They've said public safety is job 1. Who else would they deport first? Why would they hand the democrats a bunch of images of kitted-up ICE dudes ripping families apart? What purpose does that serve?

Because it's the easiest way to remove a large number of folks. Perhaps the only way. Again, the dangerous ones have made themselves scarce. The ones with arrest warrants are concealing themselves from the authorities (else the warrants would be served by the local LEOs); the ones that are actual national security threats as well (borrowing your formulation, the worst PR catastrophe for the Dems would have been a national security event perpetrated by an illegal alien whose location they knew).

The population that you can remove, if you want to make a show of enforcement, are the ones that aren't criminals or national security threats. The ones who have low priority removal orders, because they're ordinary people with families, and so there hasn't been (until this election cycle) any real reason to prioritize them for removal.

But it's all good. Bundle them up and fly them back. Yes, yes, yes you're going to tell me that there's a statute that says You Can't Do That On Television.

It's not a YCDTOT thing (man, I loved that show). Other countries have borders, too. If the country won't accept the person proposed to be removed, they won't let them in. You can't remove someone without a place to remove them.

These arguments always end up in the place: Oh, well. There's nothing to be done, so let's throw up our hands and accept the present situation. Or just offer them all citizenship and be done with it.

Not at all. You could, if you wanted, throw everyone out of the country that is here illegally. It would cost north of a trillion dollars, cause a lot of human misery, and end up with those Abuelitas and broken-up families all over the nightly news.

It's not that there's nothing to be done - it's that there's nothing easy to be done that's big enough to make a major dent in the population that's here. So when someone claims that there's an easy way to make a big dent (like Trump is doing, and Miller would like you to believe), it's probably inaccurate.