“Pre-Nixon Local Law Enforcement handled most deportations and not the Feds. LLE had several points of deportation:”
It was handled more or less as an administrative process. It wasn’t until Clinton that the whole immigration court due process scheme took off. About half of the 12 million deported during Clintons years were ordered removals.
What Clinton did is just proof that Centralization is usually a bad idea.
Nixon is the one who centralized. It was Chicago’s Mayor Daley who did not want the power taken away from his police department and centralized in DC.
The decentralized Chicago system had more local visibility and thus more accountability. The politician who protected a really bad guy paid for it politically.
Under the current system, the corruption in the ICE offices in Chicago, the bribery and extortion, the political corruption is hid from the public. It takes someone like me with a wife who was an illegal to see the corruption first hand.
Many immigrants (legal and illegal) complain of the corruption and bribes. But they are ignored by both the pro and anti illegal agendas.