Chris Hayes wants viewers to believe immigration enforcement is becoming an “assault on the idea of America itself." His latest hyper-partisan screed is that when federal agents stop vehicles, question people, or conduct raids while trying to carry out mass deportations, especially if US citizens are swept up in the action, America begins to resemble some half-free foreign state where armed men demand papers.
It is a melodramatic argument, and a dishonest one.
Hayes is describing the ugliness of enforcement as though it were the cause of the problem rather than the consequence of it. The United States did not wake up one morning and capriciously decide to expand interior enforcement and deportation operations. The country is dealing with the accumulated results of years of deliberate Democrat non-enforcement together with bizarre and repeated claims of a secured border, administrative gamesmanship, mass releases, and a border crisis so large that even sympathetic analysts described it as record-setting.
Migration Policy Institute wrote in January 2024 that the southern border had already seen at least 6.3 million migrant encounters since Biden took office, with more than 2.4 million migrants allowed into the country. Official DHS data show nationwide CBP encounters hit 2.77 million in FY 2022 and then climbed higher still in FY 2023.
That’s just the official data. The real-world numbers including the “gottaways" are likely double.
That is the context Hayes desperately wants to erase.
He presents enforcement as the scandal, when the real scandal was letting the problem metastasize until cleanup became unavoidably disruptive. Cleaning up messes is dirty work. It always has been. When the Biden-Harris administration allowed millions of people to enter, remain, or disappear into the interior with inadequate screening and weak consequences, the later effort to reestablish order could never look like a pleasant afternoon of administrative tidying. It will involve mistakes, friction, inconvenience, and scenes that cable hosts light on intellectual honesty can package as sinister montages.
None of that means enforcement is illegitimate or that we are devolving into a dark post-Democrat-enlightenment dystopia.
A sovereign country must be able to distinguish between citizens, legal residents, visa overstays, recent illegal entrants, fugitives from removal orders, and criminal aliens. That is not tyranny. That is statehood. Hayes speaks as though any encounter with immigration enforcement is inherently un-American, but immigration law necessarily requires inspection, verification, detention authority, and removal authority.
The alternative is not some morally elevated version of liberty. The alternative is functionally open borders followed by chaos, increased crime, drugs, depressed blue-collar wages, crowding in health and education ecosystems, public cynicism, institutional breakdown, and eventually an even harsher backlash.
And Hayes’s question, if taken seriously, leads nowhere. What exactly is his proposed alternative? That once millions have entered unlawfully or under dubious claims, the government should shrug and say whoopsie, too complicated now, better let them all stay? That because some enforcement actions will be controversial or even illegal, the law should simply stop existing?
A nation does not lose its character by enforcing its borders. It loses its character when it stops believing it has borders at all.
Of course mistakes can be made. When agents wrongly stop or detain an American citizen, that is a real problem. It should be reviewed, corrected, and where appropriate disciplined. But Hayes is trying to smuggle in a much larger conclusion from what he tries to frame as the moral high ground: because mistakes happen, meaningful enforcement itself is intolerable and therefore expendable. That is absurd. By that standard, every serious area of law enforcement would have to be abolished, because police, prosecutors, and regulators all make mistakes. A free country does not demand perfect execution before it permits the state to perform basic sovereign functions. It demands legal authority, oversight, and correction when errors occur.
Hayes also pretends this moral panic is new. It is not. Under Obama, who immigrant activists famously branded the “deporter in chief," formal removals were extraordinarily high. Migration Policy Institute found that Obama’s first term alone saw more than 3.2 million combined removals and returns, and his second term another 2.1 million.
So where was all this uber self-righteous trembling about the “idea of America" then?
Where was the discovery that immigration enforcement is inherently incompatible with freedom? Where was the smug sermon that questioning, detention, and removal create a country that is “not fully free"? The answer is obvious. Much of the outrage is not about the nature of enforcement. It is about who is doing it, at what scale, and in service of which political coalition.
That does not mean every tactical choice by federal agents is above criticism. It means criticism should be serious. Serious criticism would ask how enforcement can be made more targeted, more professional, and more accountable while still restoring deterrence and upholding the law. Hayes does something easier. He takes the most jarring clips, strips away the preceding policy collapse, and then invites viewers to conclude that the attempt to reverse national dysfunction is itself the real abuse.
No. The abuse came first.
The abuse was years of pretending that sovereignty was xenophobia, that enforcement was cruelty, that parole could be stretched beyond recognition, that local communities should simply absorb the fiscal, civic, health, educational, and security consequences, and that anyone objecting was a moral primitive. That dereliction created the very conditions Hayes now exploits for television.
Freedom of movement is a cherished American liberty. But it has never meant freedom from all internal law enforcement activity, and it certainly has never meant a government must ignore unlawful entry or surrender the ability to remove those with no right to remain. Liberty depends on order, citizenship means something, and borders are not a theatrical prop.
Chris Hayes is free to dislike the sight of enforcement. But he should stop pretending that the people trying to restore the law are the ones who broke it. When his demagoguery drives him to publish cherry-picked clips he can twist to appear noble in his disingenuous outrage, he is clearly unaware that he looks more like an amateur activist than a journalist.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist and lecturer, and former advisor to one of Israel’s Prime Ministers.