In the past few days, as the shooting of Alex Pretti has induced a change of tone and of personnel in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, some of the White House’s supporters have written laments for what they see as a fatal loss of nerve. Their theme is that any concession to protesters will just encourage the same opposition tactics in every state and city, which will eventually make all internal immigration enforcement impossible, nullifying both federal law and Trump’s 2024 victory.
As for those Republicans who look at the street chaos, the growing political backlash and the two dead American citizens (so far) and think that there has to be a different way, the conservative podcaster Matt Walsh parodied their stance as follows:
This ICE situation is really complex. My take is more nuanced. I want our immigration laws to be enforced, but I just want them to do it without using any force, and without anyone ever getting hurt, and without anything sad or upsetting happening ever, and if the people we’re trying to deport don’t want to be deported, or if liberal activists don’t want us to deport them, then obviously in that case we shouldn’t do it, but I’m totally a conservative on the issue, unless people get really mad at me then never mind please don’t yell I’m sorry.
I’m squarely in the camp that Walsh is satirizing, since my position at the moment is that the Trump administration was entirely correct to prioritize deportations after the collapse of immigration enforcement under his predecessors, but that misplaced priorities and excessive brutality have created a debacle and that simply doubling down will make things worse. So let me make a brief case for that view — that enforcement is necessary, this approach to enforcement is bad, and a different course is possible.
Start with the points that Walsh gets right. It’s true that you can’t have sustained immigration enforcement without also having upsetting cases and sympathetic deportees. If you deport illegal immigrants with families, you will have to choose between family separation and deporting children. If you conduct arrests in homes and neighborhoods, you will be accused of traumatizing kids and communities; if you conduct them in workplaces, you will be going after the hardest-working migrants. If you focus only on immigrants who have run-ins with the law, you’ll end up deporting people with minor infractions. And so on.
It’s also true that any deportation program will meet resistance from people — activists, lawyers, protesters — who basically don’t want you to deport anybody, and that certain liberal jurisdictions are in a state of permanent noncooperation with federal immigration law. Even when it comes to violent criminals, the sanctuary-city position is effectively that they should be jailed but not deported — or to quote Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis this week, doubling down on his city’s refusal to cooperate with federal deportation efforts, “Violent criminals should be held accountable based on the crimes they commit, not based on where they are from.” That means that even if your policy exclusively targets criminals, you still have to send agents into liberal jurisdictions where local officialdom is hostile to your efforts.
There are conflicts here that can’t be wished away. But the fact that some backlash and resistance are inescapable doesn’t mean that all enforcement strategies that generate backlash are sound or wise. To the contrary, precisely because immigration enforcement is difficult, there are basic things you need to do to pre-empt backlash, to reassure the general public and to make your critics look extreme. And the Trump administration’s immigration enforcers have often done the opposite of what both political wisdom and decency require.
First, they have deliberately played up the tough-guy aspect of enforcement, asking agents to generate footage of arrests and detentions, layering on hip-hop soundtracks for social-media clout, as though the public’s support for immigration restriction were actually a demand for Jerry Bruckheimer videos of shackled migrants. Nobody watching these videos would think that this is an agency working carefully and authoritatively and acting more in sorrow than in anger. Just as important, nobody watching these videos would think that protesters carrying cellphones were injecting a media-circus element into a purely professional operation. The operations themselves look like hype jobs, and by the administration’s own choice — a choice tailored not for the G.O.P. base as a whole but for a small and hyper-online constituency.
Second, the enforcers have repeatedly established themselves as unreliable narrators. The extreme case of Pretti, in which officials denounced the dead man as a terrorist bent on mass murder before any kind of investigation, is just the starkest instance of a larger pattern of unreliability about specific raids and targets and interactions with protesters. The administration’s political problem isn’t only that ICE agents sometimes make mistakes or that law enforcement operations sometimes yield tragic deaths. It’s also that when something does go wrong, it gives the public no reason to believe that it’s taking the problems seriously. The default is always to blame a cabal of enemies instead.
Again, such cabals do exist, in the sense of activist groups seeking dangerous confrontations and aiming for interference as well as protest. But now we reach the third great failure of the administration: the nature of the Minneapolis operation, which was conceived with transparent political motivations on a scale guaranteed to catalyze a much larger political reaction than anything that activists could generate alone.
Minneapolis is not an especially large city, and it doesn’t have an especially large number of illegal immigrants. It was targeted because of recent revelations about fraud in the Somali community and the link to Tim Walz, the governor of the state — but since ICE doesn’t investigate fraud, the predictable effect was to direct attention away from those stories and onto immigration enforcement.
Then along with that own goal, the actual enforcement campaign created a different feeling in the affected region than ICE’s operations did in the larger landscapes of Los Angeles and Chicago — a sense of citywide occupation rather than targeted intervention. Some conservatives have argued that Minneapolis has attracted more media attention than earlier operations because the activists are perfecting their methods of resistance. There may be truth to that, but based on my conversations with people in both L.A. and Minneapolis, the biggest difference is that in Minnesota ordinary people started encountering masked agents all the time, resulting in a siege mentality that made the activist task of mobilization infinitely easier.
This list doesn’t even touch other strategic failures, like why the administration has chosen to privilege ICE roundups over workplace sanctions. But just these critiques suffice to amend the Walsh caricature as follows:
I want our immigration laws to be enforced, but I want the government to do it without cutting advertisements that make it look like it’s in love with its own punitive powers, without constantly dissembling and shouting about internal enemies and acting like its own errors don’t exist, and without enforcement operations creating a police-state atmosphere for a major metropolitan area that lasts for weeks.
To Walsh and other advocates of permanent confrontation, maybe even that reformulation sounds like hapless surrender. But to me, these people are constructing a dream palace where polling and mainstream opinion don’t matter at all, where just showing strength is enough to carry waverers and anxious normies with you, where a magical final victory awaits that doesn’t require compromise or coalition management.
The woke weren’t bound by polls and public opinion, comes the reply. Yes, and look what it got them: a decisive electoral defeat and a generational opportunity for conservatism, which the Trump administration has been giving away, piece by piece and controversy by controversy, since the “vibe shift” days of late 2024.
But even Trump knows that it’s a bad idea to crack your own core coalition, and to risk letting your polling sink below its normal lows. His apparent willingness to take a step back isn’t weakness. It’s a small dose of a wisdom that the right needs in far greater measure before it’s actually equipped to rule.
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