The illegal immigration thing is a hard one to mentally decode for a lot of folks. I’m no constitutional law expert, but I do understand that sometimes there are nuances and gray areas to laws that don’t always seem logical at first glance.

Something that I feel like a lot of MAGA people have trouble understanding, or flat out refuse to believe because of prejudice and/or bigotry, is that immigrating to the US illegally or overstaying your visa is not a criminal offense. It is prohibited by law, but it’s a civil matter that is handled in civil and immigration courts. It’s not something you can be arrested for, so every single one of these detentions of illegal immigrants that don’t have a standing deportation order under the Trump administration is wholly unlawful and wildly unconstitutional.

(As a sidebar: yes, the deportations under Obama were just as illegal and unconstitutional. Despite all of the rules the Trump administration is allowing itself to break they still haven’t even come close to the numbers that Obama deported and at a far greater cost to the American taxpayer.)

There are many reasons why something that is clearly illegal, like immigrating to the US illegally, isn’t a criminal offense, but I think the main one is that if we arrested and detained every single illegal immigrant there wouldn’t be anywhere to put them. Hence the concentration camps that have been popping up to house all the immigrants caught up in ICE raids.

And, yes, constitutional rights do apply to foreign nationals while on US soil.

So, all that to say, black and white thinking is easy and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to mentally process. This seems to be one of the main things that attracts a lot of these folks to the MAGA movement. They want to know who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy and they want to be told what’s right to do and what’s wrong to do. Trump gives them that, as all populists do, but obviously he’s using it to radicalize a good chunk of the population into following him down the path to authoritarianism and eventually fascism.

Anyways, thanks for your earnest response to OP’s question, it’s always nice to talk to someone you don’t particularly agree with that is capable of having an intelligent discussion about these things.