Why Are the Courts Clogged? Ask the Democrats Who Created the Crisis

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

The mainstream news media have recently published a number of articles about how awful it is that the ICE deportation process is clogging up the nation’s courts.

The one that caught my eye was in Politico, but there are similar pieces elsewhere across the mainstream media. Perhaps the claim that the national press does little other than follow the talking points of the organized Left is true, after all?

“We’ve never seen anything like this!” begins the Politico article, saying that the ICE crackdown on illegal aliens is overwhelming the American court system in unprecedented ways.

And sure, it probably is.

We haven’t had to process hundreds of thousands of gatecrashers before. Yes, processing such numbers of people for deportation is new. Before the current administration, our nation didn’t have tens of millions of gatecrashers all at once before, so yes, now there are a lot to process as we try to remove them.

But the question isn’t, “Can our court system handle all these cases?” That’s just a symptom. The question is, “Why did the last regime bring in tens of millions of illegal aliens for us to have to round up and eject, at immense cost, now?”

As with any political issue, there are multiple parts to it. There’s the current problem and the damage it’s doing, then there’s the variety of solutions that we now must take because the problem is there, and then there’s the reason why the problem began in the first place.

The Left would like us to concentrate on our overwhelmed court system, so that we can all feel sorry for our poor overworked federal judges. The Left wants us to feel sorry for the one or two sad cases they find out of the millions, who can evoke sympathy from us. They want us to feel compassion for the court workers, the poor overworked public defenders and bailiffs and administrative aides who must work around the clock to process all these people through our overloaded courthouses.

But notice what they don’t want us to do.

They don’t want us to remember that all these millions of illegal aliens are costing us a mint in federal, state, and local benefits and other governmental costs. They don’t want us to remember that our big cities paid for hotel rooms and food and transportation for these aliens, or that counties and states have paid for grammar schools and high schools, public transit and healthcare, for millions of people who ought to be another country’s problem. They don’t want us to remember that some of these millions – the good hard-working ones – are doing entry level jobs all across the country, low-paying jobs that American kids and American seniors should be doing, either as entry level jobs for those entering the workforce, or as part time jobs in old age to supplement Social Security and pensions.

There are tons of news stories about how hard it is to find such jobs nowadays, very few acknowledging the fact that a key reason for the problem is that illegal aliens are among the top reasons why such jobs aren’t available for our kids and our parents.

And they certainly don’t want us to remember that – while some of these millions came here on their own, without help, jumping a border they’d heard was undefended – the majority of them were actually invited here, either directly brought here on American transportation, or encouraged by American nonprofits and American politicians during the Obama and Biden regimes, or, once here legally, encouraged to stay by a conscious policy of non-enforcement of the temporary status of their prior permission.

That last one merits some further attention.

The United States has always been very generous. There’s a hurricane in Haiti? Grant their people temporary legal status so they can come here for a while.

There’s a famine in Africa, or communism in South America, or civil war in Asia? Grant their people temporary legal status so they can come here for a while.

The rest of the world lacks our education opportunities? Grant their students temporary legal status so they can study here for a while.

In every one of these cases, they should return to their countries at the end of that temporary program – smarter, healthier, and better prepared as a result.

But recent Democrat regimes haven’t enforced the end dates on these temporary visas, or left them in unexpired temporary status long past any justifiable reason for our nation’s generosity. So we have millions of people who need to leave, but who can honestly say “I came here legally,” and then ask “Why are you throwing me out?” as if they didn’t know from the outset that it was a temporary deal.

The fact is, the Democratic Party has found that it benefits them politically to have millions of illegal aliens in the United States. It gives them an issue that appeals to their bleeding heart members, a dependent class on which to spend government resources, and a political wedge designed to make Republicans look “mean.”

We aren’t supposed to remember the expense to the taxpayer, the abuse of our employment opportunities, the damage to our once-uniform culture, and the overwhelming burden on our social services structure.

But we must remember all these problems – from increased crime to reduced housing availability, from overloaded hospital waiting rooms to a lack of jobs for America’s young people, from an explosion of dangerous drugs to the fundamental unfairness to our legal immigrants who often waited years to do it legally. We must remember these problems, and steel ourselves to the need to be firm in enforcing these rules.

Our nation was famously built as a melting pot, first of primarily British and northern Europeans, then eventually as a cross section of the peoples of the entire world, all of whom assimilated at a manageable rate so that Italians and Irishmen, Mexicans and Germans, Koreans and Nigerians, Cubans and Austrians, Indians and Scots, Russians and American Indians, could all speak the same language, attend the same churches, join the same Little League games and work in the same offices. Such assimilation requires reasonable, manageable numbers, beyond which such peaceful homogenization becomes impossible.

So we must enforce the laws. We must eject the gatecrashers. We must maintain the borders and be more careful with our generosity in the future, now that we see how quickly and intentionally it is abused.

And we must recognize the politicians, the movements, and the organizations, both domestic and foreign, that have intentionally built this nightmare of a situation.

Why are there millions to deport in the first place? Because the Democratic Party brought them here.

Why are the courts clogged? Because the Democratic Party created the crimes. Why are the news articles on these issues so one-sided in opposition to the rule of law? Because the Democratic Party has found that it can accumulate more power and money in a lawless atmosphere – and as their house organ, the mainstream media serve that interest.

So yes, we must stand firm. Keep going to court, keep ejecting the illegals who won’t leave willingly, keep the borders closed so that the problem doesn’t repeat itself in future years.

But even more importantly, we must learn our lesson, and understand which party it is that values a stable, functioning society and the rule of law, and which party it is that opposes such goals.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo