That line of Trump's, when I heard it on the radio—"Isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country?"—struck me as begging a couple of important and opposed questions: asking us to assume, on the one hand, that what he's been doing can be described that way, and on the other that it's an unambiguously good idea.
I've given a lot more attention to the first, especially starting in the 2024 campaign, because the shamelessness of the lying, on the part of Trump and Bannon and Stephen Miller, got me so mad, and the respectable people were hardly discussing it: that when the Trumpies screamed about the millions of criminal aliens they were planning to deport, the murderers and rapists and human traffickers and opiate dealers, the escapees from prisons and "lunatic asylums" Trump had created out of his own linguistic confusion, they weren't talking about anything real.
That is, no doubt there are some bad guys among our 12 million or so undocumented workers, as in any community, but it's a pretty small community, a bit under 4% of the population, and not very many of those are criminals; proportionately fewer, in fact, than in the general population, for the obvious reason that the consequences of getting in trouble with the law are so much harsher—exile, effectively, to the country you left because you didn't see a future for yourself there, where you were maybe in mortal danger.
I've been making a point of this for years, as readers know, at least since Trump launched his 2016 campaign with the famous escalator speech about the wicked Mexicans ("some of them, I'm sure, are very fine people"), quoting one pretty good source or another. I just ran into the best source yet, a study published just last September by the research agency (National Institute of Justice) of our own Department of Justice, which looked at arrest records from one border state, Texas, from the period 2012-18, and which found that
undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime (see exhibit 1) and violent felony crime (see exhibit 2) compared to other groups. U.S.-born citizens had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types, with documented immigrants generally falling between the other two groups.
I just found out about it thanks to a story last week in The Independent, reporting not just that the study existed, but also that a link to it has been scrubbed from the relevant DOJ website.
Not to belabor the obvious, but the why is pretty clear: the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, knows that Trump's (and Bondi's) tirades against "illegals" convey a false message, but they don't want us to know that, and will do what they can to suppress the facts. Bondi, and Stephen Miller in the White House, if not Trump himself, have understood that there aren't anywhere near enough criminals among the undocumented for Trump's promises of millions of deportations, and ICE wouldn't know how to find them if there were. The only way they can hope to achieve even a five- or six-digit number is by rounding up the innocent, or a more or less random selection of whom most will be innocent, and that's what they've been doing, preferably sending them to a penal colony like the one in El Salvador where they can be put away without all the bother of charges and trials. (Even then they're unable to deport as many per month as the Biden administration did in the previous year.) The most important is not to have charges and trials, because they'd lose almost all of those, starting with Kilmar Ábrego García, who's plainly no more a crime-committing MS-13 member than I am. They haven't gotten anywhere near far along enough yet in corrupting the judiciary.
But you can't say Trump is making any effort to "keep criminals out of our country." His goons have no idea who is and who isn't a criminal—they're keeping somebody out of the country, but they don't know who, and so far all anybody's been able to learn about is the non-criminals, and the ridiculous mistakes the goons have made in trying to identify. them. All he's doing is xenophobe theater, targeting not just the undocumented and the guys with tattoos but foreigners with visas and green cards, students, scientists, and tourists, maybe US citizens as well. All he's achieved is an awe-inspiring display of how stupid and irresponsible he and his team are, which would be funny if they weren't spreading so much pain and fear.
As to whether that would be a good idea, "keeping criminals out of our country", that's a good illustration of the fundamental narcissism of the "America First" ideology. Because it wouldn't be diminishing the amount of bad in the world, if they actually were criminals, it would just be moving it around a bit so we didn't have to think about it. Not perhaps doing any crimes in their new lives in El Salvador, since they're. brutally imprisoned, but they wouldn't be doing any crimes if they were imprisoned here either, and we've got lots of prison cells. The only reason for keeping them there, it's abundantly clear, is that El Salvador abolished due process rights for detained persons, not that long ago, just three years (I'll get to that soon), so they don't have any legal obligation there to let the prisoners talk to a judge. Putting it another way, for whatever evil some criminals are prevented from doing, the Salvadoran government takes up some of the slack to do some evil of its own. For six million dollars a year from the US government (and who knows what kind of private arrangements, the details of the contract are secret)
Getting criminals "out of the country" achieves nothing. What's a good idea is to stop people from committing crimes, maybe by keeping them behind bars, but ideally by rehabilitating them, a goal American politicians seem to have totally given up on. To say nothing of Salvadoran politicians. "Isn't it wonderful" that the Salvadoran government has permitted Senator Van Hollen to talk to Kilmar Ábrego García. Sure thing, and thanks to the Senator for making this happen! There's nothing to thank Trump for. Until he agrees to stand trial for the various crimes he's been accused of, that would be a helpful reduction in crime for me.
