The government’s immigration record is a pendulum swung by headline: a regularization program promised and then reversed, students recruited and then deported, targets announced and then missed. The backlog grows not because the system is strict but because it is improvised — rules changing faster than cases can be processed.
Enforcement by surprise is not management. People who followed the rules as written find the rules rewritten mid-queue; employers who hired in good faith lose workers overnight; the backlog becomes a waiting room for arbitrary outcomes. Strictness and chaos are not the same thing, and this government keeps delivering the second while promising the first.
The human cost lands on the most vulnerable, exactly as it did when the regularization reversal turned away people who had built lives here. A system that cannot process its own queue has no business adding new surprises to it.
The Point: An immigration system that governs by press conference and enforces by surprise is not tough on anything except the people who trusted it.