authority that truly preceded law, thus rendering a republican life a distinct possibility.
America’s social fabric grew out of that inheritance. It encouraged compassion without fostering dependency and community free of coercion. The ordinary burdens of life were met far more by churches, charities, and voluntary associations than by any government means, tying our people one to another. Simultaneously, this moral culture developed liberal instincts: due process, equal protection, and a suspicion of arbitrary power. habits that trained Americans to side with the individual and to treat state force with caution.
For a long time, that disposition held the country together, but today it’s turned against itself. It follows that those who tout “compassion” to excuse lawlessness will treat enforcement as a moral transgression. And nowhere is the resulting confusion more visible than in the intent refusal to enforce our nation’s immigration laws.
Americans have always been unusually vulnerable to appeals framed in the language of mercy, equality, and procedural justice. This vulnerability does not stem from naivete, but from our nation’s moral, civic, and political inheritance. Our political tradition holds that power should justify itself, and our religious tradition summons us to look favorably upon the downtrodden.
That inheritance explains why these appeals are so easily weaponized. The regime has learned from the Biden-era mistake of appearing soft on immigration enforcement.
Its commitments, however, remain unchanged: mass migration, multiculturalism and the dissolution of the American nation. Thus, they now position themselves as sober “reformers” who supposedly accept borders and deportations in principle, while insisting on procedural and humanitarian standards so exacting that enforcement at scale becomes politically intolerable and operationally impossible. This allows the project to continue without being defended on explicitly political grounds. If the current ICE debate were framed honestly — whether a president may admit ten million illegal migrants and bind his successor to permanent acquiescence — the public verdict would be swift and unmistakable.
So the question is displaced. Voters are instead offered a moralized argument over methods, optics, and process, carefully designed to obscure the real objective: stopping removals altogether. This is not a debate over how to enforce immigration law, but a strategy for ensuring it is never enforced at all. This maneuver has become a familiar feature of the nation’s cold civil war, as procedural moralism steadily erodes legitimacy and renders enforcement politically untenable.
Republican leaders are already falling prey to this subterfuge. To no one’s surprise, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted to redirect funding from ICE to Medicaid. But it’s not just Murkowski and Collins giving in to the manipulative and deceitful concerns over ICE. Representatives Max Miller and Andrew Garbarino and Senator Rand Paul have provided bipartisan cover for an ICE investigation aimed less at oversight than at stalling enforcement.
Credence should, by no means, be granted to this controversy, for it is but a pretext. Procedural and humanitarian complaints redirect the debate away from the central dispute and toward secondary considerations. The debate is staged as a matter of procedure and decency; it is, in fact, a conflict over first principles. Can the United States retain the right to enforce its borders and preserve itself as a culturally coherent nation?
The Left says “no.” It denies America’s legitimacy as a unified political community grounded in its Anglo-Protestant inheritance, even as it selectively invokes the language of British common law to justify the mass immigration now eroding that inheritance. But these narratives must be confronted and dismantled, for if they prevail, the question ahead will not be whether America remains great, but whether it remains at all.