“At the end of the day, this administration wants to deport as many people as possible, and they’re doing everything in their power to make that happen,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told TMD “There’s very little that motivates them other than arrests and deportations, and the economic costs are something that President Trump himself personally has a little bit of interest in, but not compared to the promises he made during his campaign.”
The economic incentives of slowing down deportations seemed to have briefly won out last Thursday, as Trump announced the work site enforcement pause. According to reports, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had called the president the day before to voice concerns about how the aggressive targeting of work sites was hurting farmers who relied on immigrant laborers. The call persuaded Trump—momentarily. According to a report by Axios, the U-turn upset White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and it was only a few days before the guidance shifted back. Over the weekend, Noem sent a letter to ICE leadership calling on it to “dramatically intensify arrest and removal operations nationwide.”
On Sunday, Trump announced that immigration enforcement would, in fact, be ramping up—but singled out Democrat-run cities for what he described as the “single largest Mass Deportation Program in History” in a post on Truth Social. “These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State.”
Despite the fiery language, it is not yet clear whether the announcement amounts to a substantive policy shift. “I don’t think it will change much,” Bier said. “It’s basically a way to sell this to Trump, to kind of get him to ignore the economics and focus on, ‘Look, this is the politics. This is the political win.’ He’s very attuned to that.”
But the economic issues could become more of a problem down the line, particularly as border crossings plummet. “There is really nowhere else to look for potential people to deport unless they are willing to go into workplaces, on farms, and in restaurants to try to find folks,” Kristie De Peña, senior vice president for policy and director of immigration policy at the Niskanen Center, told TMD. As more and more businesses lose workers, there could be downstream economic effects, especially in red states.
“It’s much easier for them to say publicly, ‘We’re going to go after Democratic blue cities,’” De Peña said, “when what we actually know is happening is that they are going into red states, rural farms, rural manufacturing plants where they employ a large portion of these mid-size or small towns and cities, and they’re rounding up people that these towns and cities rely on for a lot of these jobs and services.” The policy could even spark quiet Republican backlash.
Yet enforcement efforts continue to expand. Miller ordered ICE officials to increase their arrest quota from 1,000 to 3,000 arrests per day, reportedly telling agents to focus on rounding up any illegal immigrants—not just those with criminal histories or gang affiliations. And the ambitious new quota has forced officials to come up with new strategies: Workplace raids have increased, sparking protests in Los Angeles and other cities across the country. ICE has also targeted courthouses, arresting migrants who arrive for immigration hearings.
In another strategy to limit immigration, the Trump administration implemented a travel ban on 12 countries, including Iran, Haiti, and Libya. The ban is for both national security reasons and to prevent people from coming into the country and overstaying, according to the administration. And the White House is reportedly weighing adding 36 more countries to the list if they do not take steps to address their nationals in the U.S. illegally.
But ICE itself may not have the bandwidth for widespread enforcement expansion—at least, not right now. The agency is currently $1 billion over budget, and with more than three months left in the fiscal year, it could run out of money next month. Trump could declare a national emergency and divert funds from other agencies, but the easiest solution would be for Congress to pass the reconciliation bill, which would provide ICE with more than $75 billion in additional funding over the next five years.
“I don’t see any changes on the horizon other than onward and upward when the money comes in,” Bier said. “The reason why they have this huge deficit is that they’re feeling so confident that they’re going to get this money from Congress, so they are spending ahead, banking on getting money to bail them out.”
And resources are beginning to run thin. As of late April, the Trump administration had arrested more than 151,000 illegal immigrants. More than 48,000 of them are currently being held in detention facilities, putting the centers close to max capacity. The administration is planning to increase the number of illegal immigrants sent to Guantánamo Bay to alleviate fears of overcrowding, but with arrest quotas now at 3,000 a day, it is likely to be a continuing problem—particularly if deportations slow down but arrests do not.
“The folks that are getting picked up in some of these worksite enforcement efforts are still going through a lot of legal process,” De Peña said. “So it’s not like they are just rounded up and then taken to the border and turned around. The question is, how quickly can they build new detention facilities? How quickly can they stand up more of a judicial apparatus to move these cases through the process?”
That judicial apparatus also poses challenges for removing large numbers of immigrants from the United States. George Fishman, a senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told TMD that it would take an extremely long time to go through the current backlog of immigration cases—and that’s before factoring in these new detainees.
“I’m not necessarily sure it’s logistically, procedurally, practically possible to remove millions and millions of removable aliens through the normal removal process, which is presumably one of the reasons why the president has sought to use the Alien Enemies Act in certain cases to get around the Title 8 removal proceedings,” Fishman said, referring to a 1798 law that allows the president to imprison and deport noncitizens in wartime. In May, the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s attempt to deport Venezuelan nationals under the act, sending the issue back to an appeals court.
Whether the obstacles will be enough to slow down the administration’s massive immigration crackdown in the long term remains to be seen. “I do think that the economics of the situation and these increased workplace raids may start to turn that tide a little bit,” De Peña said. “But I don’t think that it’s broken through just yet.”
