Where Was Democrats’ Outrage When Obama And Biden Deported Illegal Alien Housekeepers And Gardeners?
It’s going to happen as sure as the sun will rise: Once Congress approves a “big, beautiful bill,” the Trump administration will supercharge its “mass deportation” plans far beyond mostly illegal alien convicts. Get ready to see deportations of workaday illegal aliens who didn’t commit jail-worthy offenses and were never convicted for illegally breaching the border and breaking whatever other laws were necessary to work illegally.
And along with it, get ready to see illegal immigration advocates — among them progressive operatives and protesters, battalions of lawyers, corporate media, and sanctuary state elected officials — intensify an information war barrage of planted heartstring-tugging “human interest” stories. These stories are used for political purposes to drive down public support for deporting illegally present domestic housekeepers, lawn-mowing crews, and construction workers. (See my recent report titled, “’Injustice Porn’: Get Ready for the Next Big Thing on the Immigration Front.”
But Americans need to be reminded that no such war for their hearts and minds happened when Democrats Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton collectively deported millions of illegal aliens who also merely worked hard, paid taxes, and stayed out of U.S. prisons and off gang and terrorism intelligence databases.
When Democrats carry out deportations, there is nary a peep of protest from this very same peanut gallery. When the Biden administration secretly air-deported hundreds of thousands of Central American and Haitian mothers with babies in their arms just a couple of years ago, there were no stories planted to spin up a rage machine. Those operations drew no tear-jerking stories in the corporate press — or really, any coverage at all.
And when Biden was vice president, he and Barack Obama practically got a blank media hall pass when they air-deported tens of thousands of unaccompanied illegal alien children back to Central American tarmacs to shut down a surge of those in 2015. Most Americans still don’t even know they did that, not to mention the millions of other non-criminal family members and oft-vaunted “breadwinners” they deported during all eight of their years in office.
And Bill Clinton? His party base lauded him in the mid-1990s when he spearheaded tough deportation-centric legislation known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
The coming war on Trump’s mere remake of Democratic Party deportation programs lays bare the profound double-standard hypocrisy of the activists waging it along with their partisan media allies who so willfully believe that a unique new MAGA inhumanity is afoot.
It isn’t. This is an old story with new, politically motivated framing.
There was a day not all that long ago, in January 2016, when Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson flat-out told reporters his agents were conducting “family deportation raids,” knowing he would take little if any serious flak.
“This should come as no surprise,” he said of raids that nabbed 121 women and children in two interior states, plus Texas, a day earlier. “I have said publicly for months that individuals who constitute enforcement priorities, including families and unaccompanied children, will be removed.”
Those who care so much today when Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan says similar things nurtured blind spots when it was Obama’s man saying them.
The Unmentionable Biden Deportation Machine
Two things can be true at once. It is certainly true, for instance, that the Biden administration’s mass release and deportation curtailment policies in January 2021 unleashed the worst mass migration event in American history, with more than 10 million allowed to disappear inside the country.
But it is also true, as I report in my book Overrun, the administration used air deportations to target high-volume non-criminal alien nationalities to help lessen the terrible public optics of mass crowds ahead of the 2022 midterm and 2024 presidential election campaigns.
In July 2021, the Biden administration announced it would launch an ICE air operation that quietly ramped up and went on to mass-deport as many as 550,000 mostly Central American immigrants by November 2024, often in whole families on the grounds that “irregular migration … is especially dangerous for families and children.”
The deportations did gain passing mention in major media reporting about an internal White House conflict between progressive political appointees who’d engineered the historic mass migration and politically pragmatic administration figures who argued for reining it in for fear of heavy political losses in the November 2022 mid-term elections.
I witnessed, videotaped, and reported that plain-clothed ICE agents driving unmarked vehicles were escorting busloads of illegal alien families to unmarked Texas airport hangars and putting them onto unmarked ICE-contracted jets. Biden’s deportation airlift did indeed successfully tamp down entries of the targeted nationalities. Corporate media wrote no tales of woe like we’re now seeing on front pages and top network TV news stories.
Obama’s Deportation Handiwork
Obama inherited a fully intact “formidable” deportation machine from his two predecessors when he took office in 2009, according to the Migration Policy Institute, allowing for more than 5.2 million deportations, averaging 650,000 per year over both terms. Up to half of those sent home were not convicted of crimes: moms, dads, and their kids, a review of various reports from the era shows.
That administration showed no reluctance in deporting even solo immigrant children to shut down a surge of those in 2015.
Obama did take some criticism for his programs but nothing like the Category 4 hurricane that Obama and Biden supporters are now whirling up against Trump. Obama easily parried such treatment by simply saying things that Trump says routinely.
During a 2013 San Francisco speech on immigration, a South Korean heckler (who was in the United States illegally) complained to Obama that deportations were separating families, shouting, “You have the power to stop all deportations!”
In response, Obama shot back: “Actually, I don’t. If in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, I would do so. But we are also a nation of laws. The easy way out is to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws.”
When a Univision reporter asked Obama that same year if he would consider a “moratorium on deportations of non-criminals,” Obama the lawyer stayed the course:
“I think it is important to remind everybody that, as I said I think previously, I’m not a king. I am head of the executive branch of government. I’m required to follow the law. And that’s what we’ve done.”
And that was pretty much the end of the story; the deportations continued at an increasing pace and numbers.
Bill Clinton Wrote Trump’s Deportation Playbook
Bill Clinton’s 1996 bill set the legal table for all the deportations his Democrat successors did and now for what Trump also plans should the $170 billion “big beautiful bill” pass.
Even allowing for the fact that Clinton’s era was a different time, it wasn’t all that long ago, and his base of union protectionists and mainstream liberals did not like illegal immigration. He took minimal criticism and, in speeches, Clinton practically channeled the future Trump, downright proud of his border crackdowns.
It’s no wonder that, back then, Trump considered himself a Democrat when Clinton gave his 1995 State of the Union speech, where he received applause on both sides of the aisle.
“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country,” Clinton said. “The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by our citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”
“We are a nation of immigrants, but ultimately, we are a nation of laws,” Clinton told a crowd quite different from the angry Democrats of today.
In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan said something that illuminated this forgotten history and the present hypocrisy when an almost indignant reporter asked if he really planned to deport whole families.
“We’ve done it before,” Homan answered.
In line with the current partisan anti-Trump times, his reference to very recent Democratic Party history went unexplored.
Jesus Christ is King
