This Isn't Crisis Response, It's Crisis Construction
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/opinion/ice-trump-safety-crisis.html
No paywall link
https://archive.li/oUd3C
Nearly nine months into President Trumps second term, immigration enforcement has become the administrations primary political weapon not to solve problems, but to manufacture fear, provoke outrage and stage an illusion of control. This isnt a crisis response. Its crisis construction.
The presidents team vowed to target gang members, murderers and rapists, but were not just rounding up violent offenders. Were arresting working parents, students, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens, to create made-for-TV crackdowns.
I served as chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Joe Biden and spent over a decade working in homeland security. I knew that national security requires focusing on threats not turning law enforcement into a spectacle. Despite President Trumps promises to go after the worst of the worst, in the past few months the administration has deported a preschooler who is a U.S. citizen and who has stage 4 kidney cancer and his family. A raid on a Hyundai plant where South Korean nationals were rounded up triggered an international incident and threatened future investment in Georgia. Those scenes appear to be part of a deliberate strategy of political theater.
Over the next three years, detention space will be multiplied. Due process will likely be further sidelined. The broken legal immigration system wont be fixed it will be abandoned.
*snip*