by Jacob G. Hornberger

January 28, 2026

Let’s give credit where credit is due: President Trump is being logical and consistent with respect to his goal of “securing the border.” Unlike so many of his fellow border-control advocates, including libertarians, he fully and completely understands a critically important point in the immigration debate: that to make an omelet, it is necessary to crack some eggs.

Today, there are advocates of America’s socialist system of immigration controls, including many libertarians, who are lamenting and criticizing the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. They are saying that the killings were unjustified. They are saying that to “secure the border,” it’s just not necessary for immigration-control officials to be killing American citizens.

They just don’t get it. But President Trump does get it.

Let’s go back to President Biden. What were border-control advocates saying about Biden? They were saying something like this: “Biden has open borders, Jacob! Look at all the illegals that have flooded into America under his watch.”

That, of course, was a ridiculous claim, as I kept pointing out. Biden was no more “open borders” than Trump. For example, during his last year in office, Biden and his immigration-control goons deported more than a quarter-million immigrants. He kept the Border Patrol and ICE in existence. He sent U.S. troops to the border. Why, he even added onto Trump’s Berlin Wall along the border. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is a very far cry from the libertarian concept of open borders.

As I detail in my new book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer (which I highly recommend!), open borders means the abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol, and all restrictions whatsoever on the free movements of goods, services, and people across our international borders. Think about the open-border system we have domestically between the states. That’s what a genuine open-borders system would look like along the U.S.-Mexico border.

So, why did border-control advocates insist on calling Biden “open borders”? It’s because Biden was not enforcing America’s immigration police state as harshly as Trump has done. Moreover, unlike Trump, he wasn’t expanding it nationwide, at least not in a big way. Biden was, by and large, limiting America’s immigration police state to the borderlands, where it has existed my entire life.

I grew up on the border. I lived almost half my life there. I saw and experienced the borderlands police state. Highway checkpoints without search warrants. Roving Border Patrol checkpoints without search warrants. Warrantless searches of ranches and farms along or near the border, including our farm along the border where my family lived. Snitches who would report illegal immigrants to the authorities. Violent immigration raids. The prosecution of American citizens who hired, transported, or cared for illegal immigrants. The militarization of the border.

In other words, to “secure the border,” Biden understood the need to crack some eggs. But the eggs he cracked were, by and large, in the borderlands.

He wasn’t the only one. Consider President Obama. He was also a Democrat. He was called the nation’s “Deporter-in-Chief.” Why? Because he set all sorts of records for deporting more people than any other president. Again, however, he didn’t expand and harshly enforce America’s immigration police state across the country, like Trump has.

Recall another Democratic president — Bill Clinton. He sent troops to the border too, just like Trump. The Marines shot and killed an 18-year-old American citizen named Esquivel Hernández, Jr., while he was taking care of goats on a ranch in the borderlands. And just like the immigration-control enforcers in Minneapolis today, U.S. immigration enforcers back then said that they were just acting in “self-defense” when they shot and killed him. Of course, they got away with it, especially since there were no cell-phone cameras back then.

Or recall Arizona Pastor Steven Anderson. He refused to roll down his window at an immigration checkpoint. They broke his window, pulled him out of this car, and beat him up.

But the rest of America didn’t care. There were no massive protests in Minneapolis or anywhere else over that incident. That’s because it occurred in the borderlands. Cracking eggs down there has always been considered normal and acceptable.

There were also no big protests in the borderlands themselves against their immigration police-state thuggery and brutality. That’s because people living along the border have become accustomed to it. The immigration police state has become normalized. Many people in the borderlands are even grateful that they live in a “free” society.

Thus, the problem with Biden was not that he was “open borders” but that he failed to expand the immigration police state beyond the borderlands and then harshly enforce it— at least in the way that Trump is doing.

Trump understands that to achieve immigration-control “success,” it’s necessary to crack eggs, not just in the borderlands but all across America. That’s where he is logical and consistent, unlike many of his fellow border-control advocates, including libertarian ones. He understands that to succeed in achieving the goal of “securing the border,” they have to cleanse America of all the illegals who have succeeded in circumventing the police state in the borderlands, including, of course, Trump’s very own Berlin Wall.

There are some border-control advocates who are now going soft and saying, “Oh well, what’s wrong with leaving the illegals in Minneapolis and other cities, especially those who have been here 5-10 years or longer”?

But Trump knows what is wrong with that “soft-on-crime” mindset. If you leave those illegals alone, then that operates as an incentive for immigrants to continue entering the U.S. illegally in the hopes of circumventing the borderlands police state and successfully ending up in Minneapolis or some other U.S. city, where they are then left alone.

Thus, Trump gets it: To truly “secure the border,” the feds have to cleanse America entirely of all illegal immigrants. The message has to be sent: Do not enter because we will find you and deport you wherever you are.

So what if immigration agents, including the military, are grabbing people off the streets to check their papers? So what if they are barging into people’s homes without search warrants? So what if they are beating up immigrants or even killing them. So what if immigrants are being sent to squalid deportation camps. So what if some of them are dying there. So what if children are being separated from parents. So what if they are being deported to El Salvador for incarceration and torture. So what if they are being deported to home countries where they are going to die of starvation or illness. To make an omelet, eggs have to be cracked. We can’t let constitutional technicalities or moral considerations interfere with what has to be done to “secure the border.” Anyway, they are just foreigners. Who cares? Why should anyone care?

But what about Good and Pretti? They’re just regular Americans, not tattooed illegal immigrants. What’s the justification for killing them?

Are you kidding me? Border-control advocates just don’t get it. Trump and his immigration-control goons clearly do get it. Good and Pretti were interfering with the goal of cleansing America of those dirty illegals who are destroying our country and preventing America from being great again. They and other protestors were actually using whistles to warn illegals that ICE was in the area. Their massive demonstrations interfere with finding enough illegals to meet arrest quotas and deportation quotas.

In other words, those protestors in Minneapolis are not exercising their rights of free speech and peaceable assembly. They are “obstructing justice” by preventing immigration-control goons from doing their jobs. If the protestors want to protest, they can do it in the privacy of their homes, not out on the public streets where they interfere with immigration law-enforcement officers who are patriotically just doing their job.

President Trump is doing America, including libertarians, a great service. He is showing all of us that to make an immigration omelet, it is necessary to crack some eggs, not only along the border but also all across America. That leaves border-control advocates, including libertarians, in an interesting position: Do they continue supporting a nationwide police state to enforce America’s socialist immigration-control system, or do they finally come around to the only position that is consistent with the principles of morality, religion, harmony, free markets, free enterprise, private property, limited government, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — a system of genuine open borders, as I detail more fully in my new book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer.