Immigration Enforcement Finally Arrives, and It’s Long Overdue

I’ve spent time on both sides of a badge. I worked private security and executive protection, and in 1992, I drove in the presidential motorcade for President George H.W. Bush after the Los Angeles riots while working on an Assembly campaign with Young Republicans. I earned my California EMT license in 1992. I know what it looks like when the rule of law breaks down, and I know what it looks like when someone finally decides to enforce it. What’s happening at ICE right now is the latter, and it’s about time.

The numbers tell the story. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 10,000 people over a five-day stretch at the end of June, roughly 2,000 arrests a day, close to double the pace tracked in recent months.

The Department of Homeland Security says roughly 70% of ICE arrests this year have targeted people already facing criminal charges or convictions, and reports that more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the country since the administration took office—roughly 900,000 formally deported and the rest self-deported. ICE is finally doing the job Congress funded it to do.

Compare that to what came before. The House Homeland Security Committee documented more than 10.8 million Customs and Border Protection encounters nationwide since the start of fiscal year 2021, with roughly 2 million more “gotaways” who were never even processed. Millions of those encountered were released into the interior on notices to appear, a paperwork promise that a huge share of them simply ignored.

Thomas Sowell spent a career explaining that you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. Catch-and-release subsidized illegal entry. Predictably, we got more of it.

Jonathan Turley has written for years that a nation that stops enforcing its own laws doesn’t have a border policy; it has an opinion about borders. For four years, that’s roughly what we had. Agents were told to prioritize almost nothing, judges were backlogged for years, and the message that traveled fast was the one that mattered: Get across, and you’re probably staying. Ten million-plus encounters later, nobody serious should be surprised by the result.

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I spent 2023 working on a rainforest preservation project deep in the Brazilian Amazon, flying into Manaus and traveling upriver past the reach of any government office, coordinating with indigenous community leaders and local officials on land nobody effectively polices. What struck me wasn’t the remoteness. It was how quickly any system, jungle, or border degrades once the people responsible for it stop showing up.

A border isn’t a mere line on a map; it’s a commitment that gets renewed daily by whether anyone’s actually standing on it. We stopped standing on ours for the better part of a decade, and the detention population, which independent tracking of ICE’s own released data put above 60,000 as of the most recent figures, is the bill coming due.

None of this means the current surge is without friction. Federal officials say Renee Good drove her vehicle at an ICE agent in Minneapolis after ignoring an order to get out of the car and defended the shooting as self-defense; Minneapolis officials dispute that account, citing security footage, and the case remains under state investigation, along with the separate killing of Alex Pretti two and a half weeks later.

Whatever the final findings, the controversy forced DHS to adjust its posture, and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has since pursued a quieter way of carrying out removals rather than high-visibility citywide raids. That’s the right call.

Competent enforcement doesn’t require theatrics. It requires consistency, and it requires prioritizing people who’ve already proven, through a felony charge or conviction, that they don’t belong here.

I trained in Muay Thai and Brazilian jiu-jitsu for years, and every striking coach teaches the same first lesson: Dropping your hands has to cost you something. Get tagged for it enough times in sparring and the bad habit disappears. Take away the consequence, and the same mistake repeats forever.

We ran a decade-long experiment in removing consequences from illegal entry, and the mistake repeated by the millions. What ICE is doing now—arresting people with real criminal histories at a real operational pace—isn’t cruelty. It’s the return of consequences to a system that had abandoned them entirely.

Fix the border, and you fix the incentives. Everything else downstream; the fentanyl, the human trafficking, and the strain on schools and hospitals in border and sanctuary states all trace back to that one broken incentive. I’ve spent 30 years managing risk for a living. Unenforced law is the biggest unpriced risk a country can carry, and we’re only now starting to price it correctly.

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