President Donald Trump’s immigration point men are scrambling to contain a MAGA revolt over the administration’s faltering crackdown.
The most hawkish of the president’s allies believe that Trump has reneged on his promise to oversee a wide-ranging crackdown on illegal immigrants. Trump campaigned on the promise to roll out mass deportations and secure the southern border with Mexico.
By May 2025, Trump’s immigration goons were demanding that federal agents arrest up to 3,000 people a day with a view to deporting them.
However, the administration hit the brakes slightly after the effort to expel migrants turned deadly in January. Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, were killed when agents clashed with protestors in Minnesota.
Now, with one eye on the midterms and as concerns that he has backtracked on another campaign promise grow, Trump is ramping up the anti-immigration rhetoric again. “You ain’t seen s--t yet,” his border czar Tom Homan said on Tuesday, nailing the tone that was shelved after Minnesota. “Mass deportations are coming.”
Politico cited “people close to the administration and immigration hawks” who said that this is an effort to satiate an aggrieved MAGA base whose growing impatience could be reflected in polling results come November. However, Trump risks rankling a bloc that believes the immigration clampdown went too far.
Homan and Trump’s hand-picked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin insist that the effort hasn’t “slowed down,” just that it hasn’t been publicized as much.
“It’s political rhetoric designed to meet both camps,” a person close to the administration said of the current approach from the Department of Homeland Security. “Which is no surprise, it’s a political administration trying to win midterms.”
But hardliners aren’t buying it. “Knocking door to door, and looking just for the worst of the worst and things like that, you’re not going to be able to ramp up the numbers,” said a second person close to the administration. “I get the sense that they’re trying to have their cake and eat it, too.”
“There’s a worry with Republican politicians that they’re going to talk a big game on enforcement and not follow through. Immigration hawks have been lied to by Republican politicians for years and decades, so it’s justified that they want reassurances,” said Mark Krikorian, who leads the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. think tank that favors a harder line on legal immigration.
On Wednesday, the Mass Deportation Coalition released a playbook about a deportation program that favors raiding workplaces to round up migrants. This was a hallmark of Trump’s early deportation effort, which was apparently shelved when blowback intensified.
“Enforcement at scale means focusing on physical areas where illegal aliens are concentrated: worksites,” the plan reads, in part.
The White House and DHS, of course, insist everything is fine. “ICE has NOT slowed down,” a DHS official said in a statement, adding that three million people have been deported during Trump 2.0.
“We will continue to deliver on the president’s promise to make America safe again.”
A spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Secretary Mullin “works closely” in “a team” with President Trump, his adviser and the architect of his immigration policies, Stephen Miller, and Homan.
They claimed there have been an “estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 700,000 deportations.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said that “nobody is changing” Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, and added that the administration’s top priority has always been to deport “illegal alien criminals.”
“There’s a lot of sort of outside voices who say we’ve stopped all deportations, we’ve stopped all border security,” an anonymous White House official added. “That’s just not true. It may not necessarily be in the news right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”
