Every week there’s a new headline: ICE arrested a “non-criminal.” The reporter almost never tells you what that word is covering for. In most of these cases, it’s an illegal alien with a final order of removal who stood in front of an immigration judge, or never bothered to show up at all, and then ignored what the judge decided.

I spent 24 years in federal immigration enforcement and served as acting chief of ICE’s National Fugitive Operations Program. The “non-criminal” label is the most misleading phrase in the immigration debate, and the people who use it know it.

Start with the law itself. The Immigration and Nationality Act is one of the thickest statutes Congress has ever passed. Look at the grounds that make someone removable from this country, and you’ll find the criminal ones are a small slice: section 212(a)(2) on the inadmissibility side and section 237(a)(2) on the deportability side. Nearly everything else is non-criminal. Entering without inspection. Overstaying a visa. Visa fraud. Falsely claiming to be a citizen. Violating the terms of the visa you came in on.

That’s by design. Removal is a civil process. Congress never wrote an immigration law that only applies to criminals, and no president of either party has ever enforced one. The Obama administration removed 438,421 people in........

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