by Jacob G. Hornberger

July 29, 2026

I recently received an email from the ACLU stating that America’s immigration-control system is “fundamentally broken” and needs a “total overhaul.” The email stated, “We need immediate changes to create an immigration system that actually works for people and keeps our communities safe.” In other words, the system needs “reform.”

Such nonsense. I have heard this nonsense all my life, including the 33 years that I lived on the U.S.-Mexico border and experienced first-hand the immigration police state that is now spreading nationwide. In its email, the ACLU cited the horrific actions of ICE, the U.S. deportation crusade, and the horrible conditions in the immigration detention centers.

But the ACLU has it wrong. The fact is that America’s immigration-control system is not broken. Instead, what most Americans still cannot bring themselves to see, even after 100 years of chaos, is that their beloved immigration-control system is inherently defective.

The difference between broken and inherently defective is the difference between day and night. It might be possible to fix something that is broken. It is impossible to fix something that is inherently defective.

It is impossible to fix America’s immigration-control system. The ACLU is living in la-la land in advocating a “total overhaul” of the system. The term is actually a variation of a ridiculous term I have heard all my life: “comprehensive immigration reform.”

President Trump is doing a great service to advocates of America’s immigration-control system, including the ACLU and other people who profess to love the “poor, needy, and disadvantaged.” He is showing what actually needs to be done to “secure the border.”

And make no mistake about it: Most everyone, including leftists and even many libertarians, favor “securing the border.” That is, they oppose the libertarian position of open borders, which would entail the abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol, and all restrictions on the free movements of people across our international borders. They just want a kinder and more benevolent immigrant-control system — i.e., one that “works.”

Trump is proving that if you really want to secure the border, it is necessary to expand the immigration police state beyond the borderlands and enforce it all across the nation, including through a terrifying campaign of raids, kidnappings, detention camps, and mass deportations.

Think about it. Some leftists and some immigration-control libertarians want to abolish ICE. They want to reduce the number of people being deported. They want a kinder and gentler immigration-control system. They want what President Biden was doing — maintaining America’s immigration-control system and the immigration police state along the border, including Trump’s Berlin Wall while, at the same time, letting in countless more illegal immigrants–what right-wingers called Biden’s “open border” policy.

But less harsh enforcement simply means that more illegal immigrants are able to circumvent the immigration police state along the border and make it to other parts of the United States. If they are then going to be left alone, that obviously gives the incentive to more illegal immigrants to enter the United States illegally, knowing that if they can make it through the borderlands, they are home free.

Trump is showing that to truly secure the border, the feds have to cleanse America of all those illegal immigrants who made it through the borderlands police state and settled in other parts of the country. By ferreting them out and getting rid of them, the incentive to come in illegally is diminished or eradicated.

So, the big difference between Trump, on the one hand, and leftists and immigration-control libertarians on the others, is simply one of degree. Trump wants to secure the border 100 percent, the leftists and pro-immigration control libertarians want to secure it only, say, 60 or 70 percent.

But keep in mind that either way, the immigration-control system remains in place. You still have the immigration police state along the border — i.e., the highway checkpoints, the warrantless searches, the Border Patrol, the roving Border Patrol checkpoints, the criminalization of hiring, transporting, and caring for illegal immigrants, the Berlin Wall, and more. And you still have the death, suffering, and humiliation of countless people, to a lesser or greater degree.

This system is not fixable or reformable because it is not broken. It is inherently defective because is is a socialist system, in that it is based on the socialist principle of central planning. As the libertarian free-market economist Ludwig von Mises observed, socialist central planning brings “planned chaos,” which is what we have had along the border ever since America adopted its socialist system of immigration controls.

I’ve said it many times before, in fact for 36 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, but it bears repeating: There is one — and only one — solution to America’s ongoing, never-ending, decades-long, perpetual immigration chaos and its ever-expanding immigration police state. That solution is: freedom and free markets, which necessarily means genuine open borders, as I detail in my most recent book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer.