Trump administration Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem participates in an ICE raid in Los Angeles this month. Credit: Public domain / DHSgov

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

Brown walks your baby
Brown walks your dog
Brown raised America in place of its mom
Brown cleans your house
Brown takes the trash
Brown even wipes your granddaddy’s ass
— Xenia Rubinos, “Mexican Chef,” 2016, courtesy Radio Pocho

During a 2012 talk at the University of Notre Dame, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last month, spoke evocatively of “the needs of the hungry and the homeless; the needs of single mothers; the needs of migrant farmworkers; the needs of refugees and illegal immigrants; the needs for good high schools for deprived children; the needs of the physically and the mentally ill; the needs of those in prison and of ex-prisoners,” and especially, “the needs of children: children who are hungry or homeless; children of prisoners; children whose schools fail them; children whose parents don’t have the means of caring for them.”

Then, with characteristic moral clarity, the Scottish American devotee of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas posed the following question: “What would it mean to live in a society where it was widely felt to be intolerable that those needs should not be met in the ordinary course of life?”

More than 77 million people voted for Donald Trump last year, supplying ample proof that we don’t yet live in such a society. If recent events qualify as a return to “law and order,” I’d hate to witness what anarchy looks like to the apologists for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

While the Trump White House has repeatedly said it’s prioritized deporting criminals, NBC News two months ago reported that ICE data shows more than half of those whom the agency has in custody have no criminal convictions.

An ICE officer who blew the whistle on corruption at a Houston field office said they were intimidated with an 8-inch tactical knife by a fellow officer in what’s supposed to be a weapons-free facility. Investigative journalists at The Intercept called this “just the latest in a long line of allegations of waste, mismanagement, abuse, cover-ups and other wrongdoing across the agency and among its contractors.”

And as ICE’s net has widened to include masked raids at job sites and churches, even U.S. citizens, tourists and people on work and student visas have found themselves swept up.

“Every day, in communities throughout the U.S., local police enable the arrest, detention and deportation of immigrants, often by entering them into the ‘traffic stop-to-deportation pipeline’ or by collaborating with ICE on immigration home raids,” sociologist Alex Vitale and public health researcher William Lopez wrote for nonprofit news outlet The Truthout.

Refusing to give in to fear, millions of protesters from Los Angeles to San Antonio marched in the streets, braving rubber bullets and tear gas and exemplifying an alternative aspiration for a more humane, welcoming U.S.

But on seas as stormy as this, ethical motion sickness should be expected. Take, for example, a confused editorial recently carried in the Express-News by Ruben Navarrette Jr., the nation’s most widely read Latino columnist.

“Democrats are masters at contradicting themselves,” Navarrette asserted. ”In June 1963, they applauded when President John Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and removed Gov. George Wallace from the doorway of the University of Alabama where the notorious segregationist was blocking the entry of Black students. Now, in 2025, when the president in question is Donald Trump and the armed forces being federalized belong to the California National Guard, Democrats suddenly aren’t so keen on the idea of a presidential override of a governor’s authority.”

“About 10 seconds of thought should tell you how radically disanalogous those situations are,” philosophy professor Ben Burgis said in response to the slapdash historical parallel on his podcast. “Jim Crow was about the maintenance of a bunch of unconstitutional mini-police states around the country that terrorized a subset of their citizens into not exercising their democratic rights. The ICE raids going on in LA were just an ostentatiously over-the-top display of cruelty making a big dumb performative show of maximally inflicting pain”.

One can believe extraordinary measures were necessary to desegregate schools and protect civil rights activists while also believing that trying to intimidate substantially peaceful protesters with the military is worse than unnecessary, it’s disgusting. So where exactly is the supposed contradiction?

Navarrette should have had no trouble finding more glaring hypocrisies on the part of the Democratic establishment. For instance, despite rhetorical grandstanding, congressional Dems have repeatedly voted to balloon ICE’s budget. ICE spending went from $8.4 billion in the last year of Trump’s first term to upwards of $10 billion under Joe Biden, records show.

“Whatever happened to the calls to abolish ICE?” stand-up comic Francesca Fiorentini asked for Zeteo news in May. “Back in 2017, amidst the outrage over child separations, ‘Abolish ICE’ was a rallying cry. So now that people are being disappeared into gulags abroad, are dying in ICE custody, now that mayors are being arrested, now that people are being kidnapped at their workplaces, at immigration appointments, where’s the call?”

While many Dems fail to meet the moment, some Republicans have flinched as well.

“Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives,” six Republican U.S. Reps, including Texas’ Monica De La Cruz and Tony Gonzales, wrote in a letter to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. “We strongly agree that convicted criminal aliens — smugglers, murderers, and sex offenders — pose an immediate threat to our homeland security … . That said, we are also concerned that your limited resources may be stretched to pursue individuals that do not constitute an immediate threat to public safety.”

Other decidedly un-leftist stalwarts have commendably held down even stauncher positions.

“If Trump’s deportation dragnet had real MS-13 kingpins to boast about, he wouldn’t need to bend the law to toss Kilmar Ábrego García — a man with no convictions — into a foreign prison,” immigration expert Alex Nowrasteh wrote for the right-wing Cato Institute. “Trump’s scandalous deportation of noncriminals to supermax prisons in El Salvador without due process, his unconscionable violation of court orders, and his silly public defenses make more sense when you realize that he’s staked much of his political career on the falsehood that there’s a massive illegal immigrant crime wave.”

When asked in 2014 whether undocumented immigrants have freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and the right to petition the government as guaranteed by the First Amendment, the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia replied simply, “I think anybody who is present in the United States has protections under the United States Constitution.”

Echoing MacIntyre, perhaps the first question for us to answer today is: What would it mean to live in a society where ICE’s treatment of noncitizens was widely felt to be intolerable?

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This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 9, 2025.