Federal law enforcement under President Trump is engaged in dangerous political theater, with high-profile arrests of non-citizen students, workers and parents set up to score political points more than to protect national security.

It is not impossible for the United States to have a humane immigration system focused on public safety that provides for the growth of the nation and local communities. I’ve seen those possibilities through my work in military intelligence, counterterrorism, homeland defense and cyberoperations and as the chief of staff at U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement during the Biden administration.

Border security and interior immigration are linked but separate challenges. In towns within the United States, there is an effective way to do interior immigration enforcement and protect our national security without undue emphasis on undocumented immigrants who do not have criminal convictions.

Right now, the government is burning thousands of federal law enforcement hours on operations that privilege political objectives over public safety, attacking constitutional protections like due process and free speech as they do. If this administration doesn’t correct course, it will lock the country into a future of weaker enforcement, lowered trust in public safety officials and greater risk to Americans’ collective safety.

This is not the first administration to fail at this task. President Barack Obama leaned on broken enforcement policies, using deportation as a deterrent while unsuccessfully trying to reform the broader immigration enterprise. President Trump’s first administration implemented zero-tolerance policies that separated families, sought to end protections for children who arrived in this country as minors, prioritized draconian deterrence measures and relied on emergency public health restrictions, like Title 42. The Biden White House then continued to use emergency public health restrictions as a crutch to address a problem that needed a much more expansive solution.

As each successive administration relied more on executive power to manage the system, Congress did not pass structured, long-term immigration reform.