The Trump administration has named New York City the next target in its deportation tour. White House border czar Tom Homan revealed last week he is planning a widespread dragnet across the Big Apple “in the near future,” in addition to enforcement sweeps already happening.
The administration sees this as the obvious next step in its pressure campaign against “sanctuary” policies in blue cities and states. But these actions are not without cost. In fact, the administration’s mass deportation campaign is already backfiring.
Securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes are some of President Donald Trump’s most popular policies. The latter has support among 79 percent of Americans — including 69 percent of Democrats — in the latest Harvard-Harris poll. Despite this, approval for Trump’s immigration agenda has dropped nine points since February.
The president’s over-the-top approach to deportations is almost certainly the reason why. While Homan has vowed to prioritize going after the “worst of the worst,” the administration has rounded up more than just hardened criminals. Americans can see the difference between carting off a rapist and deporting the neighborhood gardener who pays taxes.
The Trump administration blames “collateral arrests” — picking up people who weren’t the target of an operation — on sanctuary policies. Todd M. Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has said they wouldn’t feel compelled to be so aggressive if localities willingly turned over “violent criminal aliens.”
Lyons raised a valid public safety concern. Some progressive states and cities limit local law enforcements’ ability to honor ICE detainers, or requests for law enforcement to hold people past their release date, unless a serious crime has been committed. And some cities, such as New York, require a conviction for a serious crime or a judicial warrant. Sanctuary jurisdictions often argue that holding someone for a civil ICE detainer amounts to unlawful detention. This means that some migrants with criminal charges have been released back into the community in defiance of a detainer.
It’s reasonable to debate how local law enforcement can cooperate with ICE to track down potentially dangerous criminals. But that isn’t an excuse for the government to round up just anyone, nor is it a particularly effective way to convince moderates to rethink sanctuary policies. “Bringing hell” to Boston, as Homan promised to cheers at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, hasn’t gotten Massachusetts to change its policy on honoring ICE detainers, but it did make Boston’s defiant mayor, Michelle Wu, a progressive hero. Some states, such as Colorado, have even strengthened their sanctuary laws since Trump took office.
Meanwhile, mass deportations — and Trump’s broader anti-immigration policies — are threatening key industries like construction and agriculture. In October, Trump’s own Labor Department released a document that “the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce” is disrupting production costs and “threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers.” For a moment, Trump seemed to understand this, briefly directing immigration officers in June to stop arresting agriculture and hospitality workers before reversing that policy a week later.
New Yorkers have already been through a roller-coaster of immigration policies. In 2022, Republican governors in border states bused migrants to the city to test the sincerity of its sanctuary laws. In time, Mayor Eric Adams (D), once a defender of those laws, changed his tune. In April, his administration issued an executive orderallowing ICE into New York’s Rikers Island prison complex to investigate transnational gang members, just days after federal prosecutors dismissed corruption charges against the mayor. His order was blocked in September by the New York State Supreme Court because of an “impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest.”
At his chummy news conference with Trump on Friday, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said New York’s laws allow the city to coordinate with ICE on some serious crimes, but that these have “very little to do” with the deportation of women and children whose only crime is being in the country illegally. Some members of the Trump administration don’t care about that distinction, but the American people seem to.
The post Americans want order, not overreach appeared first on Washington Post.
