It took some time, but I've been able to find something, as a conservative, that I agree with President Donald Trump about.
After three months of his presidency, I believe Trump's actions related to the southern border have been an overwhelming success. Trump has secured the border, even without the legislation that then-President Joe Biden claimed he needed in order to accomplish the same thing.
I write a lot about Trump's shortcomings, and they are vast, so I try my hardest to praise him when he fixes problems instead of causing them. That's what he's trying to do with immigration, though I do take issue with how he handles deportations by ignoring due process.
When it comes to immigration, Trump has quickly reversed the shortcomings of the Biden administration. Southwest border encounters have fallen significantly from December, the last full month of the Biden presidency, to just roughly 11,000 in each of February and March.
While numbers were steadily declining over the last several months of Biden's term, they had held steady for the remainder of his presidency. Even with Biden administration's executive actions in June, there wasn't another massive decline until Trump took office.
However, another part is policy changes that have shown Biden's lie that he couldn't do anything about the border crisis without Congress. While it is true that Trump killed a bipartisan border bill in 2024 while he was running for reelection, it is unclear that legislation would have accomplished anything on the border.
In fact, the legislation would have restricted the president's authority to seal the border, only permitting such action when border encounters reached certain thresholds well above what they are now. It also did absolutely nothing to address the key issue driving the border crisis, which is processing false asylum claims.
Trump has addressed this by heavily restricting asylum, under what he has called an "invasion" at the southern border. Trump has also ramped up military presence at the border, increased authority for rapid deportations and is bringing back the "Remain in Mexico" policy from his first term, which forced migrants pending asylum claims to remain in Mexico until their court date.
Regardless, as it turns out, we didn't need Congress on the issue of border security, we just needed a president willing to act. The complete slashing of border encounters is evidence enough of that.
Between the deterrence of Trump's well-known stances on immigration and the actual actions he's taken at the border - all without Congress passing legislation on the topic - it is clear that the Biden administration was completely capable of controlling the border all along.
Even so, there is plenty that Trump is doing wrong with deportations.
Trump is attempting to skirt the law to enact his mass deportations, either by loosely interpreting legislation meant for wartime or by limiting due process for deportees. These attempts are in pursuit of a just cause, beginning by expelling violent criminals from the United States, but are running afoul of the courts.
Between skimping on due process and loosely interpreting ancient legislation to achieve his deportation promises, Trump is stuck fighting with the courts rather than actually accomplishing the deportations he promised. This is where Congress needs to act to help Trump, yet lawmakers remain absent.
In these fights, the Trump administration is causing unnecessary legal battles that distract from the positive changes it has made. Addressing the millions of illegal immigrants in America is important, but doing so does not require the administration to limit due process to achieve it.
Not only do these fights result in policies being shot down, but they also give the president's opponents, both the Democrats and the news media, an easy target to distract Americans from the good being done at the border.
The best thing the Trump administration could do to address the millions of illegal immigrants in the country pending asylum claims is to hire more immigration judges. The backlog of 3.6 million immigration cases needs to be addressed, and currently, we lack the number of judges required to make a dent in that figure.
Both eliminating the backlog and boosting the efficiency of removal processes would allow for the administration to deport more people without skirting due process. Trump should look for legal means to address the number of illegal immigrants in the country, rather than slow down the process by flaunting the courts.
America needs a secure border, both so that we know who is entering our country and to ensure fairness to people who follow the rules. We need a handle on the border first in order to address legal immigration. The Trump administration's efforts to secure the border move toward that goal, but hasty mass deportation attempts undermine his efforts.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.