Recent efforts to round up the undocumented in the Volunteer State seem draconian to many. However, indignation alone won’t end the policy.
The rank awfulness of the recent “we’re just looking for cars with tail lights out so we can help drivers realize they need to make some safety repairs” immigrant roundup in South Nashville needs little amplification from me given the blast of righteous contempt blowing around much of the city.
But moving beyond indignation, it’s worth pondering broader dimensions of the moral insult here. Why is this happening in the way that it’s happening, and what should be done by those who are outraged?
First, though, some professional grade outrage, so here’s the American Civil Liberties Union: “A deportation system that herds 75 percent of people through fast-track, streamlined removal is a system devoid of fairness and individualized due process. Nonjudicial removals violate our constitutional tradition.” They go on to say that the administration has “prioritized speed over fairness in the removal system.” (Disclosure: I sit on the board of ACLU’s Tennessee affiliate but do not speak for them.)
I suspect many who are appalled at traffic-stop detentions and the climate of fear they create would say that “speed over fairness” sums it up pretty well. But here’s the thing: that ACLU quote is from 2014, and the administration in question was Barack Obama’s. And indeed, Obama’s record on immigration — the “deporter in chief” by some accounts — did feature removals of noncitizens far outpacing the Clinton and Bush administrations that came before.
I mention this not to frame some sort of moral equivalence between President Donald Trump and Obama, but to highlight a chronic policy equivalence that has afflicted not just those two but every administration since Clinton’s.
The culprit of course is Washington’s inexhaustible futility on immigration. The last comprehensive bill signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986 gave rise to legal status for a few million of the undocumented. Ensuing decades brought tweaks in federal law on admissions, enforcement and border control, but also growth in the unauthorized immigrant population to its current eight-figure level. Meanwhile, occasional stabs at meaningful reform of a system that pretty much everyone agrees needs an overhaul have repeatedly failed.
That’s left each administration over the last four decades with basically three options: (1) try to light a fire under major immigration reform in Congress, or (2) do essentially nothing and let legal and nonlegal immigrant demography go where it will on its own, or (3) use instruments of state power to try to rein in that demography in the short run and kick the actual reform can down the road. And while (1) gets its share of lip service, each administration since Reagan has ultimately opted for a blend of (2) and (3): throw some people out, hope some others leave , don’t talk about it much and focus on other things.
This informal working consensus that we’ll just muddle through until major reform magically happens has sufficed because immigration and the border have not been big issues driving voters. Attitudes toward immigration have trended in a positive direction over the decades, in 2016 even most Trump supporters thought many undocumented immigrants should be allowed to remain, and in 2020 Immigration continued to rank relatively low among issues important to voters. But then in 2024 Trump parlayed border mayhem and isolated migrant violence (with an assist from Bidenworld’s policy fecklessness) into a hefty surge in voter interest and alarm.
So Trump runs on “mass deportation,” wins, takes office and starts detaining and deporting. With roots in due process nonchalance and public information minimalism, his administration’s methods run the gamut from crude to cruel: pseudorandom traffic stops as we’ve seen here in Nashville, workplace raids and the particularly vile tactic of nabbing people when they show up for required appointments at immigration courts. Not to be that glib schmuck who rationalizes — “he’s doing what voters elected him to do” — but he is doing what he said he’d do.
Strident moral outrage is an appropriate reflex, but it’s not as widely shared as some may wish. A recent Pew survey finds an overall majority of U.S. adults think Trump is not overstepping when it comes to deporting immigrants.
A message to Democrats and liberals grousing loudly and justifiably about the President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement is you can’t stop there; you need to say concretely what you would do differently.
Especially relevant to doings in Nashville are the majority who are fine with law enforcement asking for immigration status during routine encounters and making immigration arrests in homes,workplaces and at public gatherings. It feels as though the public mind on this projects a kind of passive tolerance for something distasteful (like eating a rutabaga)— a sense of being generally “not not okay” with it.
Let’s keep in mind also that most of what’s happening is legally kosher. Sure, there’s the occasional need for a court to throw in with a due-process face slap. On the whole, though, ICE and its lackeys (like our servile Tennessee Highway Patrol) may be using tactics that prior administrations wouldn’t use, but these aren’t tactics that prior administrations couldn’t use.
My theory is that many who tolerate Trump’s brackish regime of detention and deportation do so not through blindness to its calamitous effects on families and communities, but through exasperation with the government’s inability to get anything done. However repellant the methods, and however botched the surgery, this is a twisted but measurable version of getting something done.
My message to Democrats and liberals grousing loudly and justifiably about the hideousness of Trumpian immigration enforcement is you can’t stop there; we need to hear what concretely you would do differently.
The voting public has made it clear that the Obama-Biden approach — timid enforcement aimed at preserving the status quo and kicking the can down the road — is no longer viable. And political realities strongly suggest that Reagan-style amnesty is not on the table. So how would you affirmatively alter the landscape of unauthorized immigration? How fast and with what methods?
Morally principled agita on this issue may be a constructive outlet for conscience and community, but it’s not by itself enough to carve a path back to power.
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: [email protected].
