The Criminals ICE Removed This Week Should Never Have Been Here in the First Place

Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported another batch of criminals this week, and the list reads like a prosecutor’s nightmare. Gang members. Kidnappers. Cocaine smugglers. People convicted of assaulting others with guns. The kind of individuals you don’t want living next door to your family, and yet they were here, moving through American communities because our immigration system has been treated like a suggestion rather than a law.

Lauren Bis from the Department of Homeland Security laid it out plainly. ICE removed pedophiles, kidnappers, burglars, and gang members just yesterday. Every single day, she said, they’re pulling criminals out of our neighborhoods. And you know what? That’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to do. The question nobody in Washington wants to answer is why these people were able to stay here long enough to rack up multiple convictions in the first place.

Take Moises Gutierez from Mexico. He’s a member of the Paisas gang, previously convicted of drunk driving and illegal re-entry. He’s also been arrested for child sex crimes. Think about that for a second. This man had multiple interactions with law enforcement, multiple opportunities for the system to work, and yet he remained in the country. How does that happen in a nation that supposedly values the safety of its children?

Pedro Gomez-Diaz tells a similar story. This Mexican national has convictions for aggravated assault with a gun, robbery, and kidnapping. He’s been arrested for domestic violence and illegal re-entry too. The pattern here isn’t subtle. These aren’t people who made one mistake. They’re repeat offenders who kept finding ways to stay, kept slipping through cracks that shouldn’t exist.

Then there’s Jorge Barrientos-Amaya from Costa Rica, convicted of cocaine smuggling and marijuana possession. Jose De Jesus Zumba Pesantez from Ecuador, convicted of assault. Omar Montes-Hernandez from Mexico, with convictions for burglary, larceny, and illegal re-entry. The common thread? They all had criminal records. They all should have been gone years ago.

The frustrating part isn’t that ICE is doing their job now. It’s that they’re having to clean up a mess that never should have existed. When you have immigration policies built on compassion without accountability, you get exactly this outcome. People who have no respect for our laws keep breaking them, and American citizens pay the price. That’s not compassion. That’s negligence dressed up in feel-good rhetoric.

Bis pointed out that crime rates have hit record lows, with the murder rate projected to fall to a 126-year low. That’s worth celebrating, honestly. But let’s be clear about what’s driving those numbers. It’s not soft-on-crime policies or defund-the-police movements. It’s law enforcement doing what works when they’re actually allowed to do it. It’s removing dangerous people from communities before they can victimize more Americans.

The border debate has become so polluted with partisan talking points that we’ve lost sight of basic common sense. Wanting secure borders isn’t xenophobic. Expecting people to follow immigration law isn’t hateful. Demanding that criminals face consequences isn’t cruel. These are baseline expectations for any functioning nation, and yet we’re treated like extremists for stating the obvious.

Every one of these deportations represents a failure upstream. Someone let these individuals in or didn’t remove them when they should have. Someone decided that enforcing immigration law was optional or politically inconvenient. Someone prioritized abstract principles over concrete safety. And regular Americans, the ones who don’t have security details or gated communities, lived with the consequences.

The solution isn’t complicated. Secure the border. Enforce existing laws. Remove people who commit crimes. Support the agents who do this difficult work instead of demonizing them. These aren’t radical ideas. They’re what every serious country does to protect its citizens. We’ve just spent so long pretending otherwise that basic governance now sounds controversial.

Related: Trump’s Freedom Haulers Initiative Puts Veterans Behind the Wheel While Clearing Out Illegal Drivers