And as for the children who never had a choice to make...?

Children never had choices to make when born into an alcoholic family, or in a country in a war torn third world country, and yet they still suffer. That's just sort of how life is. The children suffer based on the mistakes of their parents.

We have limited resources, and we have to decide how to partition these resources.

To enforce the law and to prevent these injustices to happen in the future. How are you causing more injustice? That's sort of like saying "Why spend money to evict squatters in houses they don't own? They have children, and it costs money to evict them."

Those that were born here are citizens, and get the choice like every other citizen - move to be with their families, or stay here alone. The fact that they're children is immaterial.

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

That's absolutely incorrect. Cops will and can enforce laws arbitrarily. If you're an illegal immigrant, you just have less rope to play with.

If you get bored, do a search of police arrest records on how many people are charged with just "resisting arrest".

Or you can always apply that timeless advice, "only do one illegal thing at once. For instance, either drive without a license, or have a tail light out. Not both".

Immigrants already are driving metaphorically without a license.

At this point I'm wondering if we actually disagree, since you seem to be agreeing that deportation of families that include citizen children would qualify as ruthless.

Depends. There are several instances. Trump has gradually softened his stance on illegal immigration, basically saying now that if you keep your nose clean, you probably won't get deported.

If however the family contain family members who are violent criminals or have known gang ties? How is deporting them "ruthless"? It's self-preservation.

Whether or not Trump currently says he's going to do it is besides the point. That is a super common and easily disposed of objection from conservatives. If you don't think Trump is going to propose something, a pledge not to do it should be even less objectionable to Republicans.

But... but... think of their children and families! Aren't they human beings too?/s

But then it comes down to a value judgement, and all laws/rules have edge cases. Should you take a generally good law, point to the edge cases, and then abolish the law?

> If you don't think Trump is going to propose something, a pledge not to do it should be even less objectionable to Republicans.

Not from a negotiating perspective. By keeping options in your pocket you're able to wrangle concessions from people.

Have I not demonstrated that I'm willing to listen to you and address arguments you bring up respectfully? Is there something I said that made you feel like your best way forward was to play message board nerd games?

There are no strawman arguments here. San Francisco has a sanctuary city policy, blocking immigration attempts to deport people. Deporting people is not a horrible deplorable thing, as you're making it out to be. It's a fact of border enforcement.

You can make any number of arguments about families and suffering, but the fact of the matter is that people chose to immigrate illegally and raise families when they knew what the consequences could be, and now they're trying to weasel out of the consequences.