Barack Obama, in his two terms as president, was assigned a moniker he never embraced – "deporter in chief."

Donald Trump, now in his second term as president, openly craves surpassing Obama in the deportation of undocumented immigrants in America.

Trump is now putting up significant numbers, enough to potentially rival Obama's record for deportations. But everyone I spoke to for this series of columns – comparing and contrasting how Obama and Trump approach immigration enforcement – told me that's where the similarities end.

And now, with American voters tuned in on immigration enforcement in the interior of our country, a look back at how we got here might help us understand how we reached this point of conflict and confrontation.

Some kind of federal enforcement of America's immigration laws is necessary, with Border Patrol agents guarding our boundaries and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents working in the country's interior.

They have a job to do. And it should be targeted. But what I learned while reporting for this column is that any president, Obama or Trump, can quickly lose control of that targeting.

Experts told me Obama, like Trump, promised to deport "the worst of the worst," undocumented immigrants with serious criminal histories. What we got with Obama, which might not linger in the memory of many Americans, was far broader than that.

A key difference: Obama didn't make a big show of it. Trump craves a cruel spectacle in deportations.

American voters have been repulsed by images of federal immigration agents rampaging through American cities, randomly grabbing people based on the color of their skin, while taunting and threatening activists who protest these abuses.

Two activists in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot to death by immigration agents in January. Millions of people have seen videos of those deaths, which visibly contradict accounts delivered by Trump and his top aids.

That has given rise to a renewed call for reform, which hinges on a looming partial government shutdown.

That's why I wrote this series of columns about immigration enforcement and........

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