U.S. President Donald Trump came to power promising he would deport as many as a million immigrants a year. But fixing immigration is no easy task, according to Janet Napolitano, who as President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security oversaw about 450,000 deportations a year.
“It’s important in this conversation to distinguish between border security and interior enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws,” said Napolitano, speaking on FP Live. “The interior enforcement needed to focus on those who were not only undocumented but who had committed other crimes, were known national security threats, or were proven gang members. Those were our priorities. We didn’t talk about mass deportation. We didn’t talk about going into schools and churches and courthouses to round people up. We didn’t seize people off the streets.”
Was President Joe Biden’s immigration policy a backlash to the first Trump term, and is Trump now going too far the other way? “I think this administration is actually doing some of the right things,” said Napolitano, reflecting on polling that shows Americans are more supportive of Trump’s border policy than his handling of the economy. “Messaging and rhetoric matters because it spreads through the possible immigrant community. So, as vituperative and wrong their language is, it is indeed having an effect.”
