Barkley’s right. Trump’s lost Americans on immigration.

The pleasure of March Madness, the NCAA’s males’s and ladies’s basketball tournaments, makes for an unlikely backdrop for viral  commentary on the explosive challenge of immigration.

Yet that second got here from Hall of Fame basketball participant and CBS analyst Charles Barkley on March 29.

CBS had featured Connecticut senior Alex Karaban, whose dad and mom immigrated to the U.S. from Eastern Europe. According to the NCAA, final yr 264 worldwide college students — 15% of all athletes — competed within the males’s and ladies’s basketball tournaments.

After the characteristic on Karaban, the always-opinionated Barkley said: “I want to be very careful with my words right now. Because this is a really touchy subject for me. I love that kid and his family, but the way some of these other immigrants are getting treated in our country right now is a travesty and a disgrace. I think there’s a difference between amazing immigrants and criminal immigrants. And I think what’s going on in our country — what we’re doing to some of these amazing immigrants — is really unfortunate and it’s really sad. … Immigrants built this country, and we should admire and respect them.”

Unsurprisingly, immigration hawks who support President Donald Trump’s policies torched Barkley for his comments.

We see Barkley’s comments differently. Not only did his comments reflect polling — Americans generally believe the Trump administration has gone too far — but they also show how sports can be a vehicle for meaningful discussion and change about national issues. 

Barkley was speaking about the importance of immigrants to our nation’s history and present, just as he was speaking to our national character, or at least what it could be.

Historically, immigrants have seen the worst and best of our national character. The worst is manifest in virulent bigotry and hatred, and racist, anti-immigration laws dating back to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which reserved citizenship for “free white persons” of fine character.

Immigrants have also been recipients of our best selves. They have been welcomed into communities where they received encouragement and support.

In making the distinction between amazing immigrants and criminal immigrants, Barkley did something rhetorically that the Trump administration has failed to do politically and in policy. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be focused on immigrants who have committed violent crimes or pose a threat.

But that’s not whom ICE is often arresting. An internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News shows that less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE during Trump’s first year back in office had charges or convictions for violent offenses.

Instead, masked ICE agents, with their brutal treatment of innocent people, including damaging homes and dragging women out of cars, are treating all immigrants as violent criminals, and often holding them in overcrowded and unsanitary detention centers.

These immigrants feel even more exposed since the Trump administration reversed a 2011 policy designating schools, churches and hospitals as protected, a policy change magnified in Texas as Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered hospitals to ask patients for their citizenship status.

Immigrants are transferring into the shadows. As Express-News workers author Scott Huddleston just lately reported, space faculty districts have seen a declining   variety of emergent bilingual college students. Children have stopped going to school or have been withdrawn due to deportations or concern of deportation.

Also, according to the Texas Tribune, hospitals across Texas reported fewer visits from undocumented patients each month in 2025 after they began asking about citizenship status in November 2024. The aren’t the “unhealthy hombres” Trump vowed to focus on.

Sending good people into hiding for fear of cruel and indiscriminate federal policies also sends our better selves into hiding. Perhaps those better selves will step forward in November.