Trump Losing on Immigration

WHAT MOST AMERICANS THINK ABOUT IMMIGRATION HAS SUDDENLY CHANGED

Nearly eight out of ten U.S. adults believe immigration is good for the country, the highest level ever recorded. A new Gallup poll found 79 percent of Americans now have a positive view of immigrants, reversing a four-year decline with a dramatic 15-point surge. At the same time, the number of people who want to further reduce immigration has dropped from 55 percent in 2024 to just 30 percent today. The shift comes as illegal border crossings have dropped sharply, easing public concerns that had fueled the current administration’s drive for stricter enforcement. The surge in support for immigration has rebounded across party lines, with Republicans showing the most significant jump—climbing from just 50 percent last year to 65 percent today.

“If you got here, and you’ve integrated, maybe you shouldn’t have snuck in. But you did it, and now you’re not breaking any laws, and you’re a hardworking person—those people need a path to citizenship, man.” [Trump-supporting podcaster Joe Rogan in a recent broadcast.] 

Joe Rogan is saying is what most Americans currently think. Americans want immigrants who are criminals to be removed from the country, but they don’t like the brutality of this administration or the expulsion of good people who have become friends of theirs in their communities. Yes, some immigrants are people who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas, but most have been law abiding people who have added to the economy and the positive fabric of their communities. They help our country to be successful not only by paying taxes but by spending money as consumers and starting new businesses. The Trump administration is arresting them based not on probable cause but the color of their skin, treating them like the worst criminals, detaining them in prisons like Alligator Alcatraz and then kicking them out of this country and sending them to countries where they don’t even speak the language and doing this without any due process.

Maybe this is Trump being tough but Americans don’t like it. The most recent Gallup poll reflects a fundamental and radical shift in thinking that is the direct result of backlash against Trump’s brutality.

MOST AMERICANS ARE NOT AS CRUEL AS STEPHEN MILLER OR TRUMP

Who is in charge of this purge?

Stephen Miller is the brainchild behind this purge of immigrants in our country but Trump is giving him free rein. Miller is the one who set the unsustainable quota that ICE must make 3,000 arrests a day. That has resulted in sweeps of places where immigrants gather to get day jobs like Home Depot and where larger numbers of immigrants work such as farms, factories, or grocery stores. These sweeps are frighteningly similar to Russian and Nazi pograms. The Holocaust Museum defines a Pogrom as a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries.

Stephen Miller should be ashamed of himself, since he was raised in a Jewish family that escaped antisemitic pogroms in the Soviet Union,

Stephen Miller’s maternal great-grandparents, Louis W. and Bessie Glosser, emigrated from Antopol, Belarus, to the United States to escape anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1903 and 1906

IMMIGRANTS ARE NOT A BUNCH OF CRIMINALS DESPITE WHAT TRUMP SAYS

At first only 11% of the immigrants being expelled in these sweeps by ICE had criminal records in America. Now that number is down to 8%. It will fall even lower because there are so few immigrants who break the law that to meet the quotas they have set they will have to expel noncriminal immigrants.

Trump says he wants to deport as many as 11 million immigrants, analyses published by The New York Times and The Washington Post indicate that it may be difficult to remove many of them under existing U.S. law. The one group that is easy to remove – those with a criminal record – is relatively small, numbering about 650,000. [PBS]

What Americans voted for in 2024 was the removal of immigrants with criminal records and backgrounds. Americans may have believed that there were way more immigrants who were criminals than there are in fact thanks to Trump’s mis and dis information.

• Lower Crime Rates: Studies consistently show that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are less likely to commit crimes or be incarcerated compared to native-born citizens.

Many immigrants who did enter illegally found jobs in a wide array of industries that rely on immigrants as part of their low wage workforce (underpaying them also greatly benefits those industries). Which industries rely on immigrant labor? They include but are not limited to: construction, elder care, child care, the fashion industry, farming, gardening, trucking, grocery stores and many more. Many immigrants pay taxes, and obey the law, unlike Donald Trump. They have lived here for 20 to 30 years and built their lives and raised families in this country hoping to help their children have better futures in this country.

New data from the American Immigration Council published February 25, 2025, tells us how valuable immigrants are to the health of our economy.

1. Undocumented immigrants are essential contributors to the economy. In 2023, undocumented immigrant households paid $89.8 billion in federal, state, and local taxes and held $299 billion in spending power. In total, immigrant (both legal and undocumented) households paid nearly $16.80 in every $100 tax dollars collected by federal, state, and local governments, funding a wide range of social services that benefit all Americans.
2. Immigrants inject trillions of dollars of housing wealth in the United States. The vast majority of immigrants are not dependent on state governments to guarantee them with housing; in reality, they are putting back vast sums of money into the housing market and revitalizing neighborhoods. In 2023, immigrant households paid over $167 billion in rent in the housing market, and held over $6.6 trillion in housing wealth.
3. Immigrants help ease key labor shortages, and are driving innovation and business creation. Almost 1 in 4 entrepreneurs in the country are immigrants. About 46 percent of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Elsewhere, immigrants are helping ease the labor shortage in the healthcare industry, where nearly 16 percent of nurses and about 28 percent of health aides were immigrants in 2023.

Many immigrants have become contributing members of their communities and belong to local churches. It is telling that pastors are starting to object to these pogroms because so many of their parishioners are afraid to attend church anymore.

WHAT’S BEHIND THESE DEPORTATIONS? 

What is the motivation for these sweeps and deportations? Since so few of these deportees have criminal records, there has to be another explanation for the push to expel these people.  A portion of Trump’s MAGA base still wants this aggressive policy implemented- although Joe Rogan might start influencing the MAGA base to think otherwise since he strongly believes this is unfair and has been saying so not only in his podcasts but at a recent dinner he had with Trump. Will Trump do a TACO on this issue? (Trump Always Chickens Out)

The administration is now at an inflection point, with deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller leading the hard-liners pushing for more deportations even as the president himself sends mixed messages. In the space of a day last week, Trump expressed sympathy for “our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business” who “have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them”—only to post a few hours later that he was committed to stanching the “tsunami of Illegals.”

“I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”

THE REAL MOTIVATIONS UNDERLYING TRUMP’S ATTACK ON  IMMIGRANTS

1. This administration likes having a 24/7 reality TV show playing all the time to prove they are doing what Trump promised. As often happens with Trump, he goes overboard. Often he has an ulterior motive that is not what he said he was doing but far more nefarious. (See below)
2. This administration wants to scare away anyone even thinking of trying to enter at the southern border. Alligator Alcatraz and cruelty has helped with that goal. Immigrants have gotten the message about not showing up at the southern border. Trump has accomplished that goal. Biden began more forceful restrictions at the border in June of 2024 by using an executive order to limit the number of asylum seekers allowed into the country. Biden did that before Trump became president and it was effective. It is one of the reasons Miller is having trouble rounding up 3,000 illegal immigrants a day.
3. Many Trump supporters are white supremacists. They want Black and Brown people out of this country. Self-deport or get deported.
4. Trump and his allies are going to try to stay in power and are afraid of the loss of congress in 2026 and beyond. They know their big ugly bill is going to deprive working Americans of their health care, their rural hospitals, their opportunities to get ahead in life but that will happen over time. Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans will try to deport millions of people who would vote against them in the future.
5. Authoritarians always have a vulnerable population they use as a whipping boy.
   Scapegoating is effective for authoritarians because it:
   • Weakens opposition: By uniting the majority against a common “enemy,” it distracts from the government’s failures and shifts blame elsewhere.
   • Consolidates power: It breaks down societal cohesion and reinforces an “us vs. them” mentality, making it easier for the authoritarian to maintain control.
   • Undermines democratic principles: It can turn the strength of human rights into a weakness, forcing democrats to defend even the most marginalized groups, potentially making themselves targets in the process.
   • Justifies repression: It creates an environment where violence and discrimination against the scapegoated group can be normalized and even encouraged. 
6. I believe Trump and the Republicans plan to use ICE as a militia/goon squad under this administration’s control to create fear about going to a polling place to vote in the midterms. In battleground states Republicans state legislators are already racing to limit who gets to vote. State legislatures in battleground states do this by making bogus claims that drop boxes and mail in ballots cannot be trusted, for example. They purge voter rolls, eliminating people from the rolls without telling them. ICE agents deployed close to polling places in battleground states and key districts are part of the plan to suppress the vote to help the Republicans stay in power in 2026 and beyond. Their job will be to scare away people they think would be likely vote for Democrats. [Read Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket to learn more.]
7. Funding ICE at the level this reconciliation bill does allows Trump to create his own SS troops as Hitler did in Germany and many other autocrats have done throughout history. Trump is using the immigration issue as a way to create his own loyal army with the goal of holding onto power as long as he is alive if he can.

• President Donald Trump’s signature law includes about $75 billion for ICE over four years, including $45 billion for new immigration detention beds and $30 billion to hire 10,000 ICE employees, upgrade facilities and more.
• ICE becomes the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency under Trump’s law compared with the FBI and DEA’s existing budgets.
• Loyalty over professionalism:

  Autocrats prioritize loyalty over competence when creating their own military forces, ensuring they are instruments of their will rather than independent entities. 

• Parallel security structures:

  Autocrats frequently establish parallel security forces, such as presidential guards or secret police, alongside or instead of the national military, to ensure their control and minimize the risk of coups. 

• Suppression of dissent:

  These forces are used to suppress any opposition to the autocrat’s rule, including protests, political dissent, and potential rebellions. 

• Examples:

  Many authoritarian regimes throughout history have relied on such forces, including the SS in Nazi Germany, the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire, and the KGB in the Soviet Union.

Trump might want to stay in power forever, like all dictators do, but two things are happening inside his MAGA base that could disrupt or end Trump’s political power and dominance. Immigration had been Trump’s superpower, but Trump is overplaying his hand which is dividing his base. And Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost is coming back to haunt him as well. I will be writing about that in the next Markin Report. Stay tuned.