President Donald Trump was returned to the White House this year largely on the strength of one issue: immigration. Trump’s narrative of a nation being overrun by violent migrant criminals was never real, but the Biden administration’s failure to prioritize border control was.

It’s safe to say a great many Americans who don’t necessarily support Trump on other issues were hoping and expecting him to finally start enforcing America’s immigration laws.

What they’ve gotten instead is a counterproductive and often lawless approach to immigration enforcement, one that weaponizes the issue for the sake of partisan politics, with a foundation of abject cruelty that every American should be ashamed of.

Consider Trump’s core campaign promise — to rid America of undocumented immigrants who commit violent crimes — in light of the story of Willians Alvarenga-Calix.

Alvarenga-Calix, 32, fled his native Honduras because of threats of violence against his family. Living in St. Louis County since 2023 with his young son, he was seeking asylum, checking in regularly with the immigration office in downtown St. Louis. He thought it was a routine part of that process when he got a call from an immigration officer earlier this month asking him to come in and verify some paperwork.

Alvarenga-Calix, who has no criminal record, complied with the request, went into the office — and was promptly arrested, put in a van and driven to a county jail about 100 miles away in Rolla. He was still there last week, worrying about who will care for his son if and when he is deported.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Katie Kull and Daniel Guerrero wrote in a deeply reported piece this week, Alvarenga-Calix is among hundreds of St. Louis-area migrants who have been rounded up and shipped to outstate Missouri jails to await deportation.

Not only are Alvarenga-Calix and those like him not the violent criminals of Trump’s relentless narrative, but they weren’t even in hiding; they were cooperating with the immigration process to get legal — and for that, they were targeted as, presumably, low-hanging fruit.

Why the urgency to round up these particular immigrants? Simple: Trump has vowed “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” but there aren’t that many immigrants here who commit violent crimes; statistically, they are less likely to than are native-born Americans. Snatching up the law-abiding ones by taking advantage of their willingness to follow the process of getting citizenship is an easy way to goose up those deportation numbers.

Does that make anyone reading this feel safer? Or feel proud to be an American?

Villainous strategies like this are being reported from all over the country. Migrant students have been snatched off sidewalks in broad daylight by masked immigration officers. The administration has moved to cancel student visas en masse, depriving American universities of not only some of the most potentially valuable immigrants to our culture and economy, but also of the higher tuition they tend to pay. So much for just targeting violent “illegals.”

Other migrants have been shipped to foreign prisons with no due process whatsoever, even in violation of court orders. So much for the trope that Trump is just “enforcing the law.”

Trump has hardly bothered denying the partisan aspect of all this, targeting Los Angeles for his chilling and likely illegal deployment of U.S. troops against the wishes of California’s governor and directing his immigration forces to target other Democratic-controlled cities such as Chicago and New York.

Isn’t that more of just “enforcing the law”? If so, what explains Trump’s announcement last week that he was going to stop deporting “very good, long time workers" away from the agriculture industry — a key political constituency for him — because “those jobs (are) almost impossible to replace”?

Those are “very good” and needed workers, but the store workers snatched up in Los Angeles aren’t? How exactly does Trump know this?

Trump, in typically random and unexplained fashion, later reversed the decision to leave migrant farm workers alone. So now we’ll be rounding up and shipping out what Trump himself recently declared in writing to be “very good” farm workers who are “almost impossible to replace.” What exactly is the value in that for America? (At least the farming industry has already had some practice dealing with Trump’s spastic policymaking, having already had to endure his on-again, off-again tariffs.)

This administration’s approach to immigration is lots of things — arbitrary, capricious, cruel — but no one should mistake it for just “enforcing the law.”

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