The most notable trend of this first year of the new Trump administration was the revival of the last truly brave policy of the US government – the Eisenhower administration’s serious enforcement of US immigration law, which in Eisenhower’s presidency was called Operation Wetback. Trump first invoked the policy ten years ago in the primary debated of his 2016 presidential campaign, but in this second term we finally see it being implemented in earnest. ICE has been send on missions to find illegal immigrants where they are reputed to be, and start deporting them.

The very resistance this operation has faced, whether by left-wing activists on the streets or activist judges from the bench, is proof of its effectiveness. Whatever one hears from opposition, it’s not that enforcement isn’t effective. It’s only couched in moral terms, because those are the only terms in which it can be argued against. This approach is quite convenient for the Left, because everything seems to be a moral issue. Nothing is ever a practical matter on which reasonable people can disagree.

The operations, because the are focused on immigrants with criminal rap sheets, necessary expose the connection between immigration and crime, the connection that the press has done everything in its power to play down. Not just legal immigration either, but also legal, such a the systemic fraud that has been exposed in Minneapolis among that city’s Somali immigrant population. All of this endemic lawlessness for years and decades, going back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, has been ignored. In the months to come we will see how the unraveling of this arrangement which was supported by a of silence will unfold.