There is about to be an outbreak of lawfulness in the United States, and Democrats and the press can’t handle it.

President-elect Donald Trump’s talk of “mass deportation” is being treated as a clear and present danger to the American order that blue jurisdictions need to mobilize to stop.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois has vowed, “I am going to do everything that I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.”

Deportation is explicitly authorized in federal statute and a legitimate, necessary tool of immigration enforcement.

It is a symptom of how perverse the immigration debate has become that it is treated as the norm to allow millions of people to defy our laws, but it’s a five-alarm fire if an incoming U.S. president vows to get serious about enforcing those same laws. If mass deportation is a hateful notion for Trump’s opponents, maybe the Biden administration shouldn’t have allowed a mass illegal influx.

Given the scale of the problem that he is seeking to address, Trump’s rhetoric is appropriately extravagant. It makes sense, though, to think of his impending deportation program as broadly consistent with enforcement as it existed in the decades prior to Biden’s presidency.

As Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies points out, 316,000 aliens were removed or returned in fiscal year 2014 under President Barack Obama before collapsing to 28,000 in fiscal year 2022 under President Biden. It wasn’t until toward the end of his presidency that Obama began to restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Biden set out to kneecap interior enforcement at the outset. He created a host of new rules to protect illegal immigrants from enforcement action.

Clearly with an eye to the election, the administration bumped up removals and returns to more than 200,000 in fiscal year 2024. If Biden could increase deportations several times over without unleashing the immigration gestapo, why can’t Trump also increase them several times over without creating a dystopia?

As a practical matter, there’s a limit to what can be done. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations has only about 6,000 officers. Even with all the political backing in the world, they aren’t going to be able to find and deport the roughly 8 million illegal immigrants admitted under Biden. Realizing this, Trump’s choice as border czar, Tom Homan, says his first priority will be removing criminal aliens and national-security threats.

The next logical priority would be to target the 1.3 million aliens who have already been ordered deported but are still in the country.

Despite all the fear-mongering about it, most people know that Trump’s deportation program is a response to a crisis that wasn’t of his making and that the vast majority of people never wanted. In a new CBS News Poll, 57% of people say that they support Trump starting a program to deport all illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Unlike Trump’s enemies, the public doesn’t fear enforcement of immigration laws that have been systematically ignored for much too long.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review