Two Conversations, One Messy Topic

There are topics that reveal something about a person's character by how they approach them, not by what they conclude. Immigration enforcement in America right now is one of those topics. It has become so emotionally loaded, so thoroughly captured by tribal politics, that it is genuinely difficult to find people willing to hold a complex thought about it for more than thirty seconds.

I had two conversations recently that stuck with me, not because they resolved anything, but because they each illustrated a different way of being wrong about this.

The first was with a friend who describes himself as a moderate. He thinks the way ICE treats some people is terrible. He also thinks illegal immigration is a real problem that can't be wished away. He was genuinely curious to hear my perspective, open to where it might take him. That kind of intellectual honesty is rarer than it should be, and I appreciated it.

The second was with a Church leader. A man with real experience watching ICE operate in Southern California, and with family members of Mexican heritage who, despite holding legal status, live in fear of what federal enforcement might mean for people they know. He came to the conversation having already decided what I believed. He seemed to assume I was a Trump loyalist who didn't care about human suffering. He wasn't interested in engaging the complexity. Rather, he wanted to register his objection and move on.

What struck me about both conversations was that neither person was wrong about everything. The coworker was right that illegal immigration is a genuine problem. The Church leader was right that ICE has real accountability issues and that human dignity is not optional. But both were operating with incomplete pictures. And that incomplete picture, whether it comes from the left or the right, is ultimately what makes this issue so hard to think about clearly.

Before I go further: I am not a Trump die-hard. I think he is a generally capable president who is doing a genuinely difficult job that most people would fail at, while also carrying serious personal and political flaws that matter and should be named. I don't believe the ends always justify the means. I also don't believe that disapproving of Trump's style or character is the same thing as having a coherent immigration policy. Those are two different conversations, and we keep mixing them up.

This article is my attempt to disentangle them.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Sit With

What Actually Happened Under Biden

Any honest conversation about ICE enforcement has to start here, because the emotional temperature of this debate is largely a reaction to what happened at the border from 2021 to 2024.

According to the Pew Research Center's 2025 analysis, the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States reached 14 million in 2023, the highest level ever recorded. In 2021, when Biden took office, that number was approximately 11 million. That is a meaningful increase of roughly three million people in two years, a pace Pew described as record-setting.

Border encounters the metric used by Customs and Border Protection to track every individual stopped or apprehended at the southern border averaged approximately two million per year from 2021 to 2023, according to the Washington Post's analysis of government data. For context, the yearly average during Trump's first term was roughly one-quarter of that.

Now, it is important to be precise here, as both sides abuse these numbers in different ways. Encounters are not the same as permanent residents. Many people encountered are removed or returned. Many who were allowed in were placed in immigration proceedings, meaning they had legal protections pending court dates, not permanent legal status. The Trump administration's claim that "20 million illegal immigrants" entered under Biden is not supported by data, and responsible commentary should say so.

But the growth was real. A Heritage Foundation analysis estimated that approximately 6.7 million new unauthorized residents entered the country between January 2021 and end of 2023. Pew's more conservative estimate put the net unauthorized population at 14 million by mid-2023, up from 11 million. Either way, it represents the largest increase in the unauthorized immigrant population in recorded history. Anyone who denies that a significant problem developed is not being honest.

Much of the growth was driven by Biden administration policies, particularly parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (the so-called CHNV program) that allowed people to enter the country with temporary protected status rather than going through traditional immigration channels. These were not people sneaking across the desert. They were arriving through programs that critics argued effectively created a backdoor to legal residence. The Biden administration ended those programs in mid-2024, which slowed the growth, but by then, the number was already at a historic peak.

The Obama Comparison Everyone Is Avoiding

Here is the thing that nobody on the left seems willing to engage honestly, and it is perhaps the single most clarifying fact in this entire debate.

Barack Obama deported approximately 3.1 million people over his two terms more than any modern president before him. Immigrant rights groups were so alarmed by his enforcement record that they gave him the nickname "Deporter in Chief." In 2013 alone, his administration deported 432,000 people, the highest single-year total ever recorded.

Trump's first term deportation total was approximately 1.2 million people, significantly less than Obama's eight-year total. Even combining Trump's first term with what his second term has produced so far, his cumulative numbers do not yet approach Obama's. In 2025, the Trump administration carried out roughly 540,000 deportations compared to Obama's 612,000 in 2013 alone, during the first year of his second term.

To be clear: there are real methodological debates here about how deportations are counted, whether border removals and interior removals should be compared the same way, and how Title 42 expulsions are classified. These are legitimate distinctions. But they do not erase the basic fact: the man the left is calling a fascist for deporting people is doing so at a pace that Obama sustained for eight years without anything like the current outrage.

And then there is Tom Homan.

Homan is Trump's Border Czar. He is the face of the current enforcement operation, the man at whom protesters direct their anger, the person whose name has become a symbol of what critics consider cruel and draconian immigration policy. In 2025, he became nationally known for aggressive interior sweeps, threatening to arrest local officials who impede ICE operations, and overseeing enforcement actions that have, at times, detained and transported people with clean records and legal status.

What is less commonly discussed is that, in 2013, Barack Obama appointed Tom Homan to run ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations. The Obama administration awarded him the government's highest civil service honor, the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service, in 2015. The official ICE press release at the time specifically praised his leadership in expanding deportation capacity, increasing detention beds, and managing the surge of unaccompanied children across the Southwest border.

The Washington Post, in 2015, ran a piece about Homan under the headline: "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." That was a compliment.

Trump hired the same man. Obama honored him for doing the same job. Democrats had no significant objection to Homan's work during the Obama years. They are now calling him a Nazi.

I am not saying this to be provocative. I am saying it because if your objection is truly to the tactics of immigration enforcement and not to the fact that a Republican is doing it, then you have some explaining to do about why the same person was your hero nine years ago.

Why the Current Enforcement Looks Different And Why 

Every man has this question written on his heart: do I have what it takes?

Do I have what it takes to lead? To provide? To protect those I love most in the face of danger?

To answer yes requires a lot more than a hunch or hope. It’s not one of those things that a participation trophy solves for you. No amount of motherly love and support can make a man ultimately feel good about himself.

But each man wants to wake up full of confidence to shout, with bass in his voice, a resounding YES to that question: I do have what it takes. And if I don’t now, I dream to someday. I want to prove myself, mostly to myself and to the few men I truly respect and admire.

For a long time, we’ve casted this notion as toxic to the male mind. Society determined that this sort of natural unworthiness was not good for men. It cultivates a negative and nasty competitive culture. It creates winners, yes, but it also creates losers, which is a net negative for the community.

So instead, our parents generation sought to create a world full of winners. There was no special prize for first place, but rather an equal prize for all participants. And somehow, we just all felt like losers. Then, the universal winners head out into the real world where, eventually, the nice act of complete parity had faded away.

Young men who have no certainty that they are capable of handling the challenges that lay ahead on the path of duty, responsibility, and leadership were just expected to step into the breach. And many have simply chosen not to. Others tried, but failed. And a select few of us have embraced life head on and have come out victorious, at least so far.

But what is it that made the difference? How does a man learn that he has what it takes to be a good husband, father, and leader in his workplace or community?

What every man seeks is confidence. It’s what we see in the eyes of a Tom Brady when his team is down 3 and he gets the ball back with 2 minutes left. It’s what we see on the TV screen when the action here is gearing up for his final mission. It’s what we recognize in strong political or business leaders in their power suits making impactful decisions.

But how do we build true, lasting confidence? This was a big question for me as a teenager. I reeked of cockiness in my teen years. I was arrogant, especially on the basketball court, but at least it was somewhat deserved there. What’s worse is the level of arrogance I had off the court. I had proven nothing, achieved next to nothing, and my character still left much to be desired.

I wanted to be a confident, capable, and courageous man someday. I yearned to be the type of man others looked up to, came to for advice, and would choose as their leader. I am blessed that God helped me to become that, but it’s important to dissect how it happened.

I recently heard what I think is now my favorite definition of confidence:

Confidence is your reputation with yourself.

The truth is that you can’t control your reputation with other people. Basing your happiness on how others perceive you is a surefire way to end up unhappy. But you are fully in control of your reputation with yourself - for better or for worse.

You know how many times you snooze in the morning. You know what you do when nobody is watching. You know the good and bad things you do on the internet. You know the status of your prayer life, physical health, screen addiction, and more. You know whether or not you’re a man of your word, somebody who does what they say they are going to do.

And that’s why you can’t fake confidence. You can deceive others about who you really are, but you can’t deceive yourself. If you’re insane enough, maybe you can put up with a big gap between those two for some time, but eventually, it catches up to all of us.

Going back to my teenage years, I can remember the participation trophy mentality. I was consistently affirmed for how wonderful I was, even though I knew deep down inside I was locked down in the chains of sin and misery. On the contrary, I’ve been hated and disowned by many of the people who once loved me, while having an immense inner peace knowing I was living a life based in truth and goodness.

The latter was much more satisfying. My confidence was through the roof. That’s how you become bulletproof. It’s how you unburden yourself from a fear of death, fear of failure, and any other fears that hold you back from reaching your full potential.

The first step in building lasting confidence is to recognize the ways in which you are destroying your reputation with yourself. We will talk about step two next week.

So many people want to find deeper meaning in their lives. We have thousands of self-help gurus who will tell you that there are as many easy ways to find purpose and happiness in daily living.

Speak affirmations to yourself in the mirror.

Stop hanging with people who challenge you to be better; instead, pursue those who accept you as you are.

Believe that you are worthy of good things - that karma will have its day so long as you pursue the vague notion of becoming a “good person”.

These are all ideas that sound nice in theory, feel good in practice, and ultimately lead you right back to where you started. That is, of course, unless you are able to practice them with enough fervor that you can achieve self-delusion and narcissism.

For the rest of us, we have to find another path. I think the direction we need is found in this famous quote from Thomas Edison:

The same is true for purpose. Most people missed it because they think it’s something they can find on an inward-focused journey. They wrongly believe that purpose is something you find or that importance is something you are owed by the world.

This is why you will find young people online with immense levels of entitlement. People will call themselves kings and queens even though they lead no one. We like to crown ourselves with achievement and glory that we have not earned. And who can blame us when we were, as children, given trophies after our losses, which were the same size as those given to the victors?

I’m here to tell you the hard truth today: purpose is not something you find. It is something you create. Perhaps more accurately, it is something you embrace.

For most of us, purpose, fulfillment, and meaning are not some distant far off thing we must discover. Rather, they are constantly in the room with us, waiting us to choose the hard right over the easy wrong.

Do you want to know when I was most empty inside? It’s when I was 15 years old. I was smoking weed nearly every day, sometimes even before school. I quit the basketball team because I had gotten lazy and worse at the game. I was a habitual liar and used the people around me as I pleased.

Do you want to know when I’ve been the most fulfilled? It’s when I’ve been generous with my time and money. It’s when I’ve embraced responsibility in leading my family. It has come from taking ownership of my spiritual, mental, and physical health. It has come from striving for excellence in the workplace and rising in the weight and responsibility I bear on a daily basis.

My emptiness came from a hedonistic life focused exclusively on satisfying my own desires. Deep meaning and purpose have emerged from a life dedicated to serving God and others.

Many young people fail to understand this. They go from place to place looking for what some institution or person has to offer them. They take this mindset to church, to the workplace, and to dating.

Then when they find themselves frustrated and unhappy they blame everyone but the person in the mirror:

“The Church doesn’t care enough about young single people.”

“Corporate life is draining and miserable.”

“The dating world is so hard and unfair and toxic.”

And yet, there is one common denominator in all of this. The world wants you to look inward for purpose and outward for blame. When we are willing to look inward for blame and outward for purpose, things begin to change.

There is one simple question we need to ask to transform our experience in this life. And that is, “how can I help?”

How can I add value here? How can I make someone else’s life and experience better? How can I make this world, this parish, this company, this family, etc., better?

When you pray with this question, your entire perspective begins to change. You no longer show up on Sundays just waiting to receive - from the homily, from the parish offerings, the free donuts. You now show up thinking - I should introduce myself to someone I haven’t seen here before. I should pick up that trash that has fallen to the ground. I should volunteer for that task for which they requested help during announcements.

The same is true in family life. Instead of plopping down on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner, you help wash the dishes. You volunteer to take your cousin to the airport for their early morning flight. You spend a few extra minutes with that great-aunt of yours who speaks somewhat incoherently - not because it pleases you, but because it means a lot to her.

Purpose is not something that is distant and needs to be discovered. It is right in front of you every day. It’s just that it’s dressed in overalls and looks a lot more like hard work than you imagined it would.