If there's one thing that distinguishes Democrats from Republicans, it's got to be their habit of illegally erasing records of their times in office. It wasn't just Sandy Berger getting off scot-free after stealing archives to destroy, stuffing them down his pants . It wasn't just the BleachBit and hammers to destroy email records from an illegal unsecured private server from President Obama's secretary of state.

The Obama administration deleted hundreds of speeches and statements on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) website just hours before President Donald Trump officially entered office, according to research released Tuesday.

A collection of 190 transcripts of speeches on ICE's website was deleted on Jan. 18 and late in the evening on Jan. 19, 2017, according to research conducted by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for government transparency. Statements made by high-ranking ICE officials regarding controversial immigration topics such as sanctuary cities, E-Verify, treatment of detainees, and other issues were included in the reported deletions.

That stands in striking contrast to the carefully preserved Twitter accounts of White House officials such as Samantha Power and Ben Rhodes. Or look at this well preserved archive of flattering Obama pictures from his days in the White House. They know how to be meticulous about saving records when they want to be. And rest assured that if there was anything that needed to be gone to avoid embarrassment, well, let's just say they have connections at Twitter.

This document destruction of archived public statements, done just a day or before Trump entered office in 2017, raises the question about just what the Obama White House wanted to hide from both Trump and the American public.

I don't have access to these public statements any more than anyone else does, but I do recall writing editorials about some of them. I recall that many did pay lip service to the growing border crisis. Many did cite the crisis as a crisis. Many did condemn the damage to rule of law that illegal immigration could do. Some may have criticized sanctuary cities.

It would take a long time to reconstruct the archive, based on the news trail, but it might be the only way. Because what it undoubtedly shows is that the Obama administration knew there was a crisis and took similar steps, perhaps even harsher steps (remember: they were the ones who caged children, not President Trump), to attempt to stop the great migration wave. Leftist open-borders advocates often yelled that he was "the deporter in chief," a title Obama did not like, but which certainly meant there was some kind of law enforcement effort going on.

And with Obama a soft socialist more than a little obsessed with winning the Latino vote, it's obvious his presidential deeds didn't quite match his political claims. There was a crisis, law enforcement tried to stop some of it, and some officials tried to give warning. That was so important for Obama to hide from the public that some of his minions actually erased records. No history for you.

It's illegal. It's unfair to the public. It's clearly a bid to give another kick to the Trump administration, enabling Democrats to paint any effort from Trump to enforce U.S. immigration law as the work of a heartless scoundrel, something Obama would never dream of being, as the narrative goes.

It ought to be prosecuted. If the public is ever to retain any right to know, a failed presidency trying to cover up its record is a good place to start. Let Trump's lawmen create some new records in the wake of this destruction of old ones.