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The problem is that if you want to actually get through the ~8M folks that need to be deported at 500-700K a year, you need a durable political coalition that can actually keep it up for 10-12 years.
That won't happen if you piss off enough of the marginal bleeding hearts that there is no way to do it. A paroxysm of 4 years of Trump's ICE (which he's already pulled back on, less than 9 months out) won't actually accomplish your goal.
People seem to forget that outsmarting your opponents is an allowed move in politics. Try harder not to be outsmarted.
Actually I think the Right could lean in to due process as a meme here -- especially with regards to folks who have had asylum denied, had their chance to appeal to the BIA and already ignored a final order of removal.
And yes, for those folks, deportation is the right next step. For those at other stages, they deserve some notice and a solid (5 days? 10 days?) chance to self-deport.
Sorry, your enemies were never going to just let you do it. "Bleeding hearts have a veto so we have to do what they want!" You'll do things the "moderate" and "humane" way and then they'll say it still isn't good enough and you need to do better. This is how you lose before you even try.
Everything Trump is doing right now is the moderate option. This is all right and just. We are going to deport illegal aliens and criminals no matter how many blue voters say we aren't allowed because it's mean.
Midterm elections are in 9 months. One way to lose is by declining to try, but another way to lose is deciding to try really hard, fucking everything up badly in a highly legible way, and being booted out of your position.
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Politically moderate and factually moderate are different things.
And yes, of course the median voter has a veto, that’s representative government. The point was doing it without losing the median voter and without getting outsmarted by your opponents.
Of course a party or a politician can decide to just go balls out for a few years and get whalloped. But it won’t lead to a long term accomplishments.
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What do you consider would be the non-moderate option?
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It seems to me as an external outlier that quite a few of the 'heartbreaking story of peaceful productive illegal immigrant removed stories' are these people, though. Cases where they entered the USA in 2005 or whatever, have explicitly run through all of their options for appeals over the course of a decade and have then wandered off the reservation till occasionally picked up on the current day. Even the OP mentioned with the Grandma who had explicitly received a final order of removal.
Also hasn't a soft-amnesty and opportunity to self deport also been provided with an additional payment to those who take it up?
I feel like those are the least sympathetic such cases. People that were ordered removed by the Obama administration and just refused, well, even Obama was in favor of deporting them (and his clip of 3M over his 8 years is comparable enough to Trump's run rate of 500K a year).
The most sympathetic cases are something like "immigrant goes to ICE appointment, has existing status yanked and is arrested right on the spot".
Granted some large proportion of those existing legal statuses were Biden-era bullshit, I'm not defending that they were justified, but a lot of those folks did have a valid-on-paper withholding of removal. And while the left doesn't acknowledge it as legitimate, the same law that makes it possible for the Biden AG to grant WoR also justified the Trump AG revoking WoR on the spot. Still, it's bad look as compared to giving them notice that WoR is being revoked, a chance to try the process and appeal through the BIA and ultimate removal if they ignore their legal duty to leave.
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