If the Goal Is Enforcement, Obama Already Wrote the Playbook

By Joe Broadmeadow

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For twenty years I carried a badge. For a good stretch of those years, I worked narcotics, a federal task force, and with ICE agents, although it was before Immigration and Customs merged. I know what enforcing the law looks like. I also know what it looks like when force stops serving the law and starts serving a show.

We are watching the second kind now.

Set aside, for a moment, the shouting. Start with the premise almost everyone claims to share: that people with no legal right to remain in this country should be removed.

Fine. If that is the goal, then the honest question is not whether to enforce, but how—and on that question we already have a controlled experiment, run by a Democratic president no less.

Barack Obama removed roughly three million people over eight years. Immigrant-rights advocates called him the “deporter-in-chief,” and they meant it as an insult. His administration formally removed more noncitizens than George W. Bush and Clinton combined.

In FY2013 alone, the figure approached 438,000. Whatever else you want to say about the man, he did not shy from enforcement.

But look closely at what that concession actually demonstrates.

It shows that you can post serious removal numbers without turning American neighborhoods into raid zones. Obama’s ICE prioritized people with criminal records. It moved through immigration courts. It did not, as a matter of routine, pull citizens out of car lines, stage armed sweeps outside elementary schools, or fill detention centers past capacity with people whose only offense was crossing a line on a map.

Now the pushback, and I’ll make it for my critics so they don’t have to: some of those numbers reflected border turnbacks reclassified as formal removals, and interior enforcement was lighter than the headline totals suggest.

True enough.

The current operation has inverted every one of those choices. Interior enforcement has more than doubled. Street arrests are up roughly elevenfold. Release rates for people with no criminal conviction have collapsed from about a third to single digits.

By the government’s own accounting, something like three of every four people booked into ICE custody last fiscal year had no criminal record beyond an immigration or traffic offense. Detention sits at an all-time high. Deaths in custody have been documented.

American citizens have been detained by mistake. That alone should give us pause.

And here is the part that should stop anyone who claims to care about results: for all that cruelty, the second-term removal totals have not clearly outrun the lawful model.

You do not achieve effective law enforcement by breaking more laws.

I spent a career learning a lesson every good cop eventually learns. The measure of enforcement is not how frightening it looks. It is whether it holds up—in court, in the community, and in the mirror.

A raid that nets a grandmother with a decade-old traffic ticket is not tougher than a targeted removal of a violent offender. It is lazier and more dangerous because it teaches an entire population that the law is not a rule but a mood.

There is nothing soft about doing this correctly. Obama proved you can remove people at scale, prioritize the ones who actually threaten public safety, and still respect the difference between a warrant and a whim.

That is not weakness. That is competence—the thing brutality is usually deployed to hide.

If the goal is genuinely to deport those who should not be here, then the model is not spectacle, masked agents, and body counts. The model is the boring, lawful, effective machinery that a president, whom his own supporters called the deporter-in-chief, built and ran.

We don’t need to invent a better way. We need to stop pretending cruelty is the same thing as strength.

Joe Broadmeadow retired as a captain from the East Providence Police Department after twenty years of service, having commanded the Investigative Services Division and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force with the FBI and DEA. Since founding JEBWizard Creative Media in 2019, he has written crime fiction, the Josh Williams and Hawk Bennett series, and co-authored true crime, YA fantasy, and literary fiction, bringing an investigator’s evidentiary eye to both his novels and his opinion writing. A 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, a grandfather, and a Cumberland High School graduate with deep roots in the town, he attended Providence College and lives in Rhode Island, or wherever his travels take him.