Turning Victory into Defeat

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Feb. 7, 2026

Immigration enforcement should be a win for Donald Trump. He promised he would secure the border, and he has certainly tightened it. He also claimed his administration would go after the worst of the worst illegal immigrants, those who committed terrible acts of violence before or after they arrived here.

It was a campaign plank with widespread support. Nobody on either side of the political fence was in favor of sheltering murderers and rapists and human traffickers. In fact, according to Pew Research Center, that support was consistent through all demographic groups.

Then Trump let his hyperbolic nonsense take over. He claimed the Biden Administration had allowed 25 million illegal immigrants into the country and further claimed countries were emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending us the “worst of the worst.” Never mind that little of that was true, because Trump’s MAGA stalwarts are always true believers.

So, instead of identifying, targeting, and apprehending those who really do represent the worst of the worst, we decided rounding up anybody with brown skin and an accent was fair game. We send enforcement “surges” into communities typically run by Democrats simply because the disruption it causes apparently pleases Trump.

(It should be noted there was such a thing as a “Kavanaugh stop,” at least temporarily. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested accents and skin color were, in fact, sufficient for cursory stops and requests for identification during immigration surges. He has since tried to walk back those comments, since stopping anyone for no reason other than skin color and an accent is clearly unconstitutional.)

Now we have Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) roaming various neighborhoods searching for illegal immigrants. They hang out at Home Depot, outside immigration offices, and anywhere they think they might find someone here illegally. They haven’t been especially nice about it once they encounter protesters.

Enforcing immigration laws and investigating and stopping cross-border crimes, including smuggling of all kinds, is what they typically train to do. Crowd control, a more traditional law enforcement activity, is not even part of their training, such as it is these days.

Before Trump, training for ICE and the other border agencies typically took 22 weeks and included a requirement to learn Spanish. Detailed background checks, requiring 45-60 days, were also conducted before anyone is hired. Those used to be the standards. Now agents can be trained in as little as 42 days, there is no language requirement, and it would seem that some background checks are being conducted after the fact—if at all.

On our streets we have masked and heavily armed individuals trying to deal with situations for which they are only minimally trained. The result could have been easily predicted by any administration decision-maker, if any cared.

All those rapists and murderers we were going to round up? According to the Associated Press, the left-leaning Cato Institute, and others, about 70 percent of those we have apprehended and deported had no criminal records at all, and only 5 percent had any kind of violent criminal history. (The White House reverses those numbers and claims 70 percent have a criminal record simply because they were here illegally. But the Supreme Court has already ruled being in the U.S. without proper authorization is a civil offense, not a crime.)

In the midst of all of this, more than 170 American citizens have been wrongly detained according to ProPublica, and not all have yet been released. Multiple American children, including a four-year-old receiving cancer treatment and a 10-year-old with a brain tumor, have been deported.

It could be worse and has been. In Minneapolis, two protesters were killed by our surging immigration officers. Renee Good was accused of attempting to run over ICE agents and was shot in the head. The videos from many angles do not show such an attempt but do show multiple agents shouting contradictory orders at her; she could not both get out of the car and drive away at the same time.

Alex Pretti, was shot 10 times, mostly in the back by a Border Patrol agent and a Border Protection officer, neither of whom would ordinarily be facing a crowd in Minneapolis. Pretti, who was accused immediately after his death of being a “domestic terrorist” and a “wannabe assassin” who was intent on causing as “much damage as possible,” was none of those things. An ICU nurse at a local VA center, Pretti told officers he was legally armed and his gun was safely removed. Then, on the ground and with no weapons, Pretti was pepper sprayed and shot to death.

Trump has declared war on some American cities and in the process turned what should have been a victory lap into a bloodstained defeat.