Comment by ithkuil

Deportation of illegal immigrants happened in the previous administrations and nothing like the current chaos unfolded.

I grant that some people protesting against the raids are likely doing that because they don't want illegals to be deported,

but I suspect most of the pushback is against the way this whole thing has been set up and the way agents handled the encounters with protesters so far, leading towards a spiral of distrust and a polarization of the issue.

There seems to be an indication that many of the ICE agents have been insufficiently trained to perform police work in a proper and safe way. and instead behave very aggressively. The abuse of racial profiling is making non-white citizens (including native Americans!) feel unsafe too. To make things worse, there is a loud group of people who are cheering the though guys from the sidelines/armchairs.

People who share those concerns are not necessarily pro-illegal immigration. I know things can be done differently because they have been done differently.

But in this case, one political movement is leveraging the deportation rhetoric to rile up their base, providing another political movement the ammonito to call them tyrannical and riling up their base, which in turn causes the first movement to justify their aggressiveness as counterinsurgence.

This doesn't lead to a good place and it has nothing to do with the fact that the country deserves a sane immigration policy.

The current immigration situation is utterly broken, but it has become such over time (and has many complicated facets) but the idea that this can be fixed in a haste by applying lunt force is the product of a new low point in politics.