Since President Trump took office, ICE has arrested at least 20 undocumented activists. As that figure continues to rise, advocates across the country increasingly worry they’re being targeted because of their activism — not their immigration status.

According to Vice News, the Department of Homeland Security appears to be targeting foreign nationals who are engaging in political activity in the United States while being here illegally.

Marcos Baltazar, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who sits on the board of the Alabama-based immigrants’ rights group Adelante, was arrested during a routine check-in on Thursday. He and his 18-year-old son are being held at the Etowah County Detention Center, a facility plagued by allegations of human rights abuses.

Though Adelante has been hesitant to accuse ICE of detaining Baltazar because of his advocacy work, he’s not the first high-profile activist the agency has arrested. The next day, Francisco Silva, a volunteer with the Chicago-based Organized Communities Against Deportations, was also arrested during a bond review Friday even though an immigration judge released him on bond in 2015. And in May, immigration officers arrested an undocumented college student just three days after he read a poem criticizing the agency.

Up until now, these foreign nationals have utilized the U.S. political system to advance their interests in the U.S. and actually viewed that activism as a sort of protection from any enforcement action on their illegal status. Lawmen would be afraid of bad press, so the logic went, if they arrested a politically vocal illegal immigrant, which of course created an incentive to being vocal. Self-interest is as applicable to illegal immigrants seeking protection as it is to capitalists trying to turn a profit through free market mechanisms. And there was some truth to this view as illegal immigrants staged church sanctuary showdowns to avoid deportation and then escaped any enforcement action that other illegal immigrants didn't.

But there's something astonishingly wrong about foreign nationals engaging in political activity in the U.S. to advance their own interests, given that the U.S. has laws against foreign interference in its internal affairs and rightly busts nationals from nations such as China, Russia and Iran for violating them. Those people know the laws and engage in their nefarious activities in secret. Illegals, by contrast, make themselves and their lawbreaking as shamelessly public as possible. So much for 'living in the shadows.' Less shadow, more protection.

A secondary bad effect of this is that their activism actually acts as an incentive to encourages more illegal immigration. After all, if you are a would-be illegal migrant in a country that's developed the criminal networks to profit from illegal immigration and you see open activism advocating your interests in the states, the first thing you're going to think is not that illegals should be legalized, but that illegal immigration itself is a zero-risk proposition. It's so poorly enforced that even illegal immigrants can partake in the political rights of U.S. citizens in their own country no less.

A third problem with this scenario is that you're also going to think that living in opposition to U.S. laws, engaging in rage against the U.S. -- instead of just learning to assimilate and adjust to U.S. laws -- is the best way to benefit from life in the U.S. That's a heckuva bad way to get started on life in America, and it's self-contradictory to boot. Immigrants historically have been grateful for their new lives in the states, not screeching ingrates breaking U.S. laws and then screaming about 'injustice.'

Here's one last thing: Engaging in open political activity as a foreigner is expressly against the law in countries such as Mexico, Central American nations, and pretty much every country that dispatches illegal immigrants to the U.S.

I don't have any polls to show for it, but I would bet that illegals loudly using the U.S. political system to advance their own interests over those of American citizens disgust Americans at least as much as the one verified thing that U.S. citizens are known to object to most: Illegals' overuse of U.S. social welfare benefits. Politics is a spoils system, particularly on the left, and taking goodies from the government is a function of political muscle. The muscle itself propelling this is just as offensive as the consumption.

So far from being a bad thing, as VICE is reporting, enforcement action on vocal illegal immigrants sounds like a strikingly useful thing, a sign of assertiveness from law enforcement which under the Trump administration sounds as though it's no longer intimidated by potential bad press coverage and lawsuits from sending home foreigners who've come to the U.S. illegally. Sending one vocal activist back would likely have the deterrent effect of discouraging tens of thousands would-be illegal migrants from coming to the U.S. as these activists touch down back in their home countries and will also likely encourage others here illegally to return to their home countries and choose to apply to reside here legally instead.

A muscular immigration policy that shuts down the shameless foreign activist networks utilizing the political system that's reserved for American citizens alone might just create the chain reaction impact every bit as effective as a border wall. It's about time these vocal activist foreigners using the U.S system get shut down. Then maybe U.S. citizens can have a voice in what goes on in their own country.