In an editorial, Hudson County GOP Vice Chair of Communications Joshua Sotomayor-Einstein expresses his opinion about why outrage at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is misguided.
The outrage at ICE by the far left ignores many facts about the agitators and illegal immigration.
First is that the leftists leading this crusade are loudly for open US borders and silent regarding the borders of other nations.
These professional protestors, the same ones who supported Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023 (before Israel’s response), defended the Maduro dictatorship, and are now holding vigils for the former Iranian Ayatollah, have never protested the immigration policy of any other nation.
Second, the loony leftists want an amnesty for illegal aliens, even those convicted of assault, rape, and murder.
This is why they are against deportation of even those illegal aliens who have had all the due process they are legally entitled to and have final deportation orders.
They do not care that an illegal alien with a record is more likely to commit another crime in a working-class neighborhood. They do not care that most illegal aliens with a criminal history perpetuate crime on other immigrants (legal and illegal).
Third, the result of the asinine lefty policies, open borders and de facto amnesty, are higher housing costs and lower wages for the working class.
Many illegal aliens commit Social Security fraud for employment but many also work illegally in cash jobs at below minimum wage for employers who are not paying into Social Security, workman’s comp, or unemployment.
Many illegal aliens live in housing that cannot legally house the number of renters in them. This means an unscrupulous landlord can charge illegal aliens more cash total than legal residents.
These facts, conveniently ignored by leftists, show illegal immigration hurts the working class, by taking away jobs and housing.
Penultimately, leftists want everyone to forget the Democrats had the ability, during eight years of Obama and four years of Biden, to pass an amnesty for illegal aliens who have not committed violent crimes.
They pretend Republicans would not have traded actual border security (which Trump proved did not require new legislation) for amnesty, as if Republicans had not attempted this bargain under Reagan.
Leftists and their Democrat enablers would rather use illegal aliens as a tool to get out the vote than reach a compromise and solve the issue. Lastly, leftists want the public to ignore that they are pro-violence.
They claim illegal aliens getting picked up after years of ignoring final deportation orders is violence, yet they pretend the 2020 riots in which dozens were murdered and billions in damage was done to neighborhoods was a “mostly peaceful protest.”
While they are against what they have attempted to redefine violence into, US bi-partisan immigration law, they have also redefined violence not to include actions leftists take which a normal person would recognize as violence – fighting police and assaulting those they disagree with.
The upset at ICE enforcement is artificial and confined to a loud minority of far-left extremists.
The majority of Americans, naturalized citizens and native born, do not want an amnesty for illegal aliens, do not want open borders, do not want illegal aliens with criminal records walking the street, do not want school children used as political pawns, and do not want the harm done by illegal immigration to the American working class.
When Sotomayor-Einstein was announced for the NJGOP Communications position, the press release he wrote cited his advocacy of a “commonsense small government message.” Inconveniently for him, this is not compatible with unapologetic statist bootlicking, so I encourage him to pick one.
By conveniently focusing his ire on a small and inflated cadre of “loony leftists,” Sotomayor-Einstein ignores the reality that ICE brutality has made first-time protestors out of regular, apolitical citizens—who, as it turns out, don’t like it when their neighbor or the line cook from their favorite restaurant gets body slammed on Facebook Live, or when kids on a school bus have to run away scared from people allegedly sworn to protect them. Record protest turnout, flips of historically red districts to blue in special elections, and public polling all demonstrate that his last claim, that the anger is “artificial and confined to a loud minority of far-left extremists,” is obviously false to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. The author in particular, who addressed his last HCV op-ed partially to “centrist Independents” as he sought their vote, is now either choosing not to read that room or incapable of doing so—as up to 2/3 of self-declared independents are now voicing their opposition to ICE’s conduct, per a rigorous Marist poll of n=1,462 from February.
Normal people obviously support the deportation of criminals—but what ICE is doing in many cases, namely, indefinite or prolonged detention in concentration camp-like conditions such as CECOT—is hardly “deportation,” which most people understand to be the removal of someone here in the United States back to their country of origin after being given due process in a court of law. Deletion from an inmate database and enforced disappearance to god-knows-where without the opportunity to contact loved ones or seek legal counsel is not deportation. While the mechanism for third-country deportation has existed in administrative code, this administration is the first to use it to any significant extent (including financing foreign prison systems—hardly America First) and active obfuscation of this critical fact occupies a space between cynicism and lunacy.
Finally, what do the immigration policies of other nations have to do with protests? Last time I checked, we are citizens and taxpayers of the United States and this line of argumentation is Strawmanning 101. If ICE’s actions weren’t so completely indefensible, maybe Greg Bovino could have avoided being sent to a farm upstate.
The illegal immigrants are bad neighbors, but their nonprofit enablers are even worse neighbors, time to admit we are surrounded by many bad neighbors here, many of them are transplants from New York, and we have the government we deserve as a result. Favoring illegal immigrants like they’re the second coming is a total betrayal of the working class that used to be the Democratic base. The public servants who keep their jobs by appealing to these bad neighbors have no shame and no class and shouldn’t show their faces.
It becomes increasingly clear that if the Democrats run a legitimate,open primary campaign and serve up a qualified Presidential candidate in ’28 — they should win going away. What will the party’s message on immigration be; open borders and lawlessness such as what we saw under Biden, or the vicious crackdowns on unsuspecting, hardworking citizens playing out today? Why do we have to live with these extremes…?
Oh god – this oped is packed with name-calling (“loony leftists,” “agitators,” “professional protestors”) and sweeping ideological claims, but noticeably absent are specifics, credible sources, or any serious engagement with actual data. That’s not analysis—it’s dogma.
Let’s start with the biggest disconnect: the repeated implication that ICE is primarily targeting dangerous criminals. That’s simply not what the data shows. In reality, a large share—often a majority—of people in ICE detention have no criminal convictions at all, and only a small fraction have been convicted of violent crimes.
So when the piece frames opposition to ICE tactics as defending “rapists and murderers,” it’s arguing against a caricature, not a reality and it makes the author look stupid.
The same goes for crime more broadly. The op-ed asserts, without evidence, that undocumented immigrants drive crime in working-class communities. But decades of research consistently show the opposite: immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens.
That’s not a partisan talking point—that’s a well-established empirical finding.
On public opinion, the author claims outrage at ICE is limited to a “loud minority.” Again, that’s not borne out by facts. Recent polling shows a majority of Americans disapprove of aggressive deportation tactics and believe enforcement has gone too far, but obviously, Mr. Einstein doesn’t want the reality to interfere with his extreme right-leaning views.
You can support enforcement and still recognize excess—and many Americans clearly do.
What’s most striking, though, is what the op-ed doesn’t do. There’s no discussion of:
how enforcement priorities have shifted toward non-criminals
documented concerns about detention conditions and due process
the economic complexity of immigration (including labor market dependence in key industries)
Instead, it substitutes a familiar rhetorical playbook: label, inflame, generalize, repeat.
If the goal is to persuade, this approach backfires. Serious people can disagree about immigration policy—border security, pathways to citizenship, labor impacts, etc., but that conversation requires specifics, tradeoffs, and evidence.
This isn’t that.
Case in point: even this op-ed about “facts” (ha-ha – seriously funny title considering to piece) ends up focusing almost entirely on cultural grievances and political labeling—not on the actual policies, data, or legislative solutions that would meaningfully address immigration.
This guy is simply contributing to today’s lack of discourse with evidence being optional. If we’re going to solve anything here, we need a lot less name-calling—and a lot more reality. Is this guy capable of that? The jury’s out.