Presidents of both parties have historically hesitated to pursue large-scale immigration enforcement in the country’s interior precisely because it tends to be politically unpopular. Trump’s push for deportations far from the border has begun to trigger a backlash in public opinion, with polls showing his approval rating on immigration and deportations—formerly one of his strongest issues—has now turned negative...

The administration is now at an inflection point, with deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller leading the hard-liners pushing for more deportations even as the president himself sends mixed messages. In the space of a day last week, Trump expressed sympathy for “our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business” who “have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them”—only to post a few hours later that he was committed to stanching the “tsunami of Illegals.”

“I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the cBP Home App or, IcE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”

Back in 2012, then-private citizen Donald Trump was singing a different tune. He had a theory about why the Republicans had just lost another presidential election: Mitt Romney, the nominee that year, had alienated Latino voters by endorsing “a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” and as a result had “lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

• Trump Struggles to Press Deportations Without Damaging the Economy - "President shifted his strategy after complaints that workplace raids were hurting businesses—but some in his administration still argue for an aggressive approach."
• The immigrants caring for the nation's elderly are losing their jobs - "Foreign-born workers make up 30% of the nursing home housekeeping and maintenance workforce, according to data provided by LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of aging services. That's compared to 19% of the overall workforce, per the Labor Department. More than 41% of home health aides in the U.S. last year were foreign-born, according to unpublished data provided to Axios by the Labor Department. 22% of nursing assistants are foreign-born, and 28% of personal care aides."
• Employees Terrified of IcE Raids Are Failing to Show Up at Work - "High-profile immigration raids are scaring off workers and leaving employers unsure of how they'll manage without them."
• IcE raids and their uncertainty scare off workers and baffle businesses - "According to the U.S. census Bureau, foreign-born workers made up less than 19% of employed workers in the United States in 2023. But they accounted for nearly 24% of jobs preparing and serving food and 38% of jobs in farming, fishing and forestry."
• Trump 'looking at' immigration relief for farm workers after resuming IcE raids on them - "About 42% of farm workers in the United States between 2020 and 2022 lacked legal status, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security."
• Trump's conflicting Messages on Workplace Raids Leave Businesses Reeling - "Trump officials insist the president is fully committed to mass deportation. But they have been careful not to directly contradict the president’s attempt to offer a reprieve to certain businesses."

Here’s a bit of information that will help you interpret Trump’s immigration announcements: He doesn’t like immigration, and he’s a committed enforcer of immigration laws. Thus, any announcement that he’ll pull back or otherwise liberalize is simply not true. This rule of thumb holds every time except when the courts force him to pause. Some members of his administration may like legal immigration or oppose intensive enforcement, and they may even get control of IcE’s PR department or Trump’s Twitter account for a few hours or days. But their announcements don’t mean anything, and they will be reversed. Just like here.

The Trump administration opposes illegal immigrants and legal immigrants, low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants, family-based immigrants, and employment-based immigrants. The only exception may be H‑2A migrant workers for agriculture, one of the few visa programs he didn’t terminate in his last year in response to cOVID-19. The economic harms don’t matter, which is why Trump canceled the student visa program. That’s a big deal because foreign students are the first link in a chain that leads to highly skilled immigrants becoming citizens. By ending that, Trump is terminating the pipeline for the highly skilled immigration system. Perhaps the system will adapt, but that’s uncertain. If it does, Trump will find another way to end it...

What could signal a real change in Trump’s immigration policy? Stephen Miller leaves the White House. Nativism is Miller’s main public policy issue. He’s helped staff DHS and other departments with nativists, he’s written many of Trump’s speeches on immigration, and he relentlessly pushes immigration enforcers to do more. Trump believes in it, too, but less so than Miller.

Using public data from customs and Border Protection (cBP)—which does not include details of criminal convictions—we can see the trend in IcE book-ins from the start of the Trump administration. During the first two weeks of June, IcE brought into its custody nearly 927 non-criminals. That represents a roughly threefold increase compared to the rate of non-criminals booked in during the first week of this administration.

This shift in policy resulted from White House Deputy chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s meeting at the end of May, when he ordered IcE to start arresting more non-criminals. “What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” he said. “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7‑Eleven?” Since then, IcE and Border Patrol have shifted to roaming US streets and workplaces to round up immigrants, regardless of the public threat they may pose...

IcE’s deportation agenda is not what is being advertised to the American public. IcE is not interested in prioritizing public safety, yet it constantly pretends that anyone who objects to its tactics and priorities is defending violent criminals. But violent criminals are not IcE’s primary focus. Indeed, it now has no focus altogether. That’s the essence of mass deportation: it is indiscriminate, unfocused, and chaotic. congress should mandate more transparent reporting from IcE and require that it target only those who pose genuine threats to public safety.

A reader alerted me to the fact that even if IcE does not publish injury statistics, it does publish a page saluting officers who have died in the line of duty. The page lists 19 officers who’ve died over the past five years. Of those 19 deaths, 15 list the cause as cOVID-19, and three list it as cancer associated with the Ground Zero terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Only one of the 19 was a death of violence, caused by the accidental discharge of the officer’s service-issued weapon.

• Masked IcE Agents Arrest Afghan Ally Following Immigration court Hearing - "Sayed Naser worked with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, fled after the Taliban killed his brother, and was awaiting asylum. IcE agents still took him in handcuffs—and the government won't explain why."
• Militarized Response to california Riots Seeks To Expand Federal Power - "Militarized riot approach sets the nation on a dangerous course."
• The 9th circuit Rejects Trump's Audacious claim That He can Use the National Guard However He Likes - "Although the appeals court said the president probably complied with the law he invoked to justify his california deployment, it emphasized that such decisions are subject to judicial review."
• A Popular Spanish-Language Journalist Is in IcE custody After Being Arrested at an Atlanta Protest - "Mario Guevara built a following covering immigration arrests around Atlanta. Press freedom groups say police frivolously arrested him while he was covering a 'No Kings' protest."
• Immigrants and Radicals Have the Same Free Speech Rights as Everyone Else - "campus protests against Israel have revived debates over the limits of First Amendment protections."

Delaney Hall is the latest federal immigration detention center to experience dysfunction. In Miami, a lack of legal representation and degrading conditions amid an influx of 400 IcE detainees led to a mini-riot at a federal facility in May, as reported by Reason's c.J. ciaramella. In Kansas, civil rights groups allege inmates are being subjected to lengthy lockdowns, abuse of force, and medical neglect. At the Northwest IcE Processing center in Tacoma, Washington—a facility that currently holds 1,300 detainees—a 50 percent surge in occupancies this year and severe staffing shortages likely contributed to a successful escape in March.

The Trump administration's immigration crackdowns are exacerbating problems at these detention centers. The federal government has allocated enough funding to hold 41,500 people at detention centers across the country, but data show IcE is currently holding over 50,000 people. The agency has already outspent its budget by more than $1 billion, with three months remaining in the fiscal year. The quotas for 3,000 daily arrests all but guarantee that chronic failures like overcrowded cells, cut-rate meals, skeletal medical care, and unrest that leads to escape attempts will only intensify.

congress may soon address these problems with significant funding increases. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" being debated in the Senate would inject $168 billion into immigration and border enforcement agencies, including IcE, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and customs and Border Patrol (cBP), over five years, according to congressional Budget Office (cBO) estimates.

Part of this $168 billion includes $5 billion for cBP to construct and expand detention facilities, $45 billion for IcE to spend on detention through FY 2029, $550 million for IcE facility upgrades, and $950 million to reimburse state and local agencies assisting with immigration enforcement. The cBO estimates the bill will add $2.8 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years.

When factoring in how aggressive deportations reduce tax revenue and economic activity, the bill's immigration provisions are nearly $1 trillion more than the cBO estimates, according to David Bier, director of immigration studies at the cato Institute.[1]

The rising cost of immigration enforcement will continue unless congress implements suitable legislative measures, he tells Reason. "congress effectively has given up on policing what the agencies are spending their money on." With congress neglecting its fiscal duties, the Trump administration is spending "on what they want to spend it on, and really the only check is the internal politics within the administration."

"Effectively, they have everyone in line on immigration enforcement. So if you want to use the Marines to do immigration, have at it," adds Bier. "There's not really anyone in the administration anymore who's going to say 'no' when IcE comes knocking for their people and their appropriations."

IcE has not shown itself to be responsible in the way it manages its finances or the way it manages detentions. Instead of holding the agency accountable or revising its policies, lawmakers are preparing to allocate more funds to IcE, at the expense of taxpayers. "There's not a question of whether they'll spend it, it's just whether it will be spent efficiently, and I'm sure it will not," says Bier.

• Florida Proposes 'Alligator Alcatraz' to House Detained Migrants and Speed Up Deportations - "Florida's attorney general proposed using a 30-square-mile part of the Everglades to house, process, and deport detained migrants."
• Florida Used a Nationwide Surveillance camera Network 250 Times To Aid in Immigration Arrests - "Flock Safety's 40,000 cameras present in over 5,000 communities across the U.S. are being used to detain undocumented immigrants, many of whom have no criminal history."
• IcE Insists That congress Needs Its Permission To conduct Oversight - "But that's not what the law says."

Trump’s favorite leverage, because it is typically the most powerful, remains unilateral holdbacks of federal funding. The attraction is that doing so can quickly cripple the operations of a target institution, and thus perhaps force it to the negotiating table before it can get a court ruling on whether the federal government’s demands are proper.

On this point, though, Trump runs smack into the constitution. In neither the university case nor that of the states does that document permit the government to use such threats to coerce targets into surrendering certain essential constitutional rights...

Yesterday, as this post was ready to go to press, a federal court in Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction in a suit filed by twenty states challenging a Transportation Department edict requiring them to pledge cooperation with federal immigration policy as a condition of receiving transportation grants. The court said the edict would probably be found in violation of the Spending clause as well as the Administrative Procedures Act.

If Trump tries to pull a Harvard-style comprehensive defunding of california or some other state, the courts will almost certainly stand in his way.