I served as chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Joe Biden and spent over a decade working in homeland security. I knew that national security requires focusing on threats — not turning law enforcement into a spectacle. Despite President Trump’s promises to go after the “worst of the worst,” in the past few months the administration has deported a preschooler who is a U.S. citizen and who has stage 4 kidney cancer and his family. A raid on a Hyundai plant where South Korean nationals were rounded up triggered an international incident and threatened future investment in Georgia. Those scenes appear to be part of a deliberate strategy of political theater.