Photo: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images
There are signs in every direction that the Donald Trump–Stephen Miller mass-deportation initiative is becoming a difficult and increasingly unpopular slog. Its initial goals keep dwindling even more rapidly than Elon Musk’s DOGE budget-savings claims. During the 2024 campaign, Trump talked about deporting all undocumented immigrants and mentioned numbers like 15 to 20 million people. But as The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo notes, ICE and DHS aren’t even meeting their own vastly downscaled quotas:
[W]hen he returned to power, Trump’s administration instituted arrest quotas for ICE, with a goal of hitting one million deportations during his first year.
So far, it has been a failure.
By the end of March, Trump will have overseen 113,000 arrests and 100,000 deportations, according to the highest estimates available. While those figures may earn breathless coverage in Trump-allied outlets like the New York Post, they are nowhere near on pace for his stated goals.
And, in fact, even those numbers may be exaggerated, Carrasquillo reports. But the political cost for what is at most a very slow start on mass deportation has been pretty big. Trump’s job-approval ratings on immigration — once his “best issue” — have been going underwater everywhere you look and in turn are pushing down his overall popularity into increasingly negative territory.
But what everyone may be missing is that the controversy surrounding ICE snatch-and-grab operations and the rent-a-prison in El Salvador is obscuring remarkable success in what was once Trump’s big goal in this area: reducing border crossings from Mexico. Yes, they were trending heavily down during the last few months of the Biden administration, but now they’re really decelerating, as U.S. News & World Report noted:
The number of tracked illegal crossings at the southern border in March — 7,181 — marked the lowest total since Border Patrol started releasing monthly statistics in 2000, according to Reuters. The previous nadir was in February.
By moving the goalposts from “border security” to a sort of ongoing ethnic-cleansing operation with all the legal and constitutional issues it raises, the Trump administration is stepping on its original message and setting itself up for failure, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained to Carrasquillo:
Reichlin-Melnick said what Trump has managed to do is draw attention away from his clamping down of the border by leaning so aggressively into deportations to El Salvador. As a result, Americans see the controversy around El Salvador less as a border and immigration issue, and more as a matter of due process.
One way of illustrating this self-sabotage is by looking at one recent poll (from Fox News) that asks separate questions about Trump’s handling of “border security” and of “immigration.” On the former issue, he gets his highest job-approval ratings (55 percent positive, 40 percent negative), even as his approval rating on “immigration” slides underwater to 47 percent positive and 48 percent negative. This is a trend that will likely intensify the longer Team Trump insists on fighting the courts over deportations (like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia) and glorying in the humiliation and even torture of terrified-looking immigrants with no record of violent crime.
Trump defenders may object that the administration had no choice but to fulfill his campaign pledge to undertake “the largest deportation in U.S. history.” But then again, Trump has talked off and on about deporting undocumented immigrants since his first campaign; during his first term, he most definitely de-prioritized deportations in favor of “building the wall” and other border-security initiatives. Only in 2024 did “mass deportation” begin to displace “securing the border” as a MAGA talking point (for many of us, it became real when delegates to the 2024 Republican National Convention happily waved “Mass Deportation Now!” signs). What was probably once just racist MAGA messaging had become front and center, to the undoubted joy of the out-and-out nativists in Trump’s circle. Indeed, restrictions on legal immigration, and revocation of both birthright citizenship and permanent naturalization, became the radical edge of Trump immigration policies, setting up still more difficult political challenges.
That’s why, when Trump could be dancing in the end zone in celebration of his successful border clampdown and moving on to other priorities, he and his team are instead at the very beginning of an expensive and increasingly unpopular uphill climb that will culminate at some point in the removal of so many immigrants that the whole issue could turn on them decisively. That could be the price of letting Miller call the shots on immigration policy and of risking future Republican election prospects while they are at it.
