To hear Democrats like Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen tell it, immigration enforcement began in 2025 with Tom Homan and Donald Trump’s second term. Their rhetoric paints deportations as an unprecedented moral crisis.
But that narrative collapses under even modest historical scrutiny. If today’s deportation numbers seem “draconian,” then what exactly should we call the Obama years?
Barack Obama didn’t earn the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief” by accident. Prior to the current year, the last highest number of deportations occurred in Fiscal Year 2012 during the Obama Administration, when 409,849 individuals were removed from the United States, according to official U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) statistics.
To be sure, the Trump administration has claimed it is on pace to remove 600,000 individuals in 2025, more than double the number removed by the Biden administration last year.
Yet Obama incurred the wrath of his allies in the immigrant-rights community at the time. The National Council of La Raza — now UnidosUS — publicly branded him “Deporter-in-Chief” to protest what they saw as an overly harsh, enforcement-first approach.
By 2014, immigrant activists were chaining themselves to the White House fence. Among the arrested protesters was Gustavo Torres, head of CASA de Maryland—a group that reliably aligns with Democratic officeholders today. Back then, he was leading protests demanding Obama “end our suffering” by halting deportations.
During his second term, Obama did reduce deportations, a retreat that may well have fueled the backlash driving Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy. He softened his policies with executive actions, most notably DACA and his 2014 immigration order, which aimed to make enforcement “more humane.” But even those actions were tacit admissions of how aggressive his first-term deportation policy had been.
As enforcement waned and border crossings rose, many voters concluded that Washington was no longer serious about controlling illegal immigration. Trump’s blunt “build the wall” message resonated because Obama’s second-term policies had come to symbolize drift and weakness.
Prior Democrats had once believed in the rule of law. In 1996, Bill Clinton proudly declared, “We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws.” He went on to boast about a “50 percent increase in border patrol agents” and “record numbers of deportations.” At the time, that was mainstream Democratic policy. Enforcing immigration law was viewed as sound governance, not moral failure.
Today, that orientation has vanished. The party of Clinton — and early Obama — has given way to activists who regard enforcement as illegitimate. To them, the presence of ICE officers is a provocation. Deportation orders are optional. Cities and states now compete to see who can be the most “defiant” toward federal law.
The irony is impossible to miss. Chicago’s mayor, presiding over one of the nation’s highest violent crime rates, declares his city a “sanctuary” from federal law enforcement. The Illinois governor vows to resist federal immigration orders, even as his state pleads for more federal funds to house and feed the influx of migrants overwhelming Chicago.
This isn’t moral courage. It’s political theater.
The last time governors attempted to nullify federal law, it wasn’t related to immigration. It was about civil rights. In the 1950s, Southern officials claimed their states’ property was “off-limits” to federal authorities enforcing school desegregation. They lost that argument decisively. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution remains unchanged in its meaning: federal law takes precedence over conflicting state and local laws.
Nevertheless, the Mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois are replaying those same failed tactics. Their resistance to lawful immigration enforcement is simply another form of nullification.
In a better world, Democrats and Republicans alike would agree that immigration laws be enforced — fairly but firmly — and that cities plagued by crime would welcome federal help instead of defying it. Local law enforcement, for example, would be freed to cooperate with Federal authorities.
But that’s not the world we live in. The Left now suffers from selective amnesia, forgetting the Obama Administration deportations and pretending that now law enforcement itself is somehow un-American.
It’s a remarkable act of political forgetfulness — and one the American public would do well to remember.
Direct Line News is a Maryland-based free-access publication committed to the Republican reform tradition.
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