No. of Recommendations: 19
These are problems to be worked out in Court. I do have a problem with those who let their legal status expire and did nothing to bring it up to date.
A reasonable position. But their violation is a civil violation. It's not a crime.
As for the Dreamers, the cohort that was formally covered by the Obama-era DACA EO now number about 500K - and they're all adults. There's about 1.2 million unauthorized immigrants that are currently children, and the interwebs tells me that the total number of all unauthorized folks that were brought over the border as children (and thus are highly unlikely to be criminally culpable for that crossing) is about 3-3.5 million.
Combined with the overstayers, the folks who entered the country by claiming asylum at a POE (which is lawful), the folks who entered under other protected status that has since been revoked (Haitians, about half a million Venezuelans, etc.), and the 3+ million folks who entered as children...well, that's a lot of the unauthorized population. There's some overlap, it's pretty likely that a majority (or something close to it) of the unauthorized population did not commit a crime when they entered. And since being in the country without authorization is a civil, not criminal, violation they wouldn't have committed any crimes by remaining.
So if anyone claims that ICE is just going after criminals because anyone who is eligible for deportation is a criminal, that's categorically false.
