From the beginning, Donald Trump’s approach to deportations has been about both removing people from the country and the spectacle of removing people from the country. If any doubt lingered about the president’s commitment to the cause, he erased it in Los Angeles, where his response to the widespread protests against a series of ICE raids—he has dispatched roughly 4,000 California National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines, all against the wishes of the state’s governor—has been an extraordinary (and extraordinarily excessive) demonstration of force. Trump’s message has been clear: No matter who or what tries to get in the way, his administration will push forward with deportations. L.A. is “the first, perhaps, of many” military deployments in the United States, Trump said earlier this week.
The spectacle part, Trump has down. The president has ushered in one of the most aggressive immigration campaigns in recent American history. The ICE raids in L.A. are just the latest of many high-profile instances in which federal law-enforcement officials have antagonized and rounded up suspected undocumented immigrants—some of whom are citizens or legal residents. Hundreds of immigrants have been swept away to what functionally is a modern Gulag in El Salvador, and the administration has recently tried to send others to South Sudan, which is on the verge of civil war. Enforcing immigration policy does not have to be inhumane, but the Trump administration is gloating in the very barbarity.
Amid all the bravado, however, the administration much more quietly has been struggling to deliver on Trump’s campaign promise to “launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” So far, deportations have not dramatically spiked under Trump, though daily rates have been on the rise in recent weeks. According to government data obtained by The New York Times, the administration has deported more than 200,000 people since Trump’s return to office, well below the rate needed to meet the White House’s reported goal of removing 1 million unauthorized immigrants in his first year in office. If the pace over the first five months of Trump’s presidency continues through the end of the year, total deportations would only slightly exceed that of President Barack Obama in fiscal year 2012.
The discrepancy is surprising. Given the visibility of Trump’s efforts, you’d be forgiven for believing deportations were unfolding on a never-before-seen scale. The actual numbers don’t diminish the cruelty of Trump’s approach or the pain his administration has caused to those it has targeted. But they do reveal Trump’s ever-increasing mastery of bending perceptions of reality. The administration’s immigration tactics are so shocking, callous, and inescapable that they have generated the appearance of mass deportations. Paranoid rumors of ICE agents hovering around playgrounds, waiting to arrest noncitizen nannies, have spread. Some immigrants have opted to self-deport instead of subjecting themselves to the potential horrors of ICE detainment and deportation.
No reason exists to think the White House has been deliberately falling behind on its deportation promise. The administration has run into several challenges: The easiest migrants to deport are those who have just crossed the border, and unauthorized immigration has dropped significantly since Trump took office. (Trump’s deportation approach and rhetoric has, in other words, seemingly been successful at keeping people out of the country in the first place.) At times, ICE has faced detention space constraints, and some of the administration’s deportations have been stymied in the courts. In an email, the White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote, “President Trump has already secured the border in record time and is now fulfilling his promise to deport illegal aliens.” The administration plans to use a “full-of-government approach to ensure the efficient mass deportation of terrorist and criminal illegal aliens.” In Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that is working its way through Congress, Republican lawmakers are set to give ICE a massive funding injection to help the agency finally carry out mass deportations. “If that money goes out, the amount of people they can arrest and remove will be extraordinary,” Paul Hunker, who was formerly ICE’s lead attorney in Dallas, told my colleague Nick Miroff.
For now, Trump is faking it until he makes it, with his administration doing everything it can to draw attention to its immigration tactics. Yesterday, federal agents handcuffed and forcibly removed Senator Alex Padilla of California just after he interrupted an immigration press conference featuring Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. In March, Noem had generated a previous viral moment when she traveled to the El Salvador megaprison where the administration has sent hundreds of supposed gang members, and gave remarks in front of shirtless, tattooed prisoners. The administration has even brought along right-wing media figures for its ICE arrests, producing further images of its immigration enforcement. Phil McGraw—the former host of Dr. Phil, who now hosts a show for MeritTV, a right-wing network he founded—was at ICE headquarters in L.A. the same day of the immigration sweeps in the city that prompted the protests last week.
Consider, too, the shocking ways in which the administration has discussed the deportation campaign on social media. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image styled like a World War II propaganda flyer, urging Americans to “report all foreign invaders” to a DHS hotline. The White House’s X account has created a meme about a crying woman in ICE custody, and uploaded a video of a deportee boarding a plane in clanking shackles with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
In one sense, all of this is just classic political spin. Instead of admitting that it’s falling behind on one of its core promises, the White House is attempting to control the narrative. But the scale of reality-warping going on in this case is hard to fathom. Trump’s actions are part of a larger way in which he has come to understand that he can sway the nation with the right viral imagery. When he was indicted on racketeering and other charges and forced to take a mug shot in 2023, Trump glowered into the camera instead of looking embarrassed or guilty, generating an image that became the subject of viral memes and campaign merchandise—and seemingly inspired his second presidential portrait, in which he strikes the same glowering pose. When he came within inches of dying during the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last summer, he had the instincts to produce one of the most significant images in modern American history.
The series of videos, pictures, and aggressive actions his administration has taken regarding deportations are of the same genre. Trump takes the reality in front of him and does what he can to create a perception closer to what he wants: in this case, one of fear and terror. This is authoritarian behavior. Trump is marshaling propaganda to mislead Americans about what is really happening. Other recent strongmen leaders, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, have used a similar playbook. If Trump can’t remove as many immigrants as he promised, the president can still use his talent for warping perceptions to make it feel as though he is. Laws don’t need to change for free speech to be chilled, for immigrants to flee, and for people to be afraid.
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