POLITICS: Trump, show your support for legal immigrants at citizenship ceremonies

A suggestion to President Donald Trump: Sometime soon, and well ahead of the midterms, show your support for immigrants who do it the right way by cheering on newly minted Americans at citizenship ceremony or three.

These events, where immigrants tale the Oath of Allegiance, are as American as apple pie and as patriotic as it gets, and a core part of what makes the United States so exceptional: Men and women who believed in the American dream and came here to pursue it — and did it honestly, without breaking the law or jumping the line.

That takes grit and perseverance; it’s a proud moment for these immigrants and their families, and there’s rarely a dry eye in the house.

Showing up to honor a few of these meaningful milestones would reaffirm that the Trump administration is waging war on criminal migrants, not legal immigrants.

As it is, Trump’s immigration stance often seems synonymous with one word: deportations.

ICE is on track to boot out 600,000 illegal migrants by year’s end, atop the 1.6 million who’ve left voluntarily.

That’s a campaign promise kept: The Biden crew let in millions of border-jumpers; Trump won, in no small part, because he swore to secure the borders and get criminal illegals out of US cities.

There’s still plenty of support for that effort; a recent Harvard/Harris poll found a whopping 78% favor getting illegal immigrants who’ve committed crimes out of the country.

But the Department of Homeland Security is casting the net wider, beyond the gang members, rapists and drug-runners that Trump promised to target.

In order to hit pie-in-the-sky quotas that are killing the morale of its agents, Homeland Security has been making arrests at immigration courts and doing other raids that look like random roundups.

That’s resulted in a smattering of stories of cleaning ladies, waitresses and dry cleaners scooped up off the streets.

Immigration hardliners might call that fair play, but most voters don’t like to imagine their kid’s soccer coach or their friendly local landscaper being here one day and gone the next.

Homeland Security’s deportation fervor gives fodder for headlines that paint Team Trump as rabidly anti-immigrant.

It doesn’t help that some on the right demonize legal immigration, arguing that it should be curbed or halted entirely.

Trump needs to give voters reason to see that he can be far kinder than that; otherwise, Republicans risk getting trounced in the midterms, losing their narrow House majority.

The president plainly has no problem with legal immigrants; he married one, after all.

But with so much of the media so hostile, it’s best to show voters that his administration is fighting for all citizens, including those not born here.

By making a huge splash at a few citizenship ceremonies, and celebrating the newest Americans, Trump can again cut through the critics’ noise.