ICE Riots, Iran Strikes and Reflections from a Week in America

It’s been a rather eventful week for America and having just returned from spending that very week in Washington D.C., I thought it might be worth sharing a few observations.

First, for the very online audience that I have no doubt cultivated over the years: America is mostly fine. It isn’t on fire, people are not, for the most part, at each other’s throats, and Washington D.C. managed to host a Pride march and a Trump military parade in the same week without incident.

Relaxing one evening in a bar, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a conversation between several black Democrats, a couple of white Republican staffers taking a break from working on the Big Beautiful Bill, and a second-generation Palestinian-American realtor. The conversation mostly focused on the NBA finals and which of the two nearby bagel shops is better. The Indiana Pacers seemed to be the popular choice for NBA honours, while the bagel debate was finally settled by the Palestinian-American who said something no one could object to: “They’re both good, man. Jews make the best bagels”. As we all went our separate ways, jokes, smiles and warm handshakes were exchanged by all.

The polarisation and acrimony you hear so much about on social media and in the news are certainly there too. In a single 20-minute Uber ride, I got a real feel for how hard tackling illegal immigration will be for any country which attempts to reverse decades of open-border policy. My driver spent the entire journey listening to some kind of mainstream radio station in which the anguished narrators told story after story about the impact of the ICE immigration raids. The mother of one told us that her husband has been here for 20 years. He never even got so much as a ticket. Their son keeps asking for his dad. “He doesn’t understand,” she said. “He still thinks daddy is at work”.

This is one of the reasons why allowing illegal immigration is cruel and immoral. Inevitably, many people get fed up with it, express that democratically, and the migrants who were allowed to enter or overstay illegally end up being deported, separated from their loved ones and having their lives upended.

Some want to celebrate that this is happening. But this is not something to celebrate - at a human level, what's happening is objectively awful. Others want to pretend that the solution is simply to allow illegal immigration to go unprosecuted and uncorrected. But that can't happen if you want to have a country. You cannot have some people spending years and thousands following all the rules while others simply skip ahead. What incentive does that leave for anyone to respect the system?

The fact that Western countries have allowed so many people to enter illegally is the reason for what is happening now. When those decisions were made, these outcomes became inevitable.

It's the same reason that failing to teach children right and wrong by setting clear boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is cruel rather than kind. A child who grows up without limits will eventually learn those lessons from life, which will be far harsher than loving parents. It's always better to do the right thing as early as possible, or the problem gets bigger and bigger, and a bigger and bigger correction is then necessary.

President Trump appears to have confronted this reality this week. He pulled back from the maximalist position, with a senior ICE official sending out guidance to Homeland Security Investigation. According to the New York Times, it stated: “Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants, and operating hotels.” The email went on to clarify that “human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are OK”, but agents must not arrest “noncriminal collaterals” i.e. illegal immigrants not suspected of such crimes.

Polls conducted at the start of the week showed that 54% of Americans support Trump’s policy on illegal immigration. But I’d be surprised if what those people imagined was quite what they’ve been seeing on their TV screens in recent days. This is also to say nothing of the fact that illegal labour is now so deeply embedded in the American economy that fixing it requires treading on a lot of toes of people who, unlike the illegals themselves, have money and power.

Yesterday, President Trump conceded on this too: "Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers." "They've worked for them for 20 years. They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be…great. We're going to have to do something about that." "We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have..." "We're going to have an order on that pretty soon. We can't do that to our farmers..."

In the meantime, President Trump appears to have played an absolute blinder in the Middle East. I say “President Trump” and not “Benjamin Netanyahu” because not a single person with any inside knowledge I met in D.C. thinks Israel acted alone.