Rich Lowry, syndicated columnist

There is about to be an outbreak of lawfulness in the United States, and Democrats and the press can’t handle it.

President-elect Donald Trump’s talk of “mass deportation” is being treated as a clear and present danger to the American order that blue jurisdictions need to mobilize to stop.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois has vowed, “I am going to do everything that I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.”

Denver mayor Mike Johnston talked of a lurid fantasy where there’d be a “Tiananmen Square moment,” with the Denver police and civilian population confronting federal immigration authorities. He subsequently admitted that invoking a historic massacre wasn’t so apt. He still says he’s willing to go to jail to oppose anything that is “illegal or immoral or un-American.”

How about something that is mandated by law? Deportation is explicitly authorized in federal statute and a legitimate, necessary tool of immigration enforcement.

It is a symptom of how perverse the immigration debate has become that it is treated as the norm to allow millions of people to defy our laws, but it’s a five-alarm fire if an incoming U.S. president vows to get serious about enforcing those same laws. If mass deportation is a hateful notion for Trump’s opponents, maybe the Biden administration shouldn’t have allowed a mass illegal influx. Given the scale of the problem that he is seeking to address, Trump’s rhetoric is appropriately extravagant. It makes sense, though, to think of his impending deportation program as broadly consistent with enforcement as it existed in the decades prior to Biden’s presidency.

As Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies points out, 316,000 aliens were removed or returned in fiscal year 2014 under President Barack Obama before collapsing to 28,000 in fiscal year 2022 under President Biden. It wasn’t until toward the end of his presidency that Obama began to restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Biden set out to kneecap interior enforcement at the outset. He created a host of new rules to protect aliens from enforcement action and defined swathes of cities off limits to ICE.

Clearly with an eye to the election, the administration bumped up removals and returns to more than 200,000 in fiscal year 2024. If Biden could increase deportations several times over without unleashing the immigration gestapo, why can’t Trump also increase them several times over without creating a dystopia?

As a practical matter, there’s a limit to what can be done. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations has only about 6,000 officers. Even with all the political backing in the world, they aren’t going to be able to find and deport the roughly 8 million illegal aliens admitted under Biden.

Realizing this, Trump’s choice as border czar, Tom Homan, says his first priority will be removing criminal aliens and national-security threats.

This is what Trump did the first time around — the majority of arrests in the first administration were of aliens with criminal records or pending charges.

The next logical priority would be to target the 1.3 million aliens who have already been ordered deported but are still in the country. Will Gov. Pritzker also seek to protect “his” undocumented immigrants who are defying explicit court orders?

Trump talks of the military assisting in mass deportations, which his critics assume will involve the 101st going door-to-door in Los Angeles. Actually, the military has already been involved in various forms of logistical support of immigration enforcement. Surely, this will be the nature of its role again.

Despite all the fear-mongering about it, most people know that Trump’s deportation program is a response to a crisis that wasn’t of his making and that the vast majority of people never wanted. In a new CBS News Poll, 57 percent of people say that they support Trump starting a program to deport all illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Unlike Trump’s enemies, the public doesn’t fear enforcement of immigration laws that have been systematically ignored for much too long.

EDITOR’S NOTE : Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.