Deep Dive: Why Trump’s Deportations Are Legal, Constitutional, and Long Overdue
Deportation isn’t dictatorial. It’s required. And Due Process means only the process that’s actually due.
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by Rod D. Martin
April 21, 2025
Contents:
The U.S. Belongs to Its Citizens — Not the Entire World
The Constitution: Sovereignty and Plenary Power Over Immigration
Due Process Is Only the Process That’s Due — and That’s Often Minimal
Federal Law Doesn’t Just Permit Deportation: It Requires It
The Alien Enemies Act and the Military Infiltration of the Southern Border
Biden’s Subversion — Deliberate Nullification of Immigration Law
The System Cannot Handle 20 Million Trials — and Was Never Meant To
Precedent — Trump’s Plan Is Completely Consistent With Past Presidents
Conclusion: The Real Constitutional Crisis
1. The U.S. Belongs to Its Citizens — Not the World
However much it may offend our Libertarian and Socialist friends, the United States does not belong to the world. It belongs to its citizens.
That statement, once self-evident, now invites shrieks of outrage from the professional ruling class, the corporate media, and an activist judiciary. But it remains true. And it is the foundation of our laws, our Constitution, and our civilization.
The United States is not a global flophouse, nor a refugee camp for humanity at large. It is a nation, with citizens, and borders. Citizenship means something, no matter who tries to cheapen it. Those borders mean something too. And they exist not to exclude the world arbitrarily, but to protect the people who live within them — the citizens who constitute the sovereign body of the Republic.
That’s the point. Sovereignty resides in the people of the United States, not in the United Nations, not in foreign NGOs, not in caravans marching from Venezuela, nor in cartels trafficking Chinese fentanyl and Afghan nationals across an open desert. Our government exists to serve and defend its own citizens: we pay taxes, and swear allegience, for that purpose. And when it fails to do that — worse, when it actively serves the interests of foreign nationals over those of its own people — it is no longer governing: it’s betraying.
So we begin with the first principle: No one has a right to be here unless our law expressly says they do. There is no international human right to sneak into America. There is no constitutional doctrine that transforms trespass into entitlement. And there is no line in the Declaration of Independence that grants political membership to 8 billion strangers simply because they want it.
Entry into the United States is a privilege, not a right. Citizenship is a covenant, not a souvenir. Anyone who crosses our border without authorization is not exercising freedom. They are violating it — ours, just as I would be violating the freedom of a bank I decided to rob, no matter how much I needed the money.
The people we’re discussing are guests, and in many cases, uninvited ones. They are not stakeholders. They do not share in the public trust. They do not have a claim to the fruits of our tax dollars, our elections, or our political future. And like any guest, they may remain only at the pleasure of the host. That is not xenophobia. That’s the law.
And the law — federal, constitutional, and longstanding — is clear: those unlawfully present in the United States must be removed. Not may. Must. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), passed and repeatedly reaffirmed by Congress, lays out mandatory procedures for identifying, detaining, and deporting those who enter or remain here illegally. These laws are not advisory. They are binding.
Donald Trump is not proposing something radical or new. He is enforcing the law, the law that Joe Biden’s Democrats openly defied. And Biden’s refusal is not a matter of policy preference. It is the deliberate, strategic abandonment of a constitutional duty — for political gain, for demographic manipulation, and for the preservation of one party’s power.
There is no constitutional crisis because Donald Trump wants to deport millions of illegal aliens. The constitutional crisis is that the law requires their removal — and Joe Biden spent four years ensuring that did not happen.
2. The Constitution: Sovereignty and Plenary Power Over Immigration
The debate over immigration is too often framed as a humanitarian dilemma or a matter of economic policy. It is neither. At its core, immigration is a sovereignty issue, and under the Constitution of the United States, sovereignty belongs exclusively to the American people, whose interests it must protect.
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power “to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” That clause means what it says: only Congress can determine who may become a citizen. But this authority necessarily implies — and has long been recognized as including — the power to control entry and removal of non-citizens.
Article II places the corresponding duty on the President, who must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” That includes immigration laws. And it is not optional.
Over time, the Supreme Court developed what is now known as the plenary power doctrine — the principle that immigration and deportation are core sovereign functions, inherently political, and largely immune from judicial second-guessing. That doctrine has been upheld again and again, even by the most liberal courts in American history.
In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the so-called Chinese Exclusion Case, the Court unanimously upheld the federal government’s authority to exclude aliens based on national origin or political considerations. The decision was not an endorsement of bigotry — it was a reaffirmation of national sovereignty. The opinion declared:
To preserve its independence, and give security against foreign aggression and encroachment, is the highest duty of every nation, and to attain these ends nearly all other considerations are to be subordinated.
In Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Court went even further, holding that Congress had the power to deport legal resident aliens, even without a criminal conviction, and even without trial. Deportation, the Court explained, is not punishment. It is the exercise of sovereign power to control who may remain inside the borders of the nation.
These precedents remain good law to this day. They have been reaffirmed and strengthened by modern decisions.
In Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), the Court upheld the Attorney General’s refusal to admit a Marxist academic into the United States to speak at American universities. The Court refused to question the executive’s decision, writing that when the government “has provided a facially legitimate and bona fide reason,” the judiciary has no role in overriding it.
In Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (1999), the Court held that the executive has virtually unreviewable discretion in deciding whom to prosecute and deport. Deportation may involve “policy choices” that are “ill-suited to judicial review.”
And in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court reaffirmed and sharpened all of it. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, held that:
The President’s authority to suspend the entry of aliens stems not only from the Constitution but also from express delegation by Congress… [and] is largely immune from judicial review.
That decision upheld President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” — in truth, a travel restriction from a handful of terrorist-exporting nations — against hysterical legal challenges. The Court didn’t just uphold the executive’s authority. It slammed the door on future judicial interference, declaring the matter settled.
Oh, and a side note: Trump’s ban was virtually identical to an earlier one imposed by Barack Obama, which no one thought important to challenge.
The critics like to pretend that Trump’s proposals are extreme. But the Supreme Court has said otherwise. The Court has repeatedly affirmed that Congress makes the law, and the President enforces it. And in immigration, both have broad — even exclusive — authority.
When Trump vows to deport those whom federal law requires to be deported, he is not pushing the edge of legality. He is standing squarely within it. He is exercising the very powers the Constitution gives him, and the very duties it imposes.
What is unconstitutional is the opposite: a President who refuses to enforce the law, subverts the will of Congress, and invites mass lawbreaking from foreign nationals with impunity.
Joe Biden did not merely fail to execute the law. He actively violated it, at scale, in defiance of his oath and in betrayal of the people who elected him. That is the crisis. That is the legitimate focus of outrage. And that is what Donald Trump proposes to correct — not with new laws or new powers, but with the authority the Constitution already provides.
3. Due Process Is Only the Process That’s Due — and That’s Often Minimal
The loudest cry from Trump’s critics is that mass deportation would violate Due Process. This has become the knee-jerk response to every enforcement proposal — as though invoking those two words constitutes a legal argument. But it does not. In fact, the phrase is usually misunderstood, and too often intentionally misused.
Due Process does not mean a full criminal trial with a jury, a public defender, and a presumption of innocence. That standard applies to criminal prosecutions. But it doesn’t even apply to all situations involving a crime. If I am the victim of a home invasion, I am well within my rights to administer the due process of a shotgun blast. I need no additional evidentiary hearing, trial, or appeal.
Deportation doesn’t even rise to the level of criminal. It is a civil matter — specifically, an exercise of administrative immigration law. The government is not putting someone in prison. It is simply removing them from a country they had no legal right to enter in the first place.
Even in the criminal context, the Constitution does not guarantee infinite process — only that which is “due.” And in civil cases, the standard is far lower. As the Supreme Court held in Mathews v. Eldridge (1976), due process is not a fixed checklist. It is a flexible balancing test that considers the nature of the interest at stake, the risk of erroneous deprivation, and the government’s interest in administrative efficiency and public policy.
In the immigration context, those interests overwhelmingly favor the government.
The state has a compelling interest in controlling who enters and remains in the country. It has an overwhelming interest in preventing fraud, abuse, cartel infiltration, terrorism, and foreign espionage. And it has a legal obligation — codified in federal statute — to remove those who are present unlawfully.
The alien, by contrast, has no right to be here. That fact must be repeated: illegal aliens have no right to remain in the United States. Presence alone does not confer immunity. In fact, presence alone — when unauthorized — is grounds for immediate removal under the law.
That removal may or may not involve judicial process. In most cases, it does not. And that is fully consistent with both statute and precedent.
Opponents of Trump’s enforcement agenda claim that mass deportation would be “impossible” without massive judicial intervention. But the law says otherwise. The courts are not the mandatory venue for removal. They are the exception. Congress knew full well that millions might enter illegally. That’s why it created expedited and administrative procedures. The law was designed not to depend on a clogged immigration court system with 700 judges and a 3-million-case backlog.
And when critics say that illegal aliens have a “right to due process,” what they really mean is that they want to rewrite the rules — to force every single case into a courtroom, delay every removal indefinitely, and create a de facto amnesty by procedural gridlock. That is not due process. That is abuse of process. And the Constitution requires no such thing.
4. Federal Law Doesn’t Just Permit Deportation: It Requires It
It is not enough to say that President Trump “has the authority” to deport illegal aliens. He does. But that misses the point.
The point is that he — like every President — has a legal duty to do so.
The modern legal framework for immigration enforcement is built on the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), first enacted in 1952 and amended repeatedly by Congress. It is not ambiguous. It is not silent.
Nor does it suggest. It commands.
At the center of this framework is a bedrock provision: 8 U.S.C. § 1227. This statute lays out in plain English the categories of aliens who are “deportable.” These include:
Those who were inadmissible at time of entry or who violate the terms of admission;
Those who overstay their visa;
Those who engage in certain criminal conduct;
Those who represent a threat to national security.
But most importantly, it includes any alien who enters the country without inspection — in other words, anyone who crosses the border illegally.
The language is not suggestive. It is declarative. These individuals “shall” be removed. Not “may.” Not “subject to further determination.” The law requires their deportation.
In addition to § 1227, Congress has provided a suite of enforcement tools designed to ensure that this mandate can actually be carried out.
A. Expedited Removal — 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)
As discussed in the previous section, this provision allows immigration officers to issue immediate deportation orders to aliens who are:
Apprehended within 100 miles of the border;
Unable to demonstrate legal status;
Present in the United States for less than two years.
This is not a “loophole” or a discretionary power. Moreover, it was deliberately written to bypass the courts. One immigration officer can determine inadmissibility and issue a final order of removal. That order can be executed immediately.
The Supreme Court upheld this process in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam (2020), noting that expedited removal is consistent with both statutory law and constitutional limits on due process.
B. Reinstatement of Removal Orders — 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(5)
Millions of the illegal aliens now present in the U.S. are not first-time offenders. They were previously deported and have returned.
Under § 1231(a)(5), any alien who was previously removed and who reenters the United States illegally shall have the original order reinstated. There is no new trial. No new hearing. No judicial review. DHS issues a notice, confirms the identity, and removes the alien based on the prior order.
Again, the language is mandatory. “Shall.” Not “may.”
C. Administrative Removal for Criminal Aliens — § 1228(b)
Under federal law, any non-citizen who has been convicted of an aggravated felony may be removed through a streamlined, non-judicial process. This does not require a new hearing or trial. It doesn’t even require a judge.
The determination is made by DHS — typically through ICE officers — based on certified criminal records. If the alien does not contest the facts or claim protection under limited exceptions (like withholding of removal or U.S. citizenship), DHS can issue a Final Administrative Removal Order and deport the individual without a judge and without delay.
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Taken together, these provisions are not optional powers for Presidents to use at their pleasure. They are statutory commands. They are Congress’s instructions to the Executive Branch: enforce these laws, and remove these individuals.
Refusal to carry out those instructions is not restraint. It is rebellion against the law.
A President cannot decline to enforce the INA any more than he can decide to stop collecting taxes or to ignore federal drug laws. Article II of the Constitution requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” That duty is categorical. It is not an option or a talking point. It is the cornerstone of the separation of powers.
Joe Biden violated that duty. Not by omission, but by active sabotage. He instructed ICE and CBP not to pursue known violators. He gutted the very mechanisms Congress created to enable enforcement. And he did so for political ends — to reshape the electorate, to empower special interests, and to reward jurisdictions that defy federal immigration law.
Donald Trump, by contrast, promises only to enforce the law as written. That is not radicalism. That is constitutional fidelity.
The federal government has the authority — and more than that, the obligation — to remove aliens who violate its immigration laws. The law does not merely permit deportation. The law requires it.
5. The Alien Enemies Act and the Military Infiltration of the Southern Border
At some point, an immigration crisis stops being about immigration. When foreign actors infiltrate a sovereign nation using coordinated networks of criminals, backed or tolerated by hostile regimes, it becomes a national security threat. It becomes war by other means.
And war — declared or not — has its own legal tools.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, still in force and codified at 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24, gives the President broad constitutional authority to apprehend, detain, and deport foreign nationals associated with hostile foreign powers during times of war or “any other invasion or predatory incursion.” That language was broadened by Congress during World War I to include periods of hostilities, even absent a formal war declaration.
The statute requires no trial. No hearing. No judge. It is triggered by a presidential finding — a proclamation — that certain foreign nationals or organizations are acting in concert with hostile regimes. Once that determination is made, removal becomes immediate and mandatory.
This authority belongs to the President alone. The Supreme Court has ruled — in Ludecke v. Watkins (1948), Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), and Trump v. Hawaii (2018) — that the determination of whether a foreign power or its agents pose a threat is a “nonjusticiable political question.” That means the courts cannot second-guess it. If the President declares that a group constitutes a foreign hostile force under the Alien Enemies Act, that decision is legally final.
Which brings us to Tren de Aragua — the Venezuelan state-aligned gang now operating in dozens of U.S. cities. This is not a random cartel. It is a paramilitary proxy tolerated, sheltered, and exported by the Maduro regime. Its operations are not merely criminal; they are geopolitical — trafficking in drugs, human slavery, and systemic destabilization.
This is exactly what the AEA was written for. This is a predatory incursion by a hostile regime, carried out through third-party actors. And it is not confined to TdA or Venezuela. The Chinese Communist Party is facilitating fentanyl shipments through Mexican ports. Iran has directed operatives across the southern border. Cuba and Nicaragua are in on it, too. Our enemies are already inside the gates — because one President let them walk in.
6. Biden’s Subversion — Deliberate Nullification of Immigration Law
From his first day in office, Biden acted not merely as a negligent executive, but as a hostile one — a saboteur of federal statutes whose enforcement he had sworn to uphold. His administration did not reform immigration law through Congress, nor did it ask Congress to repeal enforcement powers. Instead, it worked through executive orders, administrative rulemaking, and informal “guidance” memos to effectively nullify the law.
The goal was clear: to flood the country with illegal aliens, dismantle enforcement structures from within, and transform the demography and political landscape of the United States in the process.
This was not immigration reform. This was revolution by refusal. And in the absence of vigorous enforcement now, this fraud on the American people will succeed.
Biden’s First Moves: Dismantling Enforcement
Within days of taking office, Biden issued a series of executive actions gutting the enforcement capabilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a whole. Among them:
A 100-day deportation moratorium, later struck down by a federal judge as unlawful.
A sharp restriction on who ICE was “allowed” to arrest, instructing agents to target only the most serious criminals.
Suspension of the “Remain in Mexico” program, which had successfully discouraged fraudulent asylum claims by requiring applicants to await hearings outside the U.S.
Termination of expedited removal, limiting what little enforcement it allowed to the narrowest possible statutory limits.
Imposition of mass parole programs with no basis in law, releasing hundreds of thousands of aliens into the interior with vague promises of future processing.
The Biden Administration did not enforce the INA. At all. Not in theory. Not in practice. Not at the border. Not in the interior. And not even against dangerous criminals.
DHS Guidelines: A Blueprint for Lawlessness
In September 2021, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released formal guidance effectively rewriting the enforcement priorities of ICE. In it, he stated that the fact of being unlawfully present in the United States would “not alone be a basis for an enforcement action.”
This was not discretion. This was a categorical exemption from the law, applied to the broadest possible class of violators — an open invitation to millions more to come.
ICE officers reported widespread confusion and demoralization. Agents were told not to arrest aliens who had been previously deported, not to pursue those who skipped court hearings, and not to target known gang members unless they had recent violent convictions. Many jurisdictions stopped cooperating entirely, creating de facto sanctuaries from enforcement.
And the result? Predictable chaos.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
While Biden was in office:
Over 8 million illegal border encounters were recorded — more than in any previous administration.
An estimated 20 million illegal aliens were residing in the country — possibly more, given the explosion of “gotaways” and unrecorded entries.
ICE removals plummeted, reaching their lowest point in over two decades.
Parole and catch-and-release policies became the norm, with aliens released into the interior without trial, without processing, and sometimes without court dates (which was fine, I suppose, since the illegals generally skipped their court dates anyway).
This was not mere failure. This was engineered crisis. It was a political project.
The Political Motive: Demographic Manipulation
The left made no secret of its intent to use mass immigration — both legal and illegal — as a tool for political transformation. Prominent Democrats, activists, and pundits openly celebrated the decline of the white working-class electorate and the rise of immigrant-heavy, urban, blue-leaning constituencies.
They even prohibited the Census Bureau from asking citizenship status, thus corruptly padding blue states’ official populations for the purpose of assigning electoral votes and U.S. House seats, a truly creative approach to the usual and customary ballot box stuffing. And they made clear that their ultimate goal was mass amnesty with a “path to citizenship”, to entrench a permanent Democrat majority.
They derided any comment on this as “Great Replacement Theory”, claiming that citing their own speeches was racist (I was not actually aware that “noncitizen” was a race). But they called it “the future” when they said it out loud. “Demography is destiny,” they assured their own faithful (in our full hearing). And then they did their best to force that future into being.
Biden’s border policy was not “compassion”. It was calculated. It was designed to overwhelm immigration enforcement, to add millions to the rolls of the shadow population, and — in time — to convert that population into a political asset through amnesty, mass naturalization, or raw bureaucratic inertia.
It was Cloward-Piven applied to national sovereignty: create a crisis so vast that the existing system collapses, and then build a new regime atop the rubble.
7. The System Cannot Handle 20 Million Trials — and Was Never Meant To
Nowhere is that more painfully obvious than in Democrats’ court strategy: seeking out activist Democrat judges to slow down enforcement as long as possible to prevent more than a small fraction of illegals from ever facing deportation.
Critics of Trump’s immigration plan love to invoke Due Process — as if every illegal alien is entitled to a full trial, complete with courtroom drama and judicial review. But that’s simply not the law. And even if it were, thanks to Joe Biden, it would be physically impossible.
There are fewer than 700 immigration judges in the United States. Each immigration judge handles approximately 700 to 800 cases per year, depending on region, docket pressure, and procedural complexity. That sounds like a lot — and it is — but even at that pace, the entire immigration court system processes fewer than 500,000 cases annually — and that’s across all case types, not just removal proceedings.
Under Biden, the backlog exploded past 3 million, before accounting for the 20 million or more illegal aliens currently in the country — a population equivalent to Florida or New York, and larger than every U.S. city: it’s even larger than the populations of Los Angeles and New York City combined.
So even assuming perfect efficiency and no new arrivals, it would take more than 40 years to process them all. That is not due process. That is process as pretext — a way of using the system itself as a shield against enforcement. It is not a legal principle. It is a political strategy: clog the system, then point to the clog as a reason to stop enforcing the law altogether.
The immigration court system was never intended to process every case, or even most cases. That’s why the Immigration and Nationality Act created expedited removal for border crossers (§1225), reinstatement of prior removal orders (§1231), and administrative removal for criminal aliens (§1228).
These tools are not bureaucratic shortcuts. They are the Due Process Congress and the courts have provided for trespassors. Congress deliberately gave the Executive Branch non-judicial enforcement powers so that immigration law could be applied efficiently at scale — especially in crisis scenarios. The idea that every removal requires a full trial is ignorance at best, a lie at worst.
Moreover, many illegal aliens already have final removal orders. According to ICE, as of 2023, there were over 1.2 million people in the U.S. who had been ordered removed by an immigration judge and were still here. Many had skipped hearings, ignored court dates, or reentered after deportation. Their cases are not pending. Their appeals are not active. Their Due Process has already occurred — all can be removed immediately without recourse.
The courts have affirmed all of this. In Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam (2020), the Supreme Court upheld the legality of expedited removal, noting that illegal aliens apprehended near the border and unable to demonstrate legal status have no constitutional right to full habeas corpus review. In other words: presence alone does not trigger full-blown judicial process.
Likewise in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (1999), the Court held that decisions regarding removal priorities are largely immune from judicial review. The executive branch has wide discretion — not to ignore the law, but to carry it out without interference.
Why? Because illegal aliens are trespassers. They are not entitled to the rights of citizens, any more than a home invader is entitled to live in my guest room. Indeed, “due process” in that case is a shotgun.
8. Precedent — Trump’s Plan Is Completely Consistent With Those of Past Presidents
One of the most dishonest claims made by critics of Trump’s immigration agenda is that it is “unprecedented.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
There is nothing radical about enforcing immigration law. There is nothing unprecedented about removing large numbers of people who are unlawfully present in the country. It has happened before — many times — and not just under Republican presidents. Democrats have done it too, often at a scale larger than Trump’s has been thus far, and without so much as a fraction of the media hysteria.
What Trump proposes is not new. What’s new is the open refusal to enforce the law — the institutionalized nullification we saw under Joe Biden, and the coordinated effort by his party, his donors, and the administrative state to make that lawlessness permanent.
FDR and the New Deal Deportations
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt oversaw a far-reaching program of deportations targeting illegal immigrants and visa overstays. While much attention is (rightly) paid to the earlier Hoover-era “Mexican Repatriation” campaigns, it was under FDR’s New Deal that federal deportations expanded dramatically — exceeding 2 million removals, according to immigration historians.
And it wasn’t just Mexican nationals. Roosevelt’s administration deported immigrants from Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. The legal framework was clear: entry was controlled — no one has the right to be here unless we grant it — and removal was mandatory for those who violated the law.
No one argued at the time that immigration enforcement was unconstitutional. Roosevelt, the icon of American liberalism, built an enforcement machine that no court tried to stop. He did not face protests from Hollywood or the media. He didn’t have to. He was enforcing the law.
Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback”
The mere fact that Ike’s naming offends you doesn’t make the program illegal.
In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a military-style immigration enforcement campaign called Operation Wetback. He was responding to public outrage — especially from labor unions and Mexican-American communities — over uncontrolled illegal migration and the collapse of wages in the Southwest.
With the cooperation of state and local law enforcement, Eisenhower’s administration deployed border agents and federal marshals in a coordinated crackdown. More than 1 million illegal aliens were apprehended and deported in a single year. Many were placed on ships and buses and returned deep into Mexico to prevent reentry. Some deportations were harsh — even dangerous — and deserve scrutiny. But the fundamental act of removal was not controversial. It was law enforcement.
No one claimed that Eisenhower was a fascist. No court tried to block him. No law school dean accused him of white supremacy. He was, after all, the man who had liberated Europe, and who later sent troops to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation. And his actions were broadly popular.
Clinton and Obama: The Quiet Enforcers
Even recent Democrat presidents have engaged in large-scale deportation.
Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996 — one of the most sweeping immigration enforcement bills in U.S. history. It expanded expedited removal, increased penalties for reentry, and restricted judicial review of deportation orders. His administration removed nearly 12 million people during his two terms.
Barack Obama, decried as the “deporter-in-chief” by Hispanic advocacy groups, presided over 5 million removals. His administration used expedited removal, reinstated prior orders, and deported tens of thousands of criminal aliens annually — all while touting “smart enforcement” and “comprehensive reform.” The media hardly noticed. The courts didn’t object. The ACLU staged no walkouts.
What changed? Only the politics.
The Real Break with Precedent: Refusing to Enforce the Law
Trump’s agenda is rooted in precedent. Biden’s was the break — the rupture from American legal tradition. Never before had a President so openly, so brazenly, and so comprehensively refused to enforce the law.
Under Biden, ICE was instructed not to arrest illegal aliens without violent convictions. Interior enforcement dropped to record lows. Known fugitives were allowed to remain in the country. Sanctuary jurisdictions received federal funding while defying — indeed, in reward for defying — federal law. Mass parole became the default response at the border — with hundreds of thousands of arrivals released without trial, without vetting, without accountability.
That was the real radicalism.
Trump’s promise is simply to reverse it — to return to the enforcement levels of Eisenhower, Clinton, or Obama, using tools they used, under statutes they enforced.
9. Conclusion: The Real Constitutional Crisis
For years now, we’ve been told that Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution — that his immigration agenda is radical, authoritarian, even lawless. But that is projection. The real constitutional crisis is not what Trump has proposed to do. It is what Joe Biden already did: refuse to enforce the law.
Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the President is required to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This is not an optional duty. It is the very essence of the executive function. The President is not the legislature. He cannot rewrite statutes. He cannot ignore provisions he dislikes. He cannot convert enforcement discretion into de facto repeal. His job is execution — not nullification.
Biden did not merely under-enforce. He actively nullified the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). He suspended deportations. He narrowed enforcement priorities to near-zero. He dismantled expedited removal, gutted interior enforcement, and created mass parole programs with no basis in law. He issued policies through DHS and DOJ that instructed federal officers to ignore entire categories of statutory violations. He enabled sanctuary jurisdictions that defied federal law, rewarded them with funding, and protected their noncompliance through federal inaction.
This wasn’t the fog of bureaucracy. It was a coordinated campaign to erase immigration law from the inside out, to remake the electorate from the outside in.
That is the true crisis, the cornerstone of a color revolution.
It’s not Trump using expedited removal — it’s Biden refusing to. It’s not Trump deporting aliens with prior removal orders — it’s Biden letting them stay. It’s not Trump invoking statutes like the Alien Enemies Act — it’s Biden pretending they don’t exist.
There is no constitutional principle that allows the President to suspend enforcement of whole categories of duly enacted law. There is no constitutional right for foreign nationals to remain in defiance of removal orders. And there is no separation-of-powers doctrine that permits the Executive Branch to undo the work of Congress by inaction and rhetoric.
In a functioning republic, the President’s failure to execute the law would provoke bipartisan outrage. But in the Biden era, it was celebrated. The press (and many co-opted pastors) called it compassion. The bought-and-paid-for NGOs called it reform. The universities called it justice. But what it was — plainly and simply — was fraud, in pursuit of a silent coup.
Biden’s lawlessness unleashed a flood of illegal immigration on a scale unseen in American history. It collapsed the asylum system, overwhelmed Border Patrol, and shattered ICE morale. It allowed cartels and hostile states to penetrate our country through open pathways of corruption, fentanyl, child trafficking, and ideological warfare.
And it told the world, in no uncertain terms, that America’s laws don’t matter — because the people in charge won’t enforce them.
That is the constitutional violation that dwarfs all others.
This is not a question of compassion. It is a question of sovereignty. No country on Earth allows the deliberate and sustained violation of its borders without consequence — and certainly not while offering taxpayer-funded benefits, work permits, legal aid, and sanctuary to those who broke in.
The tools already exist. Expedited removal. Reinstatement of prior orders. Administrative removal for criminal aliens. Mass ICE operations. Military support under the Insurrection Act. The Alien Enemies Act. Each is already law. Each has been upheld. Each was used by prior presidents. And each has been abandoned not for legal reasons, but for political ones.
The Constitution is not an obstacle to deportation. It is its warrant. The President is not forbidden to enforce the law. He is required to. And when Congress has ordered the removal of those unlawfully present — when it has written the word “shall” again and again into the Immigration and Nationality Act — the President’s duty is to obey. Not to reinterpret. Not to stall. Not to hide behind discretionary memos. To enforce.
Trump’s critics know this. They are not defending Due Process, or the Rule of Law. They are defending the regime they built atop its corpse. And now they’re terrified that someone might come along and actually pull the levers that were meant to be pulled.
Let them be terrified.
Deportation is not cruelty. It is justice. It is not vengeance. It is obligation. It is not unconstitutional. It is exactly what the Constitution requires when the people — through their elected representatives — say that entry without permission shall have consequences.
We are long past due for a President who takes that duty seriously. We are long past due for a President who understands that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, but a defense of our way of life. And we are long past due for a lawful restoration of our national borders.
Trump promises to do just that. And if he does, he will not be breaking the law.
He will be saving it.
FANTASTIC overview and argument.
May I offer a few comments:
1) For decades now we've had the "anchor baby" loophole de facto recognized (though it has no basis in law). To accept it, one also has to accept the concept that Congress delegated the authority to decide if an unborn baby was to have U.S. citizenship to every woman in the world, for her to be authorized unilaterally whether to "grant" U.S. citizenship merely be showing up here at birth time. When put that way, the "anchor baby" concept is ridiculous on its face.
2) Since non-citizen presence in the U.S. is a privilege, and not a right - permissive - then there is a sticky threshold question of what Constitutional rights - including "due process" - inure to non-citizens. I would argue that, at a minimum, it is a "rebuttable presumption" of NONE.
At best, perhaps some contractual (not Constitutional) argument due to, e.g., reliance on a visa granted that was issued for a period of time, then rescinded early, and not due to any failure by the visa holder to comply with their obligations.
3) As for "migrants" and "parole" and "asylum" - there is a sound argument that any "permissive" entry they were given is VOID, because the Biden regime was issuing such extra-legally, under COLOR OF LAW ( https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/color_of_law ).
Further evidence of such (I would argue treason) was the financing of the undermining U.S. immigration law by laundering taxpayer funds (e.g., via the State Department) to the U.N. and various NGO's to finance the transport of the invaders from across the globe to and then over our border. And then there's the $ to organizations like Catholic Charities to embed the invaders in towns and cities across our land.
The Free Press
Is Donald Trump Breaking the Law? Seven Experts Weigh In.
https://www.thefp.com/p/is-donald-trump-breaking-the-law
A Comment(s)
These opinions are just what they are and nothing more.
Opinions.
"The wording of the Supreme Court is somewhat unclear and understandably so.
They are not there to enter politics but are being pushed into it.
The whole story is much more complex and I for one do not read or attempt to interpret anything that is written, in social media sites like this, as it above all pay grades to do so.
Leave it alone and let the corrupt politicians as they ask are do their stuff and vote them out in the next election"
"Please present six legal experts defending President Trump's actions. They exist. Your audience deserves both sides of this argument."
Top Comment
"Geez, lots of academics making lots of points, one idiot even saying that the president is a mafia boss. WTH! Where are the counterpoints? Total hit job when you do stuff like this. I thought TFP was trying to be different. Letting a bunch of washed-up academics have a go at the president with no rebuttal is sad. I expect better if TFP is going to be different. With this, you are not."