Ahead of President Trump’s remarks at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, Chicago’s Morning Answer host Dan Proft argued that border security should be a central theme of the president’s message, given that the political left has shown no retreat from its earlier positions on immigration enforcement. Proft played a clip of then-candidate Joe Biden telling a Vice News forum that his administration would decline to deport anyone who had not committed a felony in the United States, would hold ICE agents accountable for violating that standard, and would not consider drunk driving a felony offense.
Proft also referenced remarks by Cal State LA professor Melina Abdullah at a socialist gathering in California, similar in format to a conference held in Chicago over the weekend, in which Abdullah called for aggressive action against ICE, including publicly exposing the identity and whereabouts of a specific ICE enforcement official so that, in her words, he would have nowhere he could feel comfortable. Proft characterized the episode as representative of the posture of the ascendant wing of the Democratic Socialists of America within the Democratic Party, and argued voters face a choice in November between that approach and the current administration’s enforcement record.
For further discussion, Proft spoke with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Krikorian said he expects Trump to highlight that illegal border crossings have fallen to their lowest level in decades, an achievement he called significant given that modern surveillance now allows authorities to know far more about who is crossing than was possible even in the 1960s.
He also expects the president to tout the removal of criminal offenders, but said he would like to see a stronger push on workplace enforcement, arguing that most people in the country illegally are not violent criminals but ordinary workers, and that the most effective way to encourage voluntary departure is to make it difficult for them to find and keep jobs. Krikorian said the administration has been reluctant to move aggressively on this front, in part because of pressure from business interests who rely on that labor pool.
Proft raised concern that the administration may be a victim of its own success, since reduced border chaos could lead voters to take the improvement for granted heading into the midterms. He argued Republicans need to frame the current situation as fragile progress rather than a settled matter, warning that a Democratic-controlled Congress would not simply return to Biden-era policy but would seek to unwind enforcement gains entirely. Krikorian agreed, noting that many of the administration’s changes so far have altered how existing law is enforced rather than the underlying statute, leaving loopholes that a future administration could exploit as the Biden administration did. He said the case for expanding Republican congressional majorities is that only new legislation can close those gaps, pointing to the narrow House majority as a major obstacle to further action.
The two also discussed proposed legislation named for Delilah, a child killed in a highway crash and the subject of recent congressional testimony from her father, which would restrict commercial driver’s licenses to U.S. citizens. Krikorian called it exactly the kind of concrete, safety-focused measure Republicans could pursue with a larger majority, while Proft noted that federal action is often limited by states’ independent authority, citing sanctuary policies in Chicago and other Democratic-run cities as evidence that Democrats would extend similar protections nationally if given the opportunity. Both agreed the broader message for Republicans heading into the midterms is that Democratic immigration policy in blue states offers a preview of what a Democratic Congress would pursue at the federal level.