Barkley’s right. Trump’s lost Americans on immigration.

The pleasure of March Madness, the NCAA’s males’s and girls’s basketball tournaments, makes for an unlikely backdrop for viral commentary on the explosive challenge of immigration.

Yet that second got here from Hall of Fame basketball participant and CBS analyst Charles Barkley on March 29.

CBS had featured Connecticut senior Alex Karaban, whose mother and father immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe. According to the NCAAfinal yr 264 worldwide college students — 15% of all athletes — competed within the males’s and girls’s basketball tournaments.

After the function on Karaban, the always-opinionated Barkley said: “I want to be very careful with my words right now. Because this is a really touchy subject for me. I love that kid and his family, but the way some of these other immigrants are getting treated in our country right now is a travesty and a disgrace. I think there’s a difference between amazing immigrants and criminal immigrants. And I think what’s going on in our country — what we’re doing to some of these amazing immigrants — is really unfortunate and it’s really sad. … Immigrants built this country, and we you should admire and respect them.”

Unsurprisingly, immigration hawks who help President Donald Trump’s insurance policies torched Barkley for his feedback.

We see Barkley’s feedback in a different way. Not solely did his feedback replicate polling — Americans usually consider the Trump administration has gone too far — however additionally they present how sports activities is usually a car for significant dialogue and alter about nationwide points.

Barkley was talking concerning the significance of immigrants to our nation’s historical past and current, simply as he was chatting with our nationwide character, or at the least what it may very well be.

Historically, immigrants have seen the worst and better of our nationwide character. The worst is manifest in virulent bigotry and hatred, and racist, anti-immigration legal guidelines courting again to the Naturalization Act of 1790which reserved citizenship for “free white persons” of fine character.

Immigrants have additionally been recipients of our greatest selves. They have been welcomed into communities the place they acquired encouragement and help.

In making the excellence between superb immigrants and legal immigrants, Barkley stated one thing rhetorically that the Trump administration has did not do politically and in coverage. Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs to be targeted on immigrants who’ve dedicated violent crimes or pose a menace.

But that is not who ICE is usually arresting. An inner Department of Homeland Security doc obtained by CBS News reveals that lower than 14% of the practically 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE throughout Trump’s first yr again in workplace had expenses or convictions for violent offenses.

Masked ICE brokers, with their brutal therapy of harmless folks, together with damaging properties and dragging girls out of automobiles, are treating all immigrants as a substitute as violent criminals, and sometimes holding them in overcrowded and unsanitary detention facilities.

These immigrants really feel much more uncovered for the reason that Trump administration reversed a 2011 coverage designating faculties, church buildings and hospitals as protected, a coverage change magnified in Texas as Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered hospitals to ask sufferers for his or her citizenship standing.

Immigrants are shifting into the shadows. As Express-News workers author Scott Huddleston not too long ago reported, space faculty districts have seen a declining variety of rising bilingual college students. Children have stopped going to school or have been withdrawn due to deportations or concern of deportation.

Also, according to the Texas Tribunehospitals throughout Texas reported fewer visits from undocumented sufferers every month in 2025 after they started asking about citizenship standing in November 2024. The aren’t the “bad men” Trump vowed to focus on.

Sending good folks into hiding for concern of merciless and indiscriminate federal insurance policies additionally sends our higher selves into hiding. Perhaps these higher selves will step ahead in November.