"President Trump undoubtedly stands on strong political ground, backed by most Americans, in cases where he's deporting convicted criminals.
Now comes a new test, literally 40 years in the making:
How comfortable are Americans with deporting millions of immigrants who paid taxes, built families and committed no crimes after coming here illegally?Why it matters: That's the heart of the standoff in LA, as well as the broader Trump effort to expel potentially millions of immigrants who broke the law to get here and then played by U.S. rules.
"I said it from Day 1: If you're in the country illegally, you're not off the table," Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, told the N.Y. Times. "So, we're opening that aperture up."
The backstory: Congress, going back to 1986, has sought and failed to find a pathway to citizenship for those who fit the precise description above. Many current GOP senators were among those seeking said solution.
But concerns about border security and rewarding illegal behavior killed every effort. Now, Trump, Republicans, some Democrats and much of the U.S. public are supportive of mass deportation instead.
An estimated 14 million unauthorized immigrants live here many of them working and paying taxes. They often fill jobs other Americans won't do hotels, construction sites, landscaping and child care. Expelling them would sink some businesses, slow services in many communities, and hit close to home for lots of U.S. citizens.Will public enthusiasm wane when this reality becomes clear?
Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller are pushing to hit a target of 3,000 immigration arrests a day, as first reported by Axios' Brittany Gibson and Stef Kight.
That's triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump's term, Axios found.
The only way to pull that off is by casting wider nets beyond convicted criminals to larger worksites. So raids could rise sharply at factories, restaurants and Home Depots, where people living here illegally often gather to seek day labor on job sites…….
The bottom line: There's no clear mechanism to differentiate between someone who came here recently alone versus a father of three, whose wife and children are living here legally, and have been here paying taxes and committing no crimes for a decade. In the eyes of the current law, illegal is illegal.
When TV explodes with images of burning cars and lawlessness, Trump wins. But what about families torn apart or longtime neighbors yanked from their homes and taken away in handcuffs? That's when America's rawest views of immigration will be revealed."Axios
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