Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which I still keep calling the Border Patrol for some reason) has been coming under fire from liberals over immigration enforcement, though probably not as frequently as ICE. Some recent criticism over the handling of illegal immigration raids on seven food processing companies in Mississippi appears to have set CBP back on their heels a bit. During an interview on State of the Union this weekend, acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan pushed back on the description, saying that people shouldn’t call them “raids.” He prefers the term targeted law enforcement operations. (WaPo)

Acting customs and border protection commissioner Mark Morgan said Sunday that the mass immigration raids at Mississippi workplaces last week were not “raids,” disputing the terminology that has been widely used to describe the operation.

“I think words matter. These aren’t raids. These are targeted law enforcement operations,” Morgan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, meanwhile, said he regretted the timing of the raids, which were carried out just days after a mass shooting in which a gunman killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart. The suspect told authorities that he was targeting “Mexicans,” according to police.

If Commissioner Morgan will pardon me for saying this, it’s a bad idea to cave to that sort of verbal pressure. Once you allow your highly excitable critics to begin defining or altering your language, you are well on the way to losing the debate.

Opponents of ICE and CBP, including all of the open borders enthusiasts, want to use the word “raid” in a pejorative fashion. But that’s complete nonsense. Law enforcement across the board conducts raids on a regular basis and they describe them as such. They are raiding the criminals, not the general public. It’s part of their job and it’s part of CBP’s job. There is no reason to become bashful about using the word and playing games of semantics, nor is there any reason to apologize for it. That’s precisely the reaction that the liberals in the press want.

It’s along the same lines as the videos of the crying children who have been separated from their illegal alien parents. Cable news hosts are shoving those videos in everyone’s faces in an attempt to shame them. See how upset this child is? Don’t you care? This happened again after the Mississippi raids. The fact of the matter is that children are separated from parents who break the law on a daily basis. The responsibility rests on the shoulders of the parents, not law enforcement.

Almost immediately following the Mississippi raids, more than half of the illegal aliens without other criminal complaints against them were released. This was done almost entirely on an empathetic basis, giving priority to those who said they had small children at home. If anything, they erred in being overly compassionate and generous in this regard. Just as with ICE, CBP is not a social services outfit. And the odds of all those hundreds of illegals showing up for their court dates are somewhere between slim and none.