So yesterday, the Trump team got it right — they deported 17 known gang members back to El Salvador using basic, no-frills, by-the-book immigration enforcement. No legal gymnastics. No invoking dusty wartime laws. Just using the tools we already have in the toolbox — the same tools every administration has had at its disposal for decades.

And guess what? It worked. Smoothly. Quietly. Legally. No drama. No headlines screaming about constitutional overreach. Just justice served and threats removed from our streets. You know, the way it should be.

Now compare that to what they tried just a few weeks ago, and you’ll see how unnecessary all the legal acrobatics really were.

Remember the whole Alien Enemies Act debacle? It was designed to deal with enemy nationals during a declared war. Not gangbangers. Not illegal immigrants. Certainly not Venezuelan street thugs. But the Trump administration dusted it off anyway and tried to use it as a shortcut for deportations.

Predictably, it backfired. A federal judge blocked it. An appeals court backed the judge. And now the administration is trying to get the Supreme Court to clean up the mess. All that effort, all that time, and all that legal drama — for what?

It was clunky and, frankly, it was just plain dumb.

Meanwhile, right under their noses, the actual solution was sitting there the whole time: enforce immigration law the way it was written. No need for emergency wartime proclamations. No need to provoke lawsuits and media firestorms. Just identify known criminals, apply the law, and get them out. Simple.

It’s the difference between fixing a leaky faucet with a wrench versus using a blowtorch to weld the pipes shut.

Look, Washington loves a spectacle. They’d rather turn every routine task into a political theater production. But this really isn’t complicated. If someone is here illegally and they’re involved in violent crime, we don’t need a constitutional crisis — we need a competent official with a clipboard and a boarding pass.

The American people aren’t begging for miracles. We’re just asking for common sense and basic law and order. And for once, we actually saw what that looks like — clean, legal, and grounded in reality. No detours through wartime laws. No midnight court battles.

Let’s hope this wasn’t just a fluke. Because if there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s this: when you simply enforce the laws already on the books, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.