It Was Always Going To Look Like This
If Republicans really want "mass deportations," they better have the stomach for it.
The pro-life movement fought for a generation to get one thing: Roe v. Wade overturned.
They finally got it in the summer of 2022. It was viewed by the movement, rightfully, as a historic policy victory.
A few months later, it was plausibly the primary factor in Republicans suffering a brutally disappointing performance in the midterm elections, in which the GOP only flipped a handful of House seats and Democrats actually increased their Senate majority, all despite Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade, and implicitly, the policy triumph of the pro-life movement, was widely blamed for the poor performance. And yet, to this day I don’t know a single pro-life activist who regrets that victory, or would trade it for a few more seats in Congress.
Border hawks may now be facing their own such dilemma. Much has been made since the killing of Renee Good about the public’s turn on immigration. Trump’s action to secure the border was overwhelmingly popular. It’s what the American people voted for, and his team achieved it with a speed and totality that was an unabashed success.
Interior enforcement is a bit more complicated. Polling is going south fast on ICE, the numbers on the shooting itself are bad, and some of the president’s own advisors are reportedly getting cold feet about the prospect of continuing aggressive deportation operations in a midterm year.
“He wants deportations. He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks,” one top Trump advisor apparently told Axios.
There’s just one problem: it was always going to look like this.
It doesn’t have to look exactly like this, no. The administration has shot itself in the foot on the optics in some ways. The memes of immigrants crying, embrace of “Heritage American” shitposting, perhaps the masking of ICE agents (I’m on the fence on that one) — they all make the visual of rounding up people and deporting them more intimidating and scary to the normies.
But, on net, you can only dress up “mass deportations” so much. Trump ran to the maximal position on this issue. He and the immigration hawks who backed him created an expectation that there would be millions of deportations happening every year, to the point of eventually ridding the country of every single illegal immigrant within it.
That is simply not possible to do in a normie, swing-voter-friendly way. It involves house-to-house and business-to-business raids. Perp walks of small business owners employing illegal labor. Breaking up of families mixed between migrants and citizens. Stuff that makes the middle-of-the-road American squeamish, even if they broadly support having a strong border.
It will also inevitably result in mistakes. Citizens getting caught up in the mix, “model migrant” stories that pull on the heartstrings, and incidents like what happened with Renee Good, which even if justified legally, are still upsetting to the American public.
And Democrats and the media? They will seize on each and every one of these mistakes to make the initiative as painful as possible.
In other words, Trump and his allies now face the same predicament the pro-lifers did: are they willing to risk short-term political success to achieve a much bigger policy victory?
Are they willing to keep the pedal to the metal on ICE operations through 2026 even if it means a midterm wipeout? Further, are they willing to keep at it another two years going into 2028?
The greatest victories come at great costs. The immigration hawks face a fork in the road. Are they strong enough to win?