By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | December 02, 2025
Turns out that the left does understand the dangers inherent in a big central government amassing lots of information on private citizens. But, weirdly, only when it comes to protecting noncitizens who are here illegally.
A story in Politico tells the tale of a nationwide license plate recognition system billed “as a program to root out criminal activity on local streets, with its cameras already installed in more than 6,000 municipalities nationally.”
It goes on to point out that many blue cities and towns are cancelling their contracts with the program out of fear that “the cameras themselves pose the bigger danger for their cities, offering federal law enforcement a back door for tracking residents’ movements.”
It’s not federal law enforcement, per se, that has these liberal cities and towns worried, but the Trump administration. Cambridge, Mass., for example, voted to pause the program just months after approving it because its “unease deepened … amid the Trump administration’s intensifying immigration crackdown.”
Politico, naturally, doesn’t bother to point out that the administration’s crackdown isn’t on “immigration.” It’s on illegal immigration. And it’s not a “crackdown.” Trump is simply enforcing existing immigration laws that previous administrations ignored, and which involve removing those who entered the country illegally.
But to liberals, this license plate tracking system is a Big Government bridge too far. And they are willing to sacrifice whatever public safety benefits it has to offer actual American citizens to make sure that, as Cambridge Vice Mayor Marc McGovern put it, “we’re taking their [i.e., illegal immigrants’] concerns and their fears into account.”
Yes, heaven forbid we fail to do everything in our power to make sure those who snuck across the border illegally – rather than follow the law – feel safe and warm.
These are the same people, mind you, who were freaking out that America didn’t have a “contact tracing system” in place during the COVID-19 outbreak so the government could track and confine American citizens.
The same people who want the government to censor content they don’t like, to deny people jobs and opportunity for wrong-think, to dictate what we can and can’t drive, how we cook our food, what kind of lightbulbs we see by. They are the ones who want the federal government freed of its constitutional constraints.
These are people, in other words, who never seem to have a problem with a big, central government monitoring, tracking, or controlling American citizens.
For them to suddenly recoil because they worry that this power could be abused would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic.
So, news flash for liberals (and for those “national conservatives” who want to enlist big government to achieve their “conservative” ends) out there: Any power handed to the federal government can and will be abused. If not now, then by someone down the road, who will use it to do things you find abhorrent.
That is why the Founders created a system of checks and balances specifically and purposefully designed to limit and constrain federal power.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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