Juan David Rojas: My Time inside the Immigration-Industrial Complex

Seems reasonable and balanced.
Definitely worth a read:

What progressives fail to comprehend is that allowing millions of economic migrants to fraudulently claim asylum hurts those with credible claims. If economic migrants believe that they are certain to be deported for asylum fraud, they will be less likely to claim asylum in the first place. Consequently, the overall backlog would necessarily fall, benefiting actual asylees by reducing processing times. Voters, moreover, correctly view progressive immigration policy as facilitating a legal back door for what they regard as illegal immigrants.
None of this justifies the Trump administration’s gratuitous abuse of legal and illegal immigrants, not least migrant children. The administration has revived family separation and has attempted to strip over 26,000 unaccompanied minors of legal representation. Nonviolent deportees, including minors, have similarly been subjected to year-long detentions; since 2025, around fifty people have died under ICE custody. Violent and nonviolent deportees have likewise been sent to maximum security prisons in third countries such as Eswatini and El Salvador. [My emphasis]
Deportation should be neither pleasant nor a means for signaling performative sadism against migrants. Removals should be as swift as possible and prioritize violent criminals over children and daylaborers. Deterring the latter, moreover, would be far more efficient and cost effective by punishing employers of illegal labor. A now forgotten generation of labor leaders and conservative restrictionists such as former Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach argued in favor of a national regime of E-Verify, which would be both more humane and practical than an $85 billion Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Accordingly, corporate prosecutions of immigration-related crimes currently sit at record lows. [My emphasis]
A broader conversation must also be had about reforming asylum. At present asylum writ large has been more or less gutted, save for white South Africans. Trump 1.0 was correct that international law calls for refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they flee to. “Remain in Mexico”, asylum quotas, and Safe Third Country agreements in the Americas are more than reasonable as a means for controlling flows of irregular crossings.
Many restrictionists now advocate for revoking the right to asylum outright, including for unaccompanied minors. Something like that has already occurred in Poland; Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback has even called for banning minors without legal permanent status from attending public schools—a proposal which would necessarily increase human trafficking. Yet the fact of the matter is that a reformed asylum system could work under a status quo of managed flow through the border.
To that end, if Democrats are truly interested in protecting victims like Marlón and Xiomara, they must be willing to subject irregular immigration and asylum fraud to limits and penalties. As of this writing, little to no effort has been made left-of-center to reckon with past mistakes and offer an alternative palatable to the broader population. Instead, the prevailing view champions denialism and virtue signaling against ICE. Unsurprisingly, voters still prefer Republicans to Democrats on immigration and especially the border.
Progressives are correct when they point out that US policy has brought devastation to many countries migrants hail from, not least in countries like Cuba and Haiti. But they would do better to advocate for a more sensible foreign policy as opposed to a laxer immigration regime. Indeed, the irony is that migrants from countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua lean overwhelmingly to the right and are likely to lobby for further interventions in their home countries if or when they receive citizenship.
Republicans should note that Democratic policy towards immigration comes not from a conspiratorial effort to “import voters” but a naive and deeply misguided understanding of irregular migration. In the same vein, Democrats must grapple with the fact that lax border policies inevitably alienate workers and lead to even greater cruelty against migrants.

   I'm mostly interested in the criticisms of Trump/red-team policies.

   The failures of the blue team are obvious and well-known to people like me.

   I'm not all that interested in pleading with the left by emphasizing that these policies are bad for illegal aliens. I'm interested in forcing the left to recognize that our interests matter. X is bad for the U.S. is a reason against x. The left's refusal to recognize that seems to have on foot in its childish emotionalism and the other in its Marxist hatred of the USA. Suicidal empathy + a desire for the West (especially the U.S.) to pay--for its success and, to some extent, for its past misdeeds. Well, actually, I guess it has a third foot in its refusal to face facts--and its tendency to infer iss from its fantastical oughts. In happy candy lefty land, all immigrants are pure and virtuous, and every one makes us a better nation...because diversity is our strength or WTFever. 

   BUT: again, I'm really more concerned about the criticisms of Trump's policies. I have no sympathy for the left's unstated master argument here that enforcing laws they don't like is illegitimate. Nor for their presupposition that anyone who screams loud enough must not be arrested. But Rojas obviously doesn't accept such nonsense. His descriptions of Trump policies must be taken seriously, IMO.