The potential deportation of people like Carol Hui, which has shocked locals in the Missouri town where she’s lived for 20 years, has inspired a searching debate: What did people think they were voting for when they chose Donald Trump? The relentless smearing of “illegals,” the “mass deportation now” signs at the 2024 GOP convention, the vows to herd migrants into giant camps—how could voters not have known that Trump would remove as many as possible?
These are hard questions with no simple answers. But here’s one thing we can reasonably be certain of: Most voters had no idea that to execute Trump’s mass deportations, the administration would shift huge amounts of law enforcement resources away from combating serious and dangerous crimes, potentially hampering efforts to keep us safe.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. And this hands an opening to Democrats—including those skittish about this issue—who are looking for fresh ways to make the case against Trump’s deportation regime.
NBC News reports that top Trump adviser Stephen Miller recently erupted in anger over what he sees as woefully lagging deportation numbers, privately threatening to fire senior Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials over it. He demanded the detention of 3,000 migrants each day, sources told NBC.
It’s not surprising that the failure to impose maximal cruelty and suffering on the vulnerable would infuriate a dime-store fascist like Miller. What’s striking, though, is that this has prompted the administration to devote “more than 5,000 personnel from across federal law enforcement agencies” to arresting undocumented immigrants, per NBC.
This includes 1,800 agents from Homeland Security Investigations, which usually probes crimes that don’t involve noncriminal migrants, NBC reports. It also includes 2,000 employees from law enforcement agencies at the Justice Department, like the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
This is already hindering other crime-fighting. “Prosecutors say cases without immigration components have stalled or are moving more slowly,” reports NBC, adding that federal law enforcement officials say the “increased focus on cases with an immigration angle is pulling resources from other law enforcement priorities.”
It’s difficult to gauge the precise impact of all this without more detail. But Deborah Fleischaker, a former chief of staff at ICE, says it’s reasonable to surmise that the sheer bulk of resources being reallocated will adversely impact other enforcement efforts.
“Shifting that number of law enforcement agents from those types of agencies inevitably will mean fewer resources fighting transnational criminal organizations, drug smuggling, counter-terrorism, and child exploitation,” Fleischaker told me.
Now ask yourself this: How many voters understood that when Trump vowed to remove “illegals,” it would drain extensive resources away from fighting crimes like those?
The answer has important implications for how Democrats should proceed now. They often seem to assume that Trump has won the argument over immigration, particularly over the undocumented population. But recent events suggest this is still very much open to contestation.
For one thing, Trump’s higher-profile arrests and deportations are demonstrating that ordinary voters who wanted a more orderly immigration system—and believe this is what Trump promised—are recoiling at the forced removals of unauthorized immigrants who have, to varying degrees, integrated into American life.
The best recent example of this is the Trump voter from Missouri who said of Carol Hui’s arrest: “No one voted to deport moms.” This has prompted chortling online, with many citing those “mass deportation now” signs and saying: You absolutely did vote to deport moms.
But as data analyst G. Elliott Morris explains, even if that’s technically true, data shows that majorities do not want to deport “moms” or other unauthorized immigrants who haven’t committed serious crimes and have assimilated in some meaningful sense. Morris looked at recent polling on various types of deportations—of people who have lived here for over 10 years, or haven’t broken non-immigration-related laws, or have jobs here and no criminal record—and found all of them deeply underwater with the public.
That people voted for Trump despite these views—after he explicitly vowed to deport people from all those categories—is usually explained as an informational failure. Voters concluded Trump only wanted to deport criminals. Or they believed Trump when he wildly inflated the number of “criminal aliens” here, meaning mass deportations would of necessity target only such people. Or they just didn’t process his vow to remove non-criminals at all.
“On immigration, lots of voters cast ballots for Trump because they were told that there were millions of violent criminals here illegally, and that he would deport them all,” Morris writes. “But many of them did not have information about the rest of his deportation plans.”
This matters, notes Morris, because if numerous “moderate Trump supporters” out there oppose “deporting non-criminal parents,” then there’s an opening to supply them with information that this is actually happening, which Democrats can do. This creates space to turn them against Trump on this issue.
That’s all true. But I’d like to suggest another layer to this, one that could prompt Democrats to take this on more aggressively: Voters almost certainly didn’t grasp the deeper ideological priorities animating the Trump-Miller worldview.
Polls sometimes show that majorities support deporting undocumented immigrants when that’s posed as a yes-or-no question, but they also show that opinions change under more nuanced questioning. If respondents are asked whether they favor deporting longtime residents, they oppose it. Or if they’re offered the alternative of a path to legalization, they support doing that.
In short, opinion on immigration is confused and self-contradictory. All that data suggests that when voters hear “deport people here illegally,” they understand it as something like “restoring order and the rule-of-law to our immigration system.” And so, if majorities oppose removing longtime residents and support giving law-abiding immigrants legal status, then it’s likely they want a system that secures the border and removes serious criminals but also one that creates orderly pathways to lawful presence for those who want to contribute peacefully to our economy and society.
Unlike Miller, that is, majorities are not ideologically hostile to the mere presence of peaceful unauthorized immigrants in this country; they just want the system to work. Yet Miller and Trump see that presence as itself posing a dire public emergency, or even a civilizational one. In this worldview, there can be no desirable pathway to lawful status here for these people, because they inherently represent a public threat—they are “poisoning” the nation’s “blood.” Making them legal wouldn’t change that. It would only make the threat they pose more insidious.
That’s why Miller is capable of tweeting that the House GOP budget bill is the “most essential piece of legislation” in “the entire Western World,” largely because it ramps up deportation resources. To him, saving the “Western World” rides on deporting all those unauthorized people, including all those “moms.”
All this gets at the deeper reason Miller and Trump are shifting extensive law enforcement resources away from serious crimes into deporting noncriminal immigrants: They simply do see the presence of these people as an extraordinarily urgent national emergency, perhaps more urgent than all those other serious crimes.
It is very likely that majorities would find those priorities deeply demented. As Fleischaker, the former ICE official, told me: “The idea that immigration enforcement is the most significant national security and public safety concern that we as a country face is deeply unserious.”
Which gives Democrats a strong case to make: Trump’s twisted ideological obsession with deporting moms—and other unauthorized immigrants who have committed no serious crimes—is detracting from the fight against transnational gangs, drug trafficking, and child exploitation.
To Trump and Miller, all those unauthorized immigrant moms really do constitute a national emergency. But there’s no way majorities agree with this. Democrats: Miller’s private outbursts reveal a new kind of Achilles Heel on this issue—time to seize on it, and prosecute the case accordingly.
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