At legal crossings, no different than flying into the US. Which, for that matter, is how the vast majority of known terrorists have gotten into the United States -- 100% of the 9/11 terrorists flew into the US.

When there is some sort of equivalency drawn between the Southern and Northern border it is usually founded on absolute nonsense. The Northern border likely sees more smuggling of both people and contraband (e.g. guns) North than the reverse.

But stopping terrorism is not the only purpose of ICE.

Enumerate those other purposes?

Is one of them to privilege a white majority?

Perhaps there's a reason so many call to abolish the institution.

It's in the damn name. Immigration enforcement. We have a legal immigration process in this country, many try to come here illegally. Without a border, you have no country.

Whatever the policy on the books is, we have a pretty clearly different actual policy resulting from the way ICE chooses to enforce the law: brown people who want to live here are treated strictly and with hostility and white people who want to live here are treated on the whole with more leniency.

You still have a border, just like the 50 US states have internal borders with each other. Why haven't they ceased to exist as discrete entities?

Permeable borders abound in nature. Trying to obstruct the natural behavior of migration is as foolish as trying to halt the tides and arguably causes worse economic distortions than it solves.

The Netherlands is better off for having dikes.

Because we're the United States. We're not the United Countries.

The "natural flow of migration"?

Fewer people come here illegally than come here legally and stay illegally.

Most of your "illegal immigrants" are legitimate visitors who overstay their visa.

The legal immigration process has been slowed to a crawl by the current administration[1]. Any claims that they simply wish for people to follow the legal process are entirely misleading, to the point of being reality-muddling propaganda. The administration is making the legal process harder, impossible in some cases[2], and is advocating for the shutdown of many legal avenues, even those that the president's family themselves have used to attain status here[3].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19547565

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/trumps-...

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/nyregion/melania-trumps-p...

Counting by those apprehended is a pretty poor metric. Correlation, blah, blah, blah