Last Tuesday, Reverend Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, used her platform at the National Prayer Breakfast to play politics and question President Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policies. She said, “the people [illegal immigrants] who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of [illegal] immigrants are not criminals.” It seems strange to me that that a religious leader in the year 2025 would make an argument for modern day slavery. It is true that the illegal immigrants are doing a lot of work in this country, but they are doing it for “slave wages.” I’m tired of liberals lecturing Americans about our original sin of slavery and claiming that a barista at Starbucks cannot live on anything less than $25 an hour, and then turn around and make a compassionate argument for open borders so multi-billion-dollar companies can pay illegal aliens two dollars an hour to pick strawberries.
In her sermon, Reverend Budde stated that “the vast majority of [illegal] immigrants are not criminals” which is a very similar claim to the one that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker made when he threatened to defy the Trump administration’s deportation policy. He said that law enforcement in Illinois "will stand up for those law-abiding, undocumented people" facing deportation. There is no such thing as a law-abiding undocumented person. They’re undocumented because they broke the law when they came into this country, so as soon as they broke the law, they are not law-abiding; they are lawbreakers.
As they always do, they are manipulating the language to win the debate. Claiming that illegal immigrants abide by the law is a contradiction in terms. These people are not “undocumented” because they lost or forgot their paperwork. They are undocumented because they have no legal status in the United States. They are here illegally. They chose to cross the border illegally. They have evaded ICE illegally. Every second they are in this country, they are breaking our immigration laws. If they get a job, they are breaking the law against employers hiring illegal immigrants. What obscure definition of the word “illegal” makes these people conclude that ‘illegal immigrants’ are somehow law-abiding?
Then, Senator Adam Schiff said on NBC’s Meet the Press, “the administration already has the authority to detain people that have committed violent crimes for deportation, and they should, but this bill is so broad that if you are a Dreamer and you take a tube of toothpaste from the store, you can be detained for deportation. That, to me, is a terrible overreach.” My question is, if the President already has the authority to deport illegal aliens who have committed violent crimes, then why didn’t Biden deport these violent criminals for the past four years? But see how he framed his argument. He is saying that Trump is deporting people for stealing a tube of toothpaste. He is not. He is deporting people who broke our immigration laws. His administration has the authority to deport anyone who came here and is living here illegally regardless of whether they committed another crime. Their crime which causes them to be deported is breaking our immigration laws, not stealing toiletries. A legal United States citizen would never be deported for stealing a tube of toothpaste.
You know you are wrong when you have to make-up new terms, change the definition of terms, or create deceptive arguments to validate your position. One of the reasons why Trump is so popular is that people have grown tired of the verbal manipulations and the gaslighting from the left that the blunt straight forwardness of Trump, as crude as he is, has become very refreshing. We never have had a President who has done so much, so soon to fulfill his campaign promises as Donald Trump has done in his first week in office. What he says, is what we are going to get. And that is a good thing. In the end, Trump won because he is on the right side of the immigration issue. The American people do not want open borders and unfettered illegal immigration. And the more the left pushes against Trump on this issue, the more elections they will lose.
__________________________________________________________
Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.