The first rule of nursing is safety. Not curingâthat’s often impossibleâand not even empathy, though it ranks high. Safety is what keeps the patient in the bed, not on the floor. It keeps the wrong dose out of the IV. It keeps the grievance from turning fatal. It’s a lesson Joan Swirsky, a nurse and mother of three, says she never forgot. And it’s the lens through which she views the state of the nation in a new American Thinker op-ed: “Safety First, Comrade.”
Swirsky’s argument is blunt: The left, in its zeal for open borders and its hostility to immigration enforcement, has abandoned the most fundamental duty of governmentâkeeping Americans safe. She draws a direct line from the patient who falls out of bed to the country that throws open its doors to millions of unvetted arrivals, and she doesn’t much care who flinches at the comparison.
The Lock on the Door
She starts with a simple question: Does anyone you know live in a home without locks on the doors and windows? Of course not. Because we understand that the world contains criminals and the mentally disturbed. “Their raison d’ĂȘtre,” she writes, “is to rob you of your possessions and often rape you or torture you or kill you in the process.”
That’s not paranoia, she insists. It’s prudence. And it’s the same prudence she says the Biden administration abandoned when it allowed an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants into the country during the COVID-19 pandemicâa period, she notes, when the same officials were keeping Americans six feet apart and shuttering schools and businesses. The contrast, for her, is damning.
She points to the Cloward-Piven strategy, the 1960s leftist plan to “overload the system with crushing welfare costs” in order to force a guaranteed minimum income and, ultimately, a redistributionist state. In her telling, the open-borders policies of the Biden years were not just about compassion; they were a deliberate step toward what she calls “the collapseâactually the destructionâof the capitalist system.”
The evidence she cites includes the housing of migrants at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, complete with cash stipends and cell phones, and the reported arrival of diseases once thought vanquished: a case of bubonic plague in Oregon, a resurgence of tuberculosis in New York, a measles epidemic across 14 states.
The Missing Word
Swirsky seizes on a pattern she says is 100 percent consistent: Democrats never say the word “illegal.” They speak of “immigrants,” of “a nation of immigrants,” of “dreamers”âbut never of the legal status that would make the debate honest. She sees this as a rhetorical sleight of hand, one that lets the left embrace open borders while pretending it’s merely being kind.
She cites reporting from journalist Julio Rosas on a recent Democratic National Committee meeting, where, she says, Democrats “uniformly pledged their allegiance to open borders” and to abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The resolution, according to Rosas, would restrict DHS funding until workplace raids, mass roundups, arrests at courthouses and check-ins, and enforcement actions near schools and houses of worship are no longer carried out.
“Did you ever notice,” she asks, “that when Democrats speak about the tsunami of foreigners who have flooded into our country, they alwaysâ100 percent of the timeâomit the word ‘illegal’?”
She connects this to the left’s broader sympathies, noting the support and funding Democrats gave to Black Lives Matter and Antifa during the unrest of recent yearsâgroups she describes as “seditious, anarchic,” responsible for arson, brick-throwing, and deaths.
The Gallagher Case
She turns to New York State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, a self-described Democratic Socialist of America member, who has publicly argued that shoplifting should be legal when the thief has a “biological need”âsay, for toothpaste or soap. Gallagher, Swirsky notes, also attended an anti-Israel phone bank hosted by the New Jersey chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, whose leaders, she writes, “have espoused vile antisemitic rhetoric” and are under investigation by Virginia’s attorney general for potentially funding terrorists. “With allies like this,” Swirsky asks, “who needs enemies?”
The Trump Reversal
Against this backdrop, Swirsky frames President Trump’s second-term border actions as a return to the safety-first principle. She cites a reported drop in synthetic opioid deaths from 48,913 to 38,084 and CDC figures showing total overdose deaths down 14 percent, with fentanyl deaths down 22 percent. She credits the border crackdown against drug cartels and the arrests of convicted fentanyl traffickers.
The administration, she writes, has arrested more than 10,000 suspected gang members and foreign nationals with prior fentanyl-related convictions, and Trump has signed legislation strengthening criminal penalties for fentanyl, which he calls “a weapon of mass destruction.”
She also points to reporting by Sharyl Attkisson that Trump “has delivered the largest drop in violent crime in American history,” citing data from the Council on Criminal Justice, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, and other sourcesâ”the decisive reversal,” she says, “of the crime crisis Democrats left behind.”
The Deeper Argument
Swirsky’s piece is unapologetically a polemic. It leans on a nursing metaphor to make a political case, and its evidence is a mix of statistics, reportage, and indignation. But at its core is a question that transcends partisanship: What does it mean for a society to prioritize safety, and who is allowed to define it?
For Swirsky, the answer is clear. Safety first means securing the border, deporting those who entered illegally, and enforcing laws against crimeânot because we lack compassion, but because compassion without security is, in her view, a form of negligence. It’s the difference between a nurse who holds a patient’s hand and a nurse who forgets to check the rails.
“Not our happiness, not our well-being, not our employment status, not our relationships, not our mental or physical health, not our entertainment,” she writes, “but our safety!”
Whether readers agree with her politics or not, the framing is a deliberate challenge to the left’s moral language. Swirsky is saying: You call yourself compassionate, but you’ve left the door unlocked. And in a country with a reported million violent crimes in 2025 alone, she argues, that’s not kindness. It’s malpractice.
Source: www.americanthinker.com â https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/safety-first-comrade/