Trump’s Immigration Reset – The Dispatch

Iranian state-sanctioned media reported Wednesday that the Iranian regime had rejected a 15-point ceasefire offer presented by President Donald Trump. Two Pakistani sources told the Associated Press that the U.S. set several conditions in the deal, including requiring Iran to scale back its nuclear development programs, limit its missile production, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In exchange, the proposal offered sanctions relief and civilian nuclear cooperation, with monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Instead, Iran issued its own five-point counterproposal via state television, calling for a complete halt to U.S. and Israeli attacks and assassinations, mechanisms to prevent a recurrence of war, payment of war reparations, an end to hostilities against Hezbollah in Lebanon and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, and international recognition of Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi noted to the Iranian press that the White House had previously demanded “unconditional surrender,” adding that, “the fact that they are talking about negotiation now is exactly an admission of defeat.”

The Defense Department announced Wednesday that it had reached new framework agreements with three defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Honeywell—to increase their munitions production. The Pentagon stated that Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems agreed to quadruple production of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor missile seekers, while Honeywell will “surge production” of munition critical components, arranged under a $500 million multi-year investment. “We are providing the certainty our partners need to invest, expand, and hire,” Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael Duffey said in a statement. “This is how we place the industrial base on a wartime footing.” To learn more about America’s munition supply, read the March 19 issue of TMD.

In a 9-0 decision Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment that internet providers such as Cox cannot be held liable for copyright infringement by users of their internet services. The decision overturned a previous federal appeals court ruling. Writing for the seven-justice majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said that legal precedent holds that companies cannot be found liable for copyright infringement “for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.” Thomas also noted that Cox did not design its network to facilitate copyright infringement, but “simply provided Internet access, which is used for many purposes other than copyright infringement.”

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy said that a runway safety system meant to provide collisions “did not alert” shortly before an Air Canada commercial plane collided with a Port Authority firetruck at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport on Sunday. The crash killed two pilots and injured at least 41 people. Homendy explained that the system failed to alert “due to the close proximity of vehicles merging and unmerging near the runway, resulting in the inability to create a track of high confidence.” According to the NTSB, which is still investigating the collision, the firetruck—which had been dispatched to respond to a United Airlines aircraft that reported an issue with fumes onboard—was not equipped with a transponder at the time of the incident.

Kristi Noem’s tenure as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security was marked by—and ended in—controversy. There was a $220 million advertising campaign that funneled contracts to companies tied to Noem; allegations of micromanagement, petty infighting, and a widely reported affair with her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski; and most notably, in January, federal agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, less than three weeks apart.

Markwayne Mullin—previously a senator who challenged the head of the Teamsters Union to a fist fight during a Senate hearing, and now Noem’s replacement—is pledging to restore calm to U.S. immigration policy. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said during his confirmation hearing last week. “My goal is for people to understand we’re out there. We’re protecting them, and we’re working with them.” Mullin made it out of committee on an 8-7 vote last week and was confirmed by the full Senate on Monday, 54-45.

But even if the actions of immigration agents in the various agencies overseen by DHS—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—no longer dominate the headlines, what else will change under Mullin? More than a year into an administration that has aggressively controlled immigration, what does U.S. immigration policy actually look like now?

Getting a full picture of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement is harder than it should be. Detailed monthly data, which used to be a DHS specialty, is currently hard to come by.

“The available data that we had often relied on is no longer being published,” Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told TMD. Multiple government shutdowns—including the ongoing shutdown of DHS itself—combined with the administration’s reluctance to share data, have left specific numbers on arrests, deportations, and migrant flows largely unavailable. That makes it difficult to assess how the administration’s withdrawal of its highly visible operations in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago has affected broader enforcement numbers.

But policies have been changing. After Minneapolis residents launched mass protests in the wake of Good and Pretti’s deaths, the White House replaced CBP official Greg Bovino, who had been leading federal efforts in the city, with Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar. Homan pledged to back off from neighborhood sweeps conducted by roving federal agents and to focus on cooperating with local law enforcement.

Last week, Mullin also promised that immigration agents would return to ICE’s longstanding practice of only entering homes with a judicial warrant. Under Noem, DHS had begun allowing agents to enter homes with an administrative warrant issued by an executive branch agency such as ICE against people issued a deportation order, but not approved by a judge. “A judicial warrant will be used to go into houses, into place of businesses, unless we’re pursuing someone that enters in that place,” Mullin said.

Additionally, Homan has already reduced CBP agents’ roles in interior immigration enforcement operations, which had not been their role historically.

Returning CBP to its traditional role should improve agents’ interactions with the public, Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former DHS official and immigration policy consultant, told TMD. “The differences in the operational style, the kind of training to deal with the public are very different among all these agencies,” she pointed out.

Border patrol agents, Brown said, are used to operating in isolated regions on the U.S. border, often solo, where most people they encounter are either illegal immigrants or potentially dangerous drug traffickers. “It really is a different enforcement environment than in an urban area, where you are encountering a lot of people and encountering sort of in-your-face opposition to what you are doing,” she said.

Homan, whose background is with ICE, not CBP, “understands, I think, as a law enforcement officer, that their operational success is dependent, in a large part, on the public trusting that they’re going to do it in a professional way,” Brown added.

Bovino did not share this mentality. “We wanted total border domination,” he said of his strategy in an interview this week. “When you use terms like that, perhaps it scares some of the weaker-minded people.”

But a calmer approach doesn’t necessarily mean fewer deportations. “We’re not surrendering our mission at all, we’re just doing it smarter,” Homan said in January. Splashy raids targeting Home Depot parking lots may have generated fear and arrests in immigrant communities, but they didn’t translate to a proportionate rise in deportations. “There were a lot more arrests than there were deportations, because they were getting people who weren’t in a position to be deported when they were out on the streets,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told TMD.

As of early February, the overall number of illegal immigrants in federal detention stood around 70,000, a record high. A funding package passed last year will also allow DHS to acquire enough warehouses and detention facilities to hold more than 100,000 people, further increasing that record (although in many areas, local opposition is slowing down federal efforts). The federal government also claimed in December that 1.9 million people had self-deported in the first 11 months of Donald Trump’s second term, aided by programs that offer to pay for their ticket out of the country. But independent analyses place that number closer to 200,000.

Legal immigration levels are also in sharp decline, thanks to a wide range of policies from White House.

In December, Trump ordered that seven countries be added to a pre-existing list of nations facing a blanket travel ban on national security grounds. He also enacted more limited travel restrictions on residents from 15 other countries. And in January, the State Department announced an indefinite pause in immigrant visa issuances from 75 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, arguing that immigrants from those countries were disproportionately likely to use welfare programs.

Yet visa and citizenship applications are so backlogged that suspending inflow from specific countries mostly re-shuffles the existing queue, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an attorney and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told TMD. What is more likely to reduce legal immigration levels, he said, are new restrictions barring the spouses and children of U.S. citizens from certain countries from applying for any immigrant or non-immigrant visa. Previously, there had been no cap on these visas. “By limiting immigrant visas for those categories, you actually do drop the net number of people who can come to the United States,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

The Trump administration is also reducing the U.S. demand for immigrant labor. Last month, a new wage-weighted lottery system for H-1B visas—the traditional route through which companies sponsor high-skilled workers from abroad—took effect. That comes after the administration imposed a new $100,000 “supplemental filing fee” on new petitions in September. Together, the changes likely make it too expensive for many small and mid-sized businesses, as well as universities, to hire skilled foreign talent. With lottery selection notifications set to be sent by March 31, the number of workers entering the U.S. by this route will likely fall.

With these moves, DHS and the federal government have thrown “sand in the wheel” of U.S. immigration, Putzel-Kavanaugh said. Tightening more routine processes—such as revoking student visas and scrutinizing applicants’ social media accounts—has also helped the administration shrink the number of immigrants in the U.S., she said.

Refugees are the one category where the president has the authority to set an exact ceiling, thanks to the Refugee Act of 1980. The only refugees currently being admitted in significant numbers are white South Africans—nearly 2,000 of whom have arrived since last May, and who make up the majority of the administration’s 7,500 2026 refugee slots, which is the lowest annual allocation on record.

Noem also used her authority as DHS secretary to classify millions of American residents as illegal immigrants. In a series of determinations last year, she declared that immigrants from 13 countries—including Haiti and Venezuela—who had been authorized to live and work in the U.S. under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program were no longer subject to it. “They effectively created an additional 2 million illegal immigrants in the past year,” Bier said.

Together, these changes have produced a substantially different immigration system—though some analysts expect numbers to tick up modestly in 2026, as the bureaucracy adjusts to the new rules and processing backlogs that built up during the transition begin to clear. “Once these policy changes have settled a bit, the procedural side can catch up a little bit,” Cecilia Esterline, a senior immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, told TMD.

But any rebound starts from a historic low. Researchers now estimate that in 2025, the U.S. experienced net negative migration, the first time in at least 50 years that more people have departed the U.S. than arrived.

Even with a less aggressive and better-managed DHS, that trend is likely to continue, according to Bier: “​​This is a wholesale change in the legal immigration system, a rewrite unlike really any that we’ve seen, at least going back to the Great Depression.”

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