OPINION: Nancy Dahlstrom fails the test of political leadership

True political leadership requires accurately describing the challenges facing our state and nation and proposing realistic solutions. Nancy Dahlstrom, a Republican running for Alaska’s sole Congressional seat, has already failed this test. In an interview broadcast on Alaska News Nightly on July 16, Ms. Dahlstrom stated that, if elected, her “first priority” representing Alaska in Congress would be to get “the border wall closed” and force “16 million-plus people who are in the country illegally” (an inflated number) to “go back to where they came from and (then) they need to come back into the country legally.” This is an unworkable nonsolution to an inaccurately described problem.

Congress has not passed border security reform because of opposition from former president Donald Trump. A group of Republican and Democratic senators devoted months of effort in 2023 and early 2024 to crafting bipartisan border security legislation that would have provided thousands of additional U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel, thousands of additional asylum officers and 100 additional immigration judges; created a process to limit the number of asylum applications; raised the legal standards for claiming asylum; and dramatically increased the capacity of immigration detention facilities. Republican support for this legislation collapsed, however, after Trump opposed it. Trump preferred to rail against the “broken” immigration system rather than see it change under a Democratic administration.

Ms. Dahlstrom’s proposal to deport millions of people further confirms she is unwilling to level with Alaska voters. Identifying and arresting millions of undocumented people in the interior of our country would require creation of a vast police state costing untold billions of dollars. It would necessarily involve extensive racial profiling. It would require an exponential increase in detention facilities. In fiscal year 2024 alone, the federal government spent $3.4 billion just detaining a daily average of 41,500 noncitizens.

DHS estimates that there are approximately 11 million undocumented people in the United States, and that nearly 80% of those individuals entered the country prior to 2010. In short, most of these people have been here a long time. I am a longtime Alaska immigration attorney. I have met many of these individuals. They are often married to U.S. citizens. They often have children who are U.S. citizens. Many have lived productively in Alaska for decades. Arresting and deporting these individuals would devastate their families, harm Alaska communities and damage Alaska’s economy.

Ms. Dahlstrom tells Alaska voters that undocumented individuals should “go back to where they came from” and then “enter the country legally.” Undocumented individuals cannot legally re-enter the country after leaving, however, because there is an automatic statutory 10-year bar on re-entry even if the individual otherwise qualifies for an available and current visa. An undocumented person could conceivably return to her country of origin, apply for a visa at the United States embassy, have that visa denied based on the 10-year bar on re-entry, and then apply for a waiver on the basis of hardship to her United States citizen spouse, lack of criminal record, etc. But the grant of a discretionary waiver is unpredictable and, whether favorable or not, often involves years of delay waiting in the foreign country for the decision.

Alaska’s longtime Congressman Don Young understood that immigration law is a highly complex subject and not reducible to demagogic slogans. For example, I worked with Congressman Young to resolve the immigration status of a young mother, Rebecca Trimble, who had been brought to the United States without documentation from Mexico as a few-day-old infant by members of a Christian church who never legally adopted her. When she contacted me, Rebecca and her husband — an Army officer and Public Health Service dentist — were living in Bethel and parenting their small children. Rebecca learned she was not a United States citizen after applying for a Real ID driver’s license. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services—having been advised of her undocumented status—ordered her to leave the country within 33 days or face deportation. Under the policy advocated by Ms. Dahlstrom, Rebecca would have been separated from her husband and young children and deported to Mexico, where she had not lived since she was an infant and did not speak the language. Don Young thought otherwise and successfully sponsored a private bill to grant her legal status.

Rebecca’s long ordeal is just one example of why a program of mass deportations makes no sense on practical, moral, or economic grounds. Immigration policy and immigration law is complicated stuff. But the tools of a political demagogue are oversimplification and dehumanization of a target group. Donald Trump has fueled his political career by demonizing immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers who are — reprising a Nazi theme — ”poisoning the blood of our country.” Ms. Dahlstrom has signed onto this program for her own perceived short-term political gain. Alaskans and this country deserve better from our political leaders.

Margaret Stock is an immigration attorney practicing in Anchorage. She is also a Lt. Colonel (retired) in the U.S. Army. She has taught national security and constitutional law at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She served on the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on Immigration Policy. She is the author of “Immigration Law & the Military” (2022), now in its third edition. She has testified before Congress on national security and immigration matters on multiple occasions. In 2013 she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for “finding solutions to complex immigration issues faced by military personnel and contributing to policy debates about the role of a healthy immigration system in ensuring national security.”

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