Also see: William Teach, “Bummer: Illegals Start Self Deporting Ahead Of Trump
Immigration advocates brace for Trump’s Day 1 deportation orders that could target 47,000 in Philadelphia
President-elect Donald Trump has promised mass deportations. That could include thousands of people living in Philadelphia.
by Jeff Gammage and Julia Terruso | Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST
President-elect Donald Trump promised increased immigration restrictions and a closed border in the campaign that made him president. His inauguration on Monday could immediately usher in major policy changes that will have ramifications locally.
Trump has pledged to quickly issue a series of orders to toughen and expand federal immigration enforcement by deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, jailing migrant families, repealing birthright citizenship, and targeting sanctuary cities like Philadelphia.
People familiar with one plan told NBC News that Trump intends a major policy reversal concerning ICE, freeing the enforcement agency to arrest immigrants in places where agents have been officially dissuaded from taking action, including churches, schools, and hospitals.
While it’s unclear exactly who might be targeted, the scope, or how the government would carry out large-scale operations, advocates are already bracing for potential impact.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the “advocates” should have been taking steps to get those who wish to come to the United States to do so legally? 3.03% of the population of Philly are here illegally, and the ‘sanctuary’ administration of former Mayor Jim Kenney did nothing to help these people regularize their presence in the country while Joe Biden was in office?
“All of a sudden, the shackles are really off,” said Cris Ramon, senior adviser on immigration for UnidosUS, the national Latino civil rights organization in Washington. “You’re really expanding the ability of ICE to do a lot more enforcement. … It’s going to put a lot of lives in a precarious situation.”
Trump’s immediate actions will likely be a series of executive orders to bolster Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to send a message that the border is closed, according to reporting from Politico.
He has promised an unprecedented campaign to kick out those who lack legal permission to be in the United States — about 13 million people, roughly the population of Pennsylvania. Experts who study immigration say that would be difficult to accomplish, requiring billions in tax dollars and an unrivaled government mobilization to remove several times the number of all those currently held in American jails and prisons.
At the same time, they say, even partial Trump-administration success could cause huge disruption, not only to those who would be arrested and detained, but to the economy and to American civic life as millions of workers, neighbors, and family members are sent out of the country.
How many border crossings have their been? Part of the answer is that we just don’t know, because there were some which were never detected. But they surged under President Biden:
What the Inquirer article doesn’t tell readers is that, had President Biden attempted to regularize immigration, there wouldn’t be 47,000 people in Philadelphia fearing being rounded up and deported. Had Mr Biden issued executive orders to find ways to regularize immigration, something he could have done, given that President Trump had been able to do so during his first term, this issue wouldn’t be an issue. Had Mr Biden done what he should have, perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff would be the one preparing to take the oath of office at noon today.
Joe Biden just plain failed.
This country does need immigrants, but we need useful, vetted immigrants. Had President Biden done his job — and I omitted the adjective that occurred to me before the word “job” — we would have had some decent, hard-working people, while people like José Antonio Ibarra would have been excluded . . . and people like nursing student Laken Riley would still be alive.
It’s simple: we should define which immigrants we find acceptable, people who will work and become credits to the community, and exclude the detritus of Latin American gangs, military aged single males, and those in prime crime-committing ages. But no, Mr Bidens and the Democrats wanted to flood the United States with primarily Hispanic immigrants, thinking that they’d eventually be voting for Democrats.
President Trump, who will be inaugurated one hour and twenty minutes after the publication of this post, wouldn’t have Mr Biden’s mess to clean up if our outgoing President had just done his — adjective omitted again — job!
