Migration hits lowest level since the Great Depression; administration expands arrests of people with no criminal record.

…(cont) That is the machine the numbers describe: arrests up, migration down, and the difference between the two is who gets caught in it. On September 1, the same week, the Washington Examiner reported the immigration courts had pushed the asylum denial rate to an all-time high — 94% of claims, roughly 13,500 people in June alone, denied by judges moving through the docket at what the paper itself called an expeditious rate. Fast and merciless are not opposites in this system; they are the same instruction.

Then, this week, an appeals court found the one place the administration overreached on paper: it upheld an injunction blocking the IRS from handing taxpayer data to ICE, ruling the policy violated tax confidentiality law. That is not a rescue. It is a single court closing a single door while the arrest numbers keep climbing through every other one.

Run the sequence in order: migration collapses to a scale not seen since the Depression, arrests of people with no record climb past 50,000 a month, denials hit an all-time high, and a court has to step in just to keep the IRS out of the manhunt. This was not an accident; it is the answer anyway — the country is shrinking and the response is more force, not less. The kids in these families are the ones who absorb it, at the bus stop, in the check-in office, on the day the letter says denied. Somewhere there is a budget line for all this enforcement. It is not a shortage of money. It is a choice about who the money is for.