The shootings, while brutal, are an inevitable byproduct of a contentious but democratically mandated mass deportation policy; the conflict is fundamentally political, pitting organized left-wing resistance against a lawful enforcement initiative, and Vance's framing — however inflammatory — reflects real opposition to the policy.

Loury argues that while the Trump administration is not being fully honest by framing enforcement as targeting only criminals, the underlying legal position — that people without authorization are subject to deportation — is coherent and democratically mandated. Unauthorized presence is a legal violation, and a functional border requires that consequence to exist.

We got Donald Trump. Donald Trump don't do compromise. He doesn't do measure. He does my way or the highway, and he's doing my way or the highway on this.

He wouldn't have been at the head of my list. Should he have been susceptible to being deported because he was in the country without authorization? Yeah. I mean, I don't know how you do border without having the consequence of crossing it without authorization be susceptible to removal.

He wouldn't have been at the top of my list. He wouldn't have been in the middle of my list. He would have been way down my list. But he would have been on my list.

Loury contends that the costs of enforcement fall disproportionately on working-class Americans who compete with undocumented workers, and that the electorate clearly and knowingly gave Trump a mandate to enforce immigration laws.

He being Trump, was very clear about this. I'm gonna build a wall. We're gonna send them back. We're gonna keep our country safe by enforcing our immigration laws, and the people voted for that.

The federal government has a democratic mandate from the 2024 election to enforce immigration law, and sanctuary cities that obstruct federal enforcement are acting unconstitutionally, analogous to Southern states defying desegregation orders. While specific enforcement actions (e.g., shootings) may be deplorable, the underlying principle — that a sovereign nation controls who enters and stays — is sound and must be upheld.

I am siding with the administration insofar as they are acting on the mandate that they won in the election to enforce the border, which means removing people who are in the country without authorization.

Federal enforcement of immigration law against sanctuary cities is analogous to Eisenhower's muscular use of federal authority to override local resistance in Little Rock — a legitimate exercise of federal power over local defiance of duly enacted law.