Unlike so many of his fellow border-control advocates, including libertarians, he fully and completely understands a critically important point in the immigration debate: that to make an omelet, it is necessary to crack some eggs.

Today, there are advocates of America's socialist system of immigration controls, including many libertarians, who are lamenting and criticizing the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. They are saying that the killings were unjustified. They are saying that to "secure the border," it's just not necessary for immigration-control officials to be killing American citizens.

They just don't get it. But President Trump does get it.

Let's go back to President Biden. What were border-control advocates saying about Biden? They were saying something like this: "Biden has open borders, Jacob! Look at all the illegals that have flooded into America under his watch."

That, of course, was a ridiculous claim, as I kept pointing out. Biden was no more "open borders" than Trump. For example, during his last year in office, Biden and his immigration-control goons deported more than a quarter-million immigrants. He kept the Border Patrol and ICE in existence. He sent U.S. troops to the border. Why, he even added onto Trump's Berlin Wall along the border. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is a very far cry from the libertarian concept of open borders.

As I detail in my new book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer (which I highly recommend!), open borders means the abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol, and all restrictions whatsoever on the free movements of goods, services, and people across our international borders. Think about the open-border system we have domestically between the states. That's what a genuine open-borders system would look like along the U.S.-Mexico border.

So, why did border-control advocates insist on calling Biden "open borders"? It's because Biden was not enforcing America's immigration police state as harshly as Trump has done. Moreover, unlike Trump, he wasn't expanding it nationwide, at least not in a big way. Biden was, by and large, limiting America's immigration police state to the borderlands, where it has existed my entire life.

I grew up on the border. I lived almost half my life there. I saw and experienced the borderlands police state. Highway checkpoints without search warrants. Roving Border Patrol checkpoints without search warrants. Warrantless searches of ranches and farms along or near the border, including our farm along the border where my family lived. Snitches who would report illegal immigrants to the authorities. Violent immigration raids. The prosecution of American citizens who hired, transported, or cared for illegal immigrants. The militarization of the border.