I have no sympathy for those who came here illegally and broke the law.

I have every sympathy for those who came here illegally out of desperation because of the horrors and realities in their own countries and didn’t break the law.

I have no sympathy for those whose only purpose for coming here was to take advantage of our generosity.

I have every sympathy for those who were brought here as children by others who broke the law and now face deportation despite having lived here most of their lives.

I have no sympathy for those Americans who traffic in drugs, which aids the cartels and funds our enemies.

I have every sympathy for those who are addicted to drugs.

I have no sympathy for those who ignore the reality of the drug problem being a two-way street as American-made weapons flood Mexico to protect drug traffickers and are used in murdering innocent people.

I have sympathy for those who see the complexities involved in illegal immigration and the human costs of indiscriminate deportation.

Whether you have sympathy or not for any of these groups of people, we have failed as a country. We are unwilling or unable to stop drugs from entering our country, reluctant to face the reality that the drug problem is driven by American demand for drugs and greed, nor have we offered any readily available resource for recovery or treatment other than prison.

And now, when finding a realistic solution demands complex, intelligent analysis to address all aspects of the legal and humanitarian problem, we are abandoning any well-conceived approach and merely casting a wide net regardless of the human cost.

America, for all her faults, both real or imagined, was always a country which had sympathy for the oppressed and downtrodden. Our immigration laws recognized that there were areas where some face such desperate circumstances, which drove them to enter illegally, they deserved consideration or asylum.

But now we are consumed by a false narrative of a wave of dangerous individuals flooding over the border. If such a number of those who came here illegally were mostly criminals and psychotic individuals, we’d be awash in violence. We are not. The reality is that Americans commit the overwhelming majority of criminal acts in the country.

I have no sympathy for those here illegally who commit crimes. Round every single one of them up and send them back. But let’s not lose our ability to empathize with those who faced the choice of risking themselves or their families by staying in a country with little hope, or risking their families on the uniquely American hope of finding a sympathetic people willing to offer them a path to freedom.