Within hours of President Trump being sworn into office, 500 serious criminals who should not be in the United States were arrested by federal immigration officials who plan to deport them swiftly.

When he was running for office, Trump told us that, if elected, he would take aggressive steps to stop illegal immigration, so advocates for migrants fanned the flames of fear, and the media followed up with stories about how terrible this would be because children would be ripped from their mother’s arms and left to live here as orphans – but that’s not what happened.

Trump prioritized deportation of the worst criminals; he hasn’t arrested a single law-abiding, hard-working person who just happens to be here illegally. No orphans. No screaming mothers. Just murderers, rapists, drug dealers and thieves. Too bad we can’t deport US citizens who commit the same crimes.

The most newsworthy case happened right here in Boston where an illegal Haitian immigrant was arrested by ICE after amassing seventeen criminal convictions.

Why state officials thought he deserved to be free is a worthy question. The guy was not pleased when the feds showed up, and he made his feelings known as law enforcement placed him in the backseat of a vehicle. “I’m not going back to Haiti,” he yelled,” followed by “F… Trump! you feel me bro?”

Oh we feel you, bro, we feel you in a terroristic sense because that’s what happens in civilized society when a bum like you keeps committing crimes and state officials do nothing about it. We feel you alright – like we feel rage when we read a story about an illegal immigrant being arrested for drug dealing and rape and robbery and he walks out of the courthouse a free man time and time again. We feel a lot of things about people like you, and it’s mostly that we want to get rid of you. It isn’t that you’re here illegally, it’s that you’re a thug.

Mind you, Trump’s seeming support for the idea that criminals don’t belong here doesn’t exactly jibe with the fact that he just granted pardons to a big pile of criminals, so let’s not embrace any of this as a left-right issue where the Democrats want to fill our streets with gangsters and the Republicans want to protect us from harm. They both act from a place of self-interest and at the moment, it is very much in the interest of President Trump and the Republican Party to highlight the absurdity of convicted criminals roaming free in the United States when they have no right to be here in the first place.

The guy from Haiti gave a lot of credence to Trump’s narrative when he expressed his affection for presidents Obama and Biden. “Biden forever, bro,” he said – adding that he wanted to thank Obama “for everything that he did,” for him. Not exactly the kind of gratitude Democrats want or need right now.

The Haitian guy will now be the poster child for immigration debates moving forward, and Democrats won’t have much of a defense. Republicans will just point to this guy and say: “this is how criminals feel about American politics. Drug dealers, sex traffickers and gang members from other countries run to the southern border when Democrats are in charge because they know they can glide into our country and conduct their dirty business with impunity.”

Although most people who come here illegally do not commit crimes, if you ran an organized crime syndicate and you knew the United States had open borders, you would eagerly send your foreign minions here to find new customers knowing that your profit margins face little risk of reduction by law enforcement.

Likewise, if a drug dealer walks across the border and makes a ton of money without serious consequence, he will always vote for the party that lets him do it.

Trump’s new policies will help, but that doesn’t mean the Republicans hate immigrants and the Democrats love them. It means some monied interests benefit from open borders and others don’t. So let’s stop pretending that anyone in either party actually cares about people.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One as he travels from Las Vegas to Miami on Saturday. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
A group of deportees is repatriated to Mexico last week after the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)