[cauch]

They are not. They want illegal migrants to be processed and deported if they are illegal. What they are complaining about is the fact that current, people are "marked" as illegal (or fail to be regularised) for arbitrary reasons and the process is not fair. Imagine if you were doing everything correctly as much as you can and still being treated as a thief? It does not give you a fair chance. You can be marked as illegal just because of quotas or because you had bad luck and the officials did not read your file, or because you did not do something that no one told you you should do despite the fact that you ask, or because you followed the proper process and ask what you should do and the person you asked decided to arrested you, ...

All of this happens in western countries (maybe not all in US). Immigration processes are just really badly designed. Look it up, it is crazy: from some countries, the only way to be considered as "legal" require you to be "illegal" during to the time of the admin process. Even if you pretend that it just means they are just not accepted, it does not make any sense: in this case, why the process does not say "no, sorry, from this country, no one can be legal". But the process is "you want to be legal, good, come to my country and walk this way. Oh, by the way, now that you are here, you are technically illegal, let me arrest you".

The reason is that the victim of the bad design cannot complain because people say "they are illegal anyway, so their voice does not count". For this reason, some citizen noticed that the system is just stupid, and just ask that for each illegal person, we give them a chance to demonstrate if they are really not fit to be regularized. But right now, the whole system is just a waste of money, and some idiots are trying to defend it just because they are too lazy to consider fairness and justice.

edit: if you want more concrete information on why the immigration system is unfair, badly design and waste your money, you can watch John Oliver on youtube about "legal immigration"

[ExoticPearTree]

My point is that all the people being hunted and deported by ICE are the people that crossed the border illegally. And my question was related to that: why is it unfair to deport all the people that basically broke the law as the first thing they did when they stepped onto US soil?

[cauch]

You say that illegals are people who broke the laws, but that's a big simplification.

For example, the law says that people who have close family living in US and being US citizen are allowed to apply to become US citizen themselves. To do so, they need to come to the US to apply and be present to answer the questions when their file is progressing. But this process is slow and can take years before they even start reviewing the case due to delays. So, for these people, 1) in few year, the administration will say "oh, yes, we concluded that you perfectly have the right to be here", 2) the administration requires them to stay close, so, to live in the city they are applying. And right now, they are now illegals.

In other terms, the only way for them to not be illegal is to be illegal for a while. And once they have been illegal for a while, they may became legal, which is a way for the administration to say "well, turns out that you had the right to be here all along".

On top of that, some people who tried their best to follow all the process still become illegals just because the administration was too slow or did not inform them of the correct procedure (or inform them of the incorrect procedure). It is simply unfair of you they say "these illegals are bad people not following the rules" when in fact they really want to follow the rules but somehow the rules break and someone says "oh, too bad, you did absolutely nothing wrong, but now people can point the finger at you and treat you as if you are a bad person".

Sure, this is not the case for all the illegals. But this is also a huge incentive for illegals to not even bother to try to become legals: why jumps to all the hoops and spend energy if anyway even when you should be granted the nationality, you are still considered as illegal and take the same risks. The system is broken and people don't see the point of following an unfair process.