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The justification for the high costs will be similarly analogous. For the death penalty, you want to execute as few innocent people as possible. In principle, no innocent people would ever be executed. In real world practice, a legal death penalties always puts innocent people do death in rare circumstances (governments are incompetent, Juries composed of Everymen, etc).
Likewise, the real world of deportations are far more complex than a simply wishing that the correct people are deported in the correct way. Laws are frequently squishy. A few million cases a year are clear, and people are quickly deported (roughly 10k per day). The others have to be argued. Removing barriers before understanding why they are there is an understandable impulse, but a dubious policy.
Granted, in both circumstances activists are incentivized to run up costs. That seems like more a feature than a bug. The US government is set up to protect people from the government.
I don't think that you have a right not to be deported. Being in the US for non citizens is at the absolute discretion of the USG.
Absolutely. Assuming you are not a citizen, you can be deported. Not germane to the point I'm trying to make.
I'm responding to OP's claim that its "obvious" deportations can be done much more rapidly and cheaply, making an analogy to the death penalty.
Im pointing to the system we have, the tradeoffs made, the reasons behind them, and the traditions created. I'm arguing that the costs are inherently high because of our Constitution, laws, and history. The USG is free to pursue mass deportations, but rarely has, and I find that telling. Oddly enough, the last few administrations to campaign on it don't do it, and those that campaign against it end up deporting even more people. Strange
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/#:~:text=The%20unauthorized%20immigrant%20population%20in,the%20most%20recent%20year%20available.
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This proves too much. Without any counterbalancing principle, like the government should also protect people from crime, activists would be justified in placing the standard for any conviction arbitrarily high.
There is the explicit principle of providing for the general welfare of citizens to counterbalance, but this has always been a justification of power. Perhaps I should have been clearer: the US was unique at the time for explicitly protecting people from the government. Fully half of the bill of rights is dedicated to - stated uncharitably - "protecting criminals". The whole system created new tradeoffs. There are no stongment to carry out easy solutions to problems. On the other hand, its harder for governmental caprice to crush people.
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