Folks, this one made me sit down and pour a second cup of coffee before I started typing. The Trump administration is planning the first large-scale removal flight of Afghan nationals, sending dozens of people back to a country run by the Taliban. You can read the report yourself right here, and I'd encourage you to, because the media is already spinning itself into knots over it.

Now let me tell you what I keep hearing from the usual crowd. "Pam, how can we send people back to the Taliban?" I answer that the same way I'd answer a fourth grader who only read half the question on the test. Who let the Taliban back in charge in the first place? It wasn't the deportations. Afghanistan was lost in the withdrawal, and the mess that came after is how all of this started. Nobody wants to talk about that part at the church potluck.

This administration is actually enforcing removal orders, and this flight is part of that. After years of watching deportation orders stack up like ungraded homework, forgive me for being glad somebody is finally grading the pile.

I taught school for 34 years, and I'll let you in on something. Rules don't work if they only apply when convenient. Every parent and every teacher in America knows this in their bones. When a judge says somebody must go and nobody makes them go, the next hundred people learn the order was just noise. Enforcement is what turns paper into law.

Of course the activists are already out there with their candlelight vigils and their handmade signs. Same folks, a lot of them, who spent years insisting that every single person who arrived here had a right to stay, no questions asked, no paperwork required. They cry for the people being removed and never once shed a tear for the folks in our own towns dealing with the strain. I've stopped pretending that's a serious argument. It's theater, and badly staged theater at that.

And yes, I know the line coming next: "some of these Afghans helped us." If that's true for a particular person, there is a legal process for it, and it exists precisely for this situation. Individual cases with real claims should be handled with care, and I've never said otherwise. But a blanket excuse for everybody on a plane is how we ended up with a border mess in the first place. We are allowed to sort people one case at a time. That's what courts are FOR.

I'll say a quiet prayer for the innocent people of Afghanistan tonight, because there are plenty of them, and they deserve better than the Taliban. But America's first duty is to Americans, and a country that can't or won't remove people a judge has ordered removed is just a waiting room with a flag out front. I want more for my grandchildren than a waiting room.

The fine men and women carrying out these flights have one of the hardest jobs in government, and they do it while half the press corps calls them villains. Not on my watch. Somebody has to say thank you, so I'll say it right here: thank you.

Call your representative, say the pledge, and hold the line. Talk soon, folks.