In the minds of many US Americans, the public immigration enforcement debate seems largely reduced to two positions: mass deportation of everyone without legal status, or no enforcement at all. But this isn’t reality. Poll after poll show that the vast majority of Americans want a mix of reasonable enforcement for legitimately dangerous people and legal pathways consistent with American values of family, community, and hard work. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, but turning what people want into workable policy frameworks that transcend entrenched positions is tough.
That’s why I was excited to see the American Immigration Council’s new vision for interior enforcement, the part of the enforcement system that has become so dangerously and indiscriminately mobilized under this administration. Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick joined me to explain how this new framework provides a different way into the conversation, built around four principles drawn from years of direct legal practice that together describe what an enforcement system would have to deliver to be credible, humane, and broadly defensible.
This conversation continues a series I’ve been working through about what a positive vision for immigration enforcement could actually look like. An earlier conversation with Andrea Flores made the case that targeted, specific alternatives are what this political moment requires. Claire Trickler-McNulty and I talked alternatives to mass detention and traced what we know and don’t know about how non-detention approaches actually function. AIC’s latest framework takes both threads further with a clearly thought-out vision designed to reach beyond the beltway.
Nayna described what the framework set out to do.
“What we’re offering here as a path forward is in fact a vision for an enforcement system... In order to advance a vision that is more humane, more credible, more effective, we have to be able to deliver that in the context of an enforcement system that still works.”
See the original event announcement here.
The Four Principles of a Functioning Immigration Enforcement System
Each principle identifies a specific failure mode in how enforcement currently operates and proposes a concrete standard against which any legislative alternative could be tested.
Compliance
For a government to expect people to follow the rules, those rules have to be followable. Yet for the vast majority of undocumented people in the United States, no legal pathway to status exists. And for people who did enter the country legally or do have legal status, holding onto that status has become a chaotic game of chance. For example, the registry, the closest Congress has come to a rolling pathway for longtime residents, requires arrival before 1972 and has not been updated since 1986. DACA stopped enrolling applicants who arrived after 2007. The question “why didn’t they just get in line?” assumes a line that does not exist for most people.
Aaron described what a compliance-oriented system would look like in practice. When an immigration officer encounters someone with no criminal record who has been in the country long enough to build community ties, the first response should be a structured path toward compliance—not escalating immediately to the most punitive option of immediate deportation. The system currently resembles giving someone a parking ticket with no payment method. We cannot demand compliance if we never provide the means for it. Nayna named the misconception at the root of the problem.
“One of the biggest misconceptions for many Americans is that undocumented immigrants can just find a way to get right with the law when that’s not the case. We’ve never offered that.”
Safety
The safety section takes on the administration’s most persistent justification for mass enforcement. ICE press releases describe the people it arrests as “murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and drug traffickers,” a framing that makes every enforcement action look like a public safety intervention. My analysis of Delaney Hall shows the rhetoric does not match the reality of who is actually being detained. However, as I’ve talked to people inside and outside the immigrant rights movement, public safety remains a legitimate concern. As one family member of an undocumented immigrant told me recently, “we care about public safety, too!” AIC’s framework incorporates public safety—real public safety—as principle of enforcement, and does so in a way that reflects the reality of what the data says about low rates of criminality among immigrants.
Aaron described a case that shows precisely how misplaced fears and propaganda about “illegal criminal aliens” clashes with reality. He cited a case of a Cuban man with a green card had been convicted of marijuana smuggling in the 1980s, served his sentence, and spent the following four decades living and working legally in the United States. After the Trump administration negotiated deportation agreements that enabled Cubans to be sent through Mexico, he was arrested, held in ICE detention, and died in custody. He had not committed any offense in forty years. The administration’s press release described him as a criminal and an alien.
“He had a green card and in the eighties he was a drug smuggler. He brought in marijuana on boats into Florida, he got caught and he served time in jail. And he got his life together. From the nineteen eighties, the nineteen nineties, the two thousands, the twenty tens, he’s living a blameless life. He’s working legally. Yes, he has a final order of removal. His last criminal offense had occurred almost 40 years earlier. His last criminal offense occurred before I was even born.”
Proportionality
One problem with framing immigration (a largely civil matter) through the lens of criminal enforcement is that the public often assumes that the system already functions like a normal legal system. It does not. The criminal legal system is itself deeply unequal and applies its rules with well-documented unfairness. But it does contain structural mechanisms designed for proportionality. Graduated sentencing, statutes of limitations on prosecution, and judicial discretion to weigh individual circumstances are all built into the framework, even when applied inconsistently or unjustly. None of that architecture exists in immigration enforcement. Nayna described what a one-consequence system produces in practice.
“The only consequence that we offer is one that really does deprive most people of their full livelihood and liberty. And that is a medieval system. It is a one size fits all punishment. And now Americans are seeing what that means when they see their nanny, their restaurant owner, their Uber driver, their favorite neighbor being dragged out of their homes and handcuffed and separated from their families.”
The AIC framework proposes a statute of limitations on immigration consequences tied to old offenses, amendments to provisions that treat low-level violations identically to serious ones, and restored discretion for immigration judges to weigh mitigating circumstances before ordering deportation. The criminal legal system already imposes standard statutes of limitations on prosecution for most offenses. The immigration system has none, which is why we are deporting veterans with marijuana convictions from forty years ago.
Accountability
The accountability section addresses what happens when enforcement agencies operate without meaningful oversight. Accountability failures in immigration enforcement predate this administration, let’s be clear about that. But the current administration has made them worse by dismantling what weak oversight systems existed and encouraging ICE officers to mask up, hide their names, and drag people out of houses. As Shawn VanDiver told me recently, “that’s the kind of thing the Taliban does.”
Nayna named the contradiction at the center of any enforcement system that demands compliance while exempting itself from oversight.
“You can’t expect people to follow the rules of a system if the people enforcing them are breaking the rules. And in order to ensure that doesn’t happen, you can’t have weak systems of accountability, which is what we’ve had long before the Trump administration.”
Under the current administration, enforcement has produced masked agents operating without identifying information, deportations of U.S. citizens and legal residents, and detention deaths under inadequate conditions. The framework treats these as structural failures that require structural solutions.
Language and Framing
The terms compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability are doing important rhetoric work here. Most immigration policy language functions as a signal that either marks the speaker as aligned with a particular side or triggers alarm in the other direction. These four terms have the potential to open up the possibility of nuance and discussion rather than shut it down. Each of these terms name something that most people, regardless of where they stand on immigration, already expect from a functioning government. That gives the vocabulary a political portability and creativity that is sorely lacking.
To illustrate this, near the end of my conversation with Nayna and Aaron, I flagged my own initial reaction to the word “compliance.” The word can carry a draconian undertone, as though it is an instruction directed at immigrants to comply or face the consequences. But this is not how the framework uses that term. A compliance-oriented system places the demand on the system, not just the person. You cannot require compliance with a standard the system has made impossible to reach. That shifts the policy question from “why didn’t they get legal?” to “did we ever give them a path to legal status?”
I think you’ll find the conversation with Nayna and Aaron informative and even hopeful. In addition to discussing the content of the report, I asked them about their professional backgrounds and what knowledge and skills go into their everyday work. It’s important to pull back the curtain on what it takes to do this work, and most of it is, as Nanya and Aaron both said, lots of reading, lots of attention to detail, and lots of real-world experience with these systems.
My thanks to Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick for their time, and to everyone who joined us live.
Five Things You Can Do Right Now
Read the framework at whatever depth works for you. The full report is at the American Immigration Council. If you want the four principles summarized on a single page you can share with a colleague, start with the one-page overview. If you want the argument and core proposals without wading into policy detail, the executive summary is the right entry point. If you want to know what specific statutory changes the framework recommends and why, read the full pillar-by-pillar breakdown. You can also watch the video below, which features Ashley DeAzevedo from American Families United.
Use the language. If you write, teach, speak, or have any platform where you talk about immigration, start using compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability as your analytical frame. Test it out in a conversation or a piece of writing and pay attention to the reactions you get. I’d be curious to hear what you find. Leave a comment or reply to this post.
Follow Nayna and Aaron online. Aaron (@ReichlinMelnick on X, @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social on Bluesky) follows the legal and legislative mechanics of immigration policy day to day and explains them in terms that don’t require a law degree. Nayna (@nayna_gupta) translates policy changes in real time for practitioners and advocates.
Sign up for updates from the American Immigration Council. They publish research, analysis, and policy breakdowns continuously. americanimmigrationcouncil.org.
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