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Does America have the resolve to deport illegal border crossers?
Does America have the resolve to deport illegal border crossers?
Can the forces resisting federal law enforcement in Minneapolis nationalize the struggle?
DOES AMERICA HAVE THE RESOLVE TO DEPORT ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSERS? The United States experienced a mass incursion of illegal border crossers in the years 2021 to 2025. Estimates vary, but in that period, at least 9 million people entered the U.S. illegally. Rather than turn them back, former President Joe Biden allowed most to stay, with little or no vetting. Administration officials denied that there was a problem, periodically declaring the border “closed” when in fact 200,000 to 300,000 people were crossing illegally each month. When officials conceded that there was a problem, Democrats argued that only sweeping immigrationlegislation would solve it.
Of course, all that changed with the election of President Donald Trump. Without any new legislation, the new administration cut border incursions to nearly zero. But the question remained: What about the 9 million or more who had recently entered the U.S. illegally? Would the Trump administration allow them to remain in the country?
That is the question at the heart of the current rebellion against federal authority in Minneapolis. Yes, some Trump administration officials have explained that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol personnel are simply going after “the worst of the worst.” Indeed, they have arrested a lot of people who entered the U.S. illegally and then committed crimes, some of them horrendous crimes. They have also discovered people who entered illegally after having committed crimes in their home countries. Perhaps some progressive activists would disagree, but a large majority of people support the deportation of those illegal border crossers.
But what about the illegal border crossers who have not committed any additional crimes since entering the U.S.? Many polls have shown that majorities support deporting them, too.
A New York Times-Siena poll in September 2025 found that 54% strongly or somewhat support “deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries.” A Harvard-Harris poll in December 2025 asked the question two ways. It found that 80% support “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes,” while 54% support “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally.” Going back to January 2025, an Ipsos-Axios poll found that 66% supported “deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally.”
The question was made urgent by the mad influx of the Biden years. Illegal border crossers moved into U.S. cities, straining resources, budgets, and communities’ ability to deal with them, both financially and socially. The flood of migrants also raised fundamental questions of justice: Should people who enter the U.S. illegally be given legal status? All of them? And what about people who went through the time-consuming process to come to the U.S. legally?
There are immigration activists in this country who would answer the questions: Yes, yes, and too bad. They are tirelessly working to liberalize every immigration law they can. Any administration that seeks to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants must contend with them.
Beyond that, though, there is the practical difficulty of deporting people. Once someone is in the U.S., even if they have no legal right to be in the country, it can still be very difficult to deport them. And if they have teams of lawyers, advocates, and street activists on their side, it can be harder still.
Speaking about Minneapolis, the writer Mickey Kaus said, “The local protesters do not want the illegals deported, period. Even if the ICE force was incredibly well trained, wore white gloves, and followed Waldorf-Astoria rules of etiquette, if they are effective, local dissenters will press forward with resistance until it produces confrontations and some violence. That’s the way it worked in the antiwar movement I was a part of.”
That is certainly the way it is working in Minneapolis. The question for immigration activists is whether they can set off similar struggles around the country. On Meet the Press Sunday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche blamed sanctuary jurisdictions, in which Democratic local and state governments forbid local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, for a lot of the problems in Minneapolis. “What we see all over the country, save a few sanctuary cities like Minneapolis, is we see cooperation and support,” Blanche said. “We deport 10 times the number of illegal aliens out of Texas than we do out of Minneapolis. Why do we hear nothing out of Texas about any of the same problems that we have in Minneapolis? I’ll tell you why. Because in Texas, we have the cooperation and support of local law enforcement so that we can do these operations safely, keeping U.S. citizens and others protected and safe. That is not what we have in Minneapolis.”
One key question now is: Can the forces resisting federal law enforcement in Minneapolis nationalize the struggle? Boosted by the furor over immigration enforcement personnel’s killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, plus the agency’s general reputation for heavy-handedness, the resistance has made huge progress. Trump is now hearing voices from his own side telling him to tone ICE down.
Still, keep in mind the activists’ goal: They don’t want ICE to deport illegal immigrants in a safe, smooth, and efficient way. They want to stop the deportations. And after the mass illegal crossings of the Biden years, that is the compelling issue: Will the U.S. end up allowing the illegal crossers to stay? Doing so will create an enormous incentive for future illegal crossers. And then, what is to stop another mass incursion the next time a Democratic president, under pressure from his party’s activist groups, opens the border again?
www.foxnews.com
From what I understand Kristi Noem has been relieved of her Northern duties and sent to protect the Southern Border…A man is in a critical condition after he was shot by a Border Patrol agent in Arizona. No details about the shooting have been released.
Border Patrol shoots person in Arizona days after Alex Pretti died
The unidentified individual is in critical condition after allegedly being shot by a federal agent on Tuesday, just three days after Alex Pretti was killed by border patrol agents.www.dailymail.co.uk
apnews.com
- But americans are fattier, this garantes athleast two sits per american
Five-year-old deported to Honduras despite being US citizen is latest child victim of Trump crackdown
Mother whose visa application was pending says she will send girl back to US soon accompanied by another relative
Claudia Mendoza in Santa Cruz de Yojoa, Honduras, and Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro
The day I separate from my daughter will be the most painful of my life,’ Génesis’s mother said. Photograph: Claudia Mendoza
Five-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Despite being a US citizen, she was deported on 11 January alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos, to Honduras, a country Génesis had never known.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutiérrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Génesis was born.
“I kept telling them ‘the girl was born here’. They didn’t care, they picked up the child, just put a jumper on her and told me to get into the car with her,” Gutiérrez told the Guardian.
The two were held for almost a week in a hotel 80 miles from their home, without access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge, before being deported to the Central American country.
Activists and analysts point to a string of procedural violations in the case and note similarities with other recent detentions of children, such as that of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minneapolis. They see it as a chilling indication of what may lie ahead as Donald Trump’s administration continues with mass deportations.
Gutiérrez had been living in the US since 2018 after leaving Santa Cruz de Yojoa, a Honduran city of about 100,000 people, to “escape poverty and build a prosperous future”, she said. She received a deportation order a year later but remained in the country and in 2020 Génesis was born.
Gutiérrez said she separated from the girl’s father after suffering repeated abuse and applied for a U visa, designed to assist non-citizen victims of qualifying crimes such as domestic violence and sexual assault. There is a severe backlog in processing such applications and, like tens of thousands of others, Karen’s case was still pending.
Despite what she described as a “beautiful and stable life” in which Génesis was growing up surrounded by uncles and cousins, Gutiérrez, who worked as a cleaner, said she was living in constant fear amid an increase in ICE raids. “I would get into my car to go to work and I felt afraid that someone was behind me and would stop and arrest me,” she said.
In early January, Gutiérrez was hosting a friend who had also been a victim of domestic violence when the alleged perpetrator turned up, and the former couple had a heated argument.
They went back inside and Gutiérrez said she was asleep in another room when officers from the Austin police department knocked on the door responding to the disturbance. According to a statement, police said they “discovered an active ICE warrant” and notified the agency.
Mother and daughter were taken by ICE to the neighbouring city of San Antonio and held in a hotel, where Gutiérrez said she was not allowed to call her family until three days after being detained. According to the Texas-based NGO Grassroots Leadership, which first reported the case, she was reportedly instructed not to share her location.
An immigration attorney tried to intervene but ICE agents reportedly said they could not locate the pair in the agency’s database, which some believe may have been a deliberate consequence of holding them in a hotel rather than a detention centre.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said: “The inability to locate people in the system, and the fact that lawyers cannot reach them to provide proper representation, is unfortunately happening more and more, and it directly undermines immigrants’ rights.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Gutiérrez’s next call to her family came days later after she and Génesis had landed in Honduras. Since then, the two have been staying with Gutiérrez’s mother. Because Génesis is a US citizen, Gutiérrez said she had taken the “painful” decision to send the girl back to the US soon, accompanied by another relative.
“She has her school there, her uncles, her cousins, her whole life, because she was born there and she doesn’t want to be here,” Gutiérrez said, adding that they had never been apart before. “The day I separate from my daughter will be the most painful of my life but I will do it for her future.”
She vowed not to give up on returning to the US to reunite with her daughter. “I will seek help, lawyers, everything. I will fight until God tells me ‘that’s enough, Karen’.”
Last May, also in Austin, a mother and her three children, two of whom were US citizens, were arrested by ICE agents and deported to Mexico.
On inauguration day, Trump signed an executive order seeking to end the 150-year-old policy of birthright citizenship, but judges across the US issued injunctions blocking it, saying it violated the constitution, federal law and supreme court precedent. The court is expected to hear the case this year.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that of the 6.3 million children under the age of 18 living with at least one unauthorised immigrant parent in the US, 5.3 million are US citizens.
“Families are facing extremely difficult choices over whether or not to stay together,” Bush-Joseph said. She said that given Trump’s focus on mass deportations, “I do unfortunately anticipate that there will be more of these very difficult situations where parents are being deported and their children are either left behind or removed from the lives they knew in the US”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...-girl-us-citizen-and-mother-deported-honduras
