The White House lawn was festooned for the past week with mug shots of supposed illegal immigrant criminals the administration has arrested or deported. It formed a backdrop for "Border Czar" Tom Homan's threats from the briefing room warning that every illegal immigrant within our borders needs to register immediately with the Department of Homeland Security and carry documentation at all times. If they fail to comply, he advised, that itself will be treated as a criminal offense.

Homan is, to put it politely, winging it. This isn't Russia yet. The "czar" cannot simply declare something to be a crime. Congress decides what is and what is not a federal offense and Congress has decreed that merely being in the country without documentation is not a crime. An estimated 45 percent of undocumented aliens currently in the U.S. did not enter the country by sneaking across the border. They entered legally and overstayed.

At the 100-day mark, the administration is touting its immigration onslaught as both a policy and a political victory, and many commentators (and even many Democrats) are granting them that. But neither is true.

The showy mug shots on the lawn and Homan's snarling threats are a tell; the administration just hasn't been able to find those thousands of criminal aliens they claimed were rampaging throughout the nation. Like so many other themes Trump campaigned on, the plague of immigrant crime was a fiction.

This is not to suggest that there are no legitimate arguments against immigration. Trump could have made a case that immigration was placing an unfair burden on border states, that immigrants were driving down wages, that illegal entrants were "jumping the line" or that excessive percentages of foreign-born people erode a nation's identity. But that's not the case Trump made. He and his willing enablers in the GOP have always smeared immigrants as rapists, drug dealers and murderers.

Numerous records from law enforcement agencies confirm that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less, not more, likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Between 1980, when immigrants comprised 6.2 percent of the U.S. population, and 2022, when the percentage of immigrants had more than doubled to 13.9 percent, the crime rate declined. States with higher percentages of immigrants showed no greater incidence of crime than states with lower numbers according to data from the FBI and the Census Bureau. Alex Nowrasteh of the CATO Institute studied homicide convictions in Texas between 2013 and 2022 and found that legal immigrants were the least likely to be guilty, followed by illegal immigrants. Native-born Americans were the most often convicted of murder.

But demagogues need scapegoats and Trump relentlessly, grossly vilified immigrants as invaders, criminals, and threats to national security. Trump promised in his inaugural address that, "We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came."

They are deporting thousands of people, but how many of them are dangerous? I wonder even about the mug shots on the White House lawn. How many of those are actually guilty? Three-quarters of the Venezuelan immigrants spirited off to the Salvadoran gulag had no criminal record, according to CBS News. That doesn't make them Boy Scouts necessarily, but this crowd lies incessantly, so we cannot trust their word.

Andry Hernandez Romero is a 31-year-old gay makeup artist. He has no criminal record, but he does have tattoos. He was bundled off to El Salvador without due process, where he is being held in a prison known for human rights abuses and in the hands of a regime that prides itself on its cruelty. Well, two regimes, really, if you count the United States.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report that fewer than 50 percent of those arrested between January 20 and February 2 have criminal convictions. During Trump 1.0, 60 percent of those the administration labeled as criminal aliens had committed only minor crimes like immigration offenses or traffic violations.

So the immigration crackdown can in no way be called a success. It has depressed tourism, made a mockery of the rule of law and tarnished our global reputation, and for what? Most of those removed were probably no threat to anyone, but they were working, paying taxes, caring for children and going to church. Sure, a few were doubtless criminals. But as one of the judges in the many legal challenges put it, "How can we know?"

As for the political win, where is it? The most vicious of Trump's supporters may delight in this theater of thuggishness, but most voters are dismayed or worse. Fifty-two percent say he has "gone too far" with deportations, while 53 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration generally. Majorities oppose sending undocumented immigrants "suspected of being members of a criminal group" to El Salvador without a hearing.

Border apprehensions are way down. If that were all, Trump's immigration policies would probably receive broad approval. Instead, Trump's shameful, reckless and lawless approach is creating a long overdue backlash. At some point, newly disabused voters may be ready to learn that Trump's claims about other topics — tariffs, NATO, vaccines, DOGE cuts — were also lies.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.