Has Immigration Enforcement Become a GOP Liability—or an Asset?

As Roll Call noted after the November elections, “The promise of mass deportations was a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign”. Now that Trump’s returned, his administration is working to fulfill that promise, even as resistance to his immigration policies galvanizes his opponents. Have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations become a Republican liability? Perhaps Americans aren’t as disturbed by immigration enforcement as many in the media would have you believe. 

“Biden’s Border Fiasco”

What Bloomberg Opinion termed “Biden’s Border Fiasco” in August 2023, a month in which nearly 200,000 migrants were apprehended at the Southwest border, grabbed most of the immigration headlines during the last administration.

But even as the unauthorized population swelled, imposing crushing fiscal costs on communities, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, was tightening restrictions on ICE’s ability to detain and deport illegal immigrants—including criminals.

Texas and Louisiana challenged those Mayorkas restrictions, but the Biden administration successfully fought all the way to the Supreme Court to preserve the secretary’s authority to not arrest criminal aliens.

Consequently, ICE “interior removals” of criminals in the United States plummeted, from nearly 78,500 in FY 2019 to fewer than 27,000 in FY 2022. 

 The Backlash

Then, reality intervened. The murders of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, and others by illegal immigrants—some released by DHS at the border—spurred outrage, including an outburst during Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address. 

Democrats never recovered, and Republicans took control of Congress and the White House in November in large part due to immigration concerns.

Trump tapped Tom Homan, a DHS careerist turned campaign surrogate, to lead the administration’s immigration-enforcement efforts.

Illegal entries slowed to a trickle, falling from just over 56,500 apprehensions at the Southwest border in December to just fewer than 4,600 in July. 

Attention Turns to the Interior

Border Patrol hasn’t released any illegal migrants since April, and as DHS has achieved “operational control” of the border, media attention has turned to ICE operations in the interior. 

Homan and ICE have given them plenty to talk about. 

Riots in L.A. In June, ICE launched what Al-Jazeera termed “military-sized raids” in Los Angeles, triggering “protests” that devolved into chaos as rioters assaulted local law enforcement. 

Over the objections of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (D) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), Trump called out the National Guard and Marines to protect agents and federal property, prompting a lawsuit by the state. On September 2, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer declared the deployment illegal. 

L.A. residents who alleged they’d been unlawfully targeted for immigration stops filed suit, and on July 11, U.S. District Court Judge Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong imposed limits on factors officers could rely on in initiating “detentive” questioning. 

That order barred ICE from relying on certain characteristics, including “apparent race or ethnicity” and “presence at a particular location”, when making stops in the U.S. Central District of California, America’s most populous. The L.A. region alone is home to more than 20 million residents, 2 million here illegally. 

On September 8 the Supreme Court enjoined that order, with Justice Kavanaugh noting in concurrence that under the Court’s “precedents, not to mention common sense” the factors Judge Frimpong listed “can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.” 

“Midway Blitz”. ICE rolled on, launching “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago in early September.

DHS claims the operation has resulted in 3,000 arrests in Illinois and neighboring states, including alleged Tren de Aragua gang members, child sex offenders, murderers, and drug traffickers. It’s also triggered the sorts of protests that played out in L.A. in June. 

Some have turned violent, with DHS contending ICE’s officers have been targeted by “vehicular assaults”. 

Protests ramped up after an October 6 early morning raid at a Chicago apartment building in which agents allegedly “rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters” while making 37 arrests. 

In response to Midway Blitz, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) compared ICE enforcement to “Nazi Germany”, while Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) declared city property “ICE Free Zones”.

Again, Trump called out the National Guard, Democratic officials filed lawsuits, and a U.S. district court judge imposed a temporary restraining order on troop deployments. 

On October 28, Judge Sara Ellis of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued an order requiring “all Federal Agents operating in Operation Midway Blitz to place an identifier conspicuously on their uniform where one can easily view it and the Agent’s equipment does not obscure it”. 

She also directed CBP to “strive to ensure” agency officers assisting in Midway Blitz carry body−worn cameras, a directive she applied specifically to El Centro Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino (who is quarterbacking Midway Blitz, though it’s an inapt analogy in football terms) and to provide the court with “all CBP use of force reports relating to Operation Midway Blitz from” September 2 through October 25, and to continue to do so on an ongoing basis.

Judge Ellis also ordered Chief Bovino to appear in her court “in person, week days at 5:45 PM”, which prompted DOJ to file with the Seventh Circuit a petition for a writ of mandamus and a stay of that particular requirement, which the department termed and “extraordinary and extraordinarily disruptive requirement”.

On October 29, the Seventh Circuit issued an administrative stay of the order directing Chief Bovino’s appearance pending briefing. 

Portland. A litigation cycle similar to the ones in Los Angeles and Chicago has also played out over National Guard deployments in Portland, Ore., where protests at an ICE facility have been ongoing since early June. 

At times, they’ve turned violent, with Portland police declaring a riot on June 14.

As I recently reported, a district court judge had blocked Trump from sending the National Guard from federalizing and deploying troops to Oregon on October 4, an injunction a divided three-judge Ninth Circuit panel stayed on October 23 in an order currently on hold pending consideration whether the case should be reconsidered by a larger, 11-judge, en banc panel of the circuit court. 

A Historical Perspective 

Media critics now contend, and the president’s supporters fear, Trump’s “mass deportation” plans are turning off an electorate that still largely supports immigration enforcement. 

There’s support for their respective contentions and concerns. 

Following its most recent polling, the New York Times reported that while “the share of registered voters who favor deporting immigrants living in the country illegally — 54 percent — has remained unchanged”, 52 percent nonetheless oppose Trump’s handling of immigration and “51 percent said his actions around immigration enforcement had gone too far”. 

From my more than three decades of immigration experience, starting with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in California in the 1990s, trust me when I say that it’s a familiar trend—but not likely as straightforward as it appears.

First, ICE enforcement now isn’t much different than INS enforcement was in the past; if anything, it’s less robust. 

In a 1984 opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded “the average INS agent arrests almost 500 illegal aliens” annually. 

If ICE were maintaining that pace, arrests would top 3 million per annum, four times their current rate. 

And those “military-style raids” that triggered massive protests in Los Angeles? Court filings indicate they resulted in “2,805 immigration arrests” over six weeks, .14 percent of the area’s illegal population.

The Chicago apartment raid? The Sun Times reports residents there have long suffered “unlivable conditions”, quoting one woman who complained, “It was a nasty mess before ICE came. . .. So don’t nobody keep putting that s— on ICE, because that was not ICE.”

But, what has changed since 1990s is the rise of “sanctuary jurisdictions”, which refuse to honor ICE detainers for criminal detainees or allow immigration officers into their jails and prisons. 

Those laws were rare until recently, because they primarily protect criminals and force immigration officers to make the sorts of dangerous “street arrests” protestors are railing against. 

Homan promised a “worst first” deportation plan that starts with criminal deportations, and that’s about what he’s delivered. Of the 46,015 aliens in ICE detention, 64 percent have criminal convictions or pending charges. An untold number of the rest are under final removal orders. 

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) contends that if ICE “was only going after dangerous criminals, there would be no debate”.

His state, however, has among the worst sanctuary laws, and he’s done nothing about them. Nor have Newsom and Bass.

“The State of the Parties”

Note that in the latest Harvard/Harris poll, 78 percent of voters—including 69 percent of Democrats—supported “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes”. That’s three points higher than in August Harvard/Harris polling, even after the L.A., Chicago, and Portland protests.

Most at-large arrests, criminal or immigration, are confrontational and sometimes violent. Americans eschew confrontations of any sort, so it’s no surprise Trump’s immigration support has dipped. But does that benefit his political opponents? 

Republican party pollster and strategist Patrick Ruffini has his doubts. 

In an October 24 article in The Intersection captioned “The state of the parties”, he examined polls of issues important to U.S. voters and attempted to interpret what they show. 

He conceded at the outset that “on the surface, people are more aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans on their prioritization of the top issues”, highlighting polling revealing (among other issues) that, while 27 percent of voters thing the government should be focused on immigration, 71 percent think the GOP is focused on that issue and 17 percent think Democrats are.

That suggests Trump’s political opponents’ are more aligned with the electorate than his party is. 

The Democratic Party also bests the Republicans on such topics as “shares my views on most issues” (D+2), “cares about people like me” (D+5), and “offers stability, not chaos” (D+3). 

Where the Democrats fall short, according to Ruffini, “is . . . execution, where Republicans have a massive advantage on things like ‘has a good plan and follows through on it’ (R+8), ‘strong and decisive’ (R+20), and ‘says what they really think, even when it’s not popular’ (R+24).”

“Many of these characteristics”, he aptly notes, “are ones that are personally associated with Trump. They may not extend to other Republicans once he’s gone. But as long as he’s here, voters associate the party with strength, decisiveness, and action.”

In perhaps his most controversial point, Ruffini then argues that “a better ability to get things done overrides a lot of things, including extremism”.

That’s not an idle opinion, as he next cites polling showing majorities across all education levels “would rather support” a party “better at getting things done, even if its views are sometimes too extreme” over one “that’s more mainstream, even if it’s not as good at getting things done”. 

The Gaps Between Voters’ Concerns and Democrats’

Ruffini’s focus isn’t immigration per se, but his findings are readily applicable to voters’ perspectives on what’s happening with respect to the immigration enforcement actions described above.

Which likely explains why Trump’s media critics both decry the president’s immigration-enforcement operations and their effectiveness in stoking tales of alleged internecine feuds among the president’s advisors—the rhetorical equivalent of complaining a restaurant’s food is awful and its portions too small.

They want to show Trump’s immigration actions are both extreme and fruitless, which logically no one would support. 

In that vein, rarely does a day go by that I don’t field a question from some outlet seeking to undermine (or prove) DHS’s claim that “more than 2 illegal million aliens” have been deported or left since Trump returned. 

In my mind (and likely in the minds of more than a few Americans), the real focus should be on whether the unauthorized population has risen or fallen under Trump II, and it’s beyond cavil that it’s the latter. 

But, want proof about what Americans think? Ruy Texeira in The Liberal Patriot on October 30 included a poll conducted by the “Welcome Party”, one of several of what he describes as “Democratic-aligned organizations focusing on the party change imperative and promulgating useful analyses and suggestions”. 

Results of that poll showed a -21 percent gap between how much voters think Democrats should prioritize “securing the border” and how much they do prioritize it. Conversely, that poll revealed a +26 percent gap between Democrats’ focus on “protecting the rights of undocumented immigrants” and what voters think they should be doing in that regard. 

In other words, voters believe the president’s political opponents are too focused on protecting illegal aliens currently here and too little concerned about border security. 

The Welcome Party polled 17 different issues, and those two responses show the biggest gap between what voters wanted and what they think Democrats want—and those were the only immigration-related questions on that list. 

“Extremism in the defense of liberty” may not be a vice, but most voters are moderates. Plenty of polling and analyses, however, suggests Americans aren’t as disturbed by ICE (and CBP) enforcement as many in the media would have you believe. That said, the only polls that count in politics are conducted on Tuesdays in November, in years divisible by two.