He doesn’t understand why Americans care about illegal immigration in the first place.
By Linda Chavez
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION HAS BEDEVILED the United States ever since the government first put restrictions on entry into the country. In recent years, the problem became an emergency. Donald Trump recognized that—and promised to do something about it. But while the Trump administration has successfully slowed the inflow of illegal migrants at the southern border, its hamfisted mass deportation effort is backfiring. Trump overestimated the degree to which Americans’ antipathy toward illegal immigration was rooted in racism and xenophobia and underestimated the degree to which it was about the rule of law. Now, Trump’s immigration policies are doing serious harm to the rule of law, and most Americans know it.
The government’s tough tactics are eating into the widespread support President Trump initially had for his election-season stance against illegal immigrants. Shortly after his return to the White House, Trump promised to “rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered.” He said his administration would “put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.” Trump understood, in a way Democrats did not, that Americans don’t like chaos, which is what they saw at the border through much of the Biden administration’s term.
But support for Trump’s aggressive tactics against illegal immigration is ebbing. Americans don’t like what they’re seeing. We’re not used to having people grabbed off the streets and whisked away in unmarked cars, never to be heard from again.
A June Gallup poll found that support for mass deportation has dropped to 38 percent among American adults, while 78 percent favor a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants if they meet certain requirements. These numbers reflect a 9-point drop on deportation compared to one year earlier and 7-point increase supporting a path to citizenship. Notably, Republicans are warming faster on a path to citizenship than Democrats and independents. Another recent poll, from CNN, shows that 55 percent of Americans think the president has gone too far in deporting illegal immigrants and 58 percent believe the government hasn’t been careful enough in following the law in its deportation policies.
More Americans believe that sending heavily armed, masked men, many with no identifying badges or uniforms, into Home Depot parking lots, farms, restaurants, and car washes, or having them lurk outside courthouses, schools, and even churches to snatch suspected illegal immigrants without warrants violates the essence of American justice. Almost nobody would tolerate a local police force rounding up suspected drug dealers or thieves in this manner, much less breaking into houses or cars on the street, as agents have done repeatedly in the last few months.
The rough enforcement actions have provoked civil unrest, with some individuals striking back with rocks and even incendiary devices. To be clear, this violent response is both wrong and counterproductive. It feeds the administration’s narrative that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is pursuing dangerous criminals, as opposed to peaceful families who have lived in the United States for decades.
Contrary to the administration’s claims that it is focused on deporting violent criminals, a new Cato Institute analysis shows most recent ICE detentions—about 65 percent—involve immigrants with no criminal convictions whatsoever. And administration efforts have snagged a lot of longtime residents, which isn’t surprising given that an estimated two-thirds of illegal immigrants have lived in the United States for more than ten years. ICE recently detained a 75-year-old Cuban man who had been here almost sixty years and an Iranian woman who has been here forty years. They released the woman after House Majority Leader Steve Scalise intervened; the septuagenarian wasn’t so lucky.
Isidro Pérez died in ICE custody less than a month after he was picked up as an inadmissible alien based on 1980s convictions for simple drug possession. He became one of ten detainees to die in ICE custody so far this year. At the current rate, ICE can expect sixteen people to die in its detention centers in 2025—the largest number since the pandemic year of 2020 and the second-largest since the agency began publishing data in 2018.
Many critics of the administration’s policies have gone to the courts seeking relief. In July, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from detaining people indiscriminately based on their ethnicity, language fluency, location, or the type of work they do. But the administration will appeal to the Supreme Court. The underlying class-action suit claims the administration’s snatch-and-deport tactics violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The administration will no doubt appeal the decision of the trial judge, too, if it doesn’t go their way.
Respect for the rule of law goes both ways in a democracy. Individuals must abide by the law or risk the consequences, including arrest, trial, and punishment. But those responsible for enforcing the law also agree to respect basic rights and follow certain procedures, including properly identifying themselves as officers of the law, notifying the person what they’re accused of, and if it’s a criminal offense, informing them of the right to remain silent and to legal counsel. Immigration enforcement officers have greater latitude in dealing with persons suspected of being in the country illegally—which in most cases is a civil offense, not a criminal one—but they may not violate basic constitutional rights, such as warrantless searches on private property, and they need, at a minimum, reasonable cause that their target is indeed illegally present.
Though the administration claims there are 21 million illegal immigrants in the United States, the best estimates of the population are in the 12–14 million range, with a median U.S. residence of fifteen years. The vast majority, of course, are not criminals. Trump has vowed to deport one million people per year. It’s simply not possible to summarily remove hundreds of thousands, much less millions, without trampling on civil liberties and abusing police powers.
The tide of illegal migration has now shifted. Attempted crossings are down at the Mexican border from their peak of more than 300,000 per month during Biden’s term to about 12,000 per month since Trump took office. Spending on border enforcement is set to soar to $170 billion under the president’s “big beautiful bill,” making ICE the largest and best-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
As ICE grabs more construction workers, landscapers, farmhands, and domestic workers in its effort to fulfill quotas handed down by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, ordinary Americans will feel the pain. Those burned out by the devastating Los Angeles fires in January won’t be able to return to their homes any time soon because the workers doing toxic cleanup are afraid to show up. Employers in western North Carolina hit hard by Hurricane Helene complain, “There are just not enough people being born here to fill all the roles that need to be filled.”
Red states and blue states alike are experiencing the ill effects of our haphazard and sometimes rough immigration policies. There is a better way: Reform our outdated immigration laws to make it possible for more workers to come legally and concentrate on removing convicted felons who have committed serious, violent crimes.
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Linda Chavez is the Author of The Silver Candlesticks: A Novel of the Spanish Inquisition. She is a longtime political Commentator. Her syndicated column ran for 30 years in newspapers around the country. She was a senior staff member in the Reagan White House.
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