Behind The Gop Convention: An Immigration Fight

When President Donald Trump takes the stage in Dallas at the GOP midterm convention, he’s expected to tout record immigration arrests by immigration agents and a border that’s been hardened — all of which he’ll say has driven down violent crime.

What he almost certainly won’t do is reprise a campaign of mass deportations of the sort he rode to a second-term victory.

The shift from two years ago is likely to infuriate hardline immigration activists already livid over their feeling that the administration hasn’t lived up to its campaign promises. But it also is an acknowledgment that the politics of immigration are far thornier for Trump than they were at the 2024 convention when “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs filled the room. The change is due, in large part, to the killings in Minneapolis and Maine, third-country removals, and the arrests of thousands of long-term immigrants who have not committed violent crimes.

A person close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said Trump delivers the keynote address he will lean into how his immigration policy has improved public safety. The person added that border security, public safety and targeting criminals residing in the U.S. illegally remains popular among wide swaths of voters.

“People are significantly safer by all metrics. It’s the one thing people can agree upon,” the person said, who added that a majority of voters support immigration enforcement but want to see it in “a more targeted fashion” in the wake of Minneapolis.

But that posture is exactly what’s alienating immigration hardliners, who made up an important part of the president’s winning coalition. In recent months, they have ramped up their criticism, accusing the White House of going soft on the president’s aggressive immigration agenda. They have decried a lack of immigration enforcement at businesses and work sites, scant arrest and deportation data, and what they see as a focus on the “worst of the worst” criminals instead of a broader pool of undocumented immigrants.

Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol Commander who the White House sidelined after Minneapolis, said young Republicans are disillusioned and don’t believe the administration’s claim that they are breaking arrest records or following through on the promise of mass deportations.

“The one thing I know is [young voters] are not happy, and they haven’t been happy for a long time since the surrender in Minnesota,” Bovino said. “They realize their future is being destroyed, and they’re being gaslit over some crazy numbers. They want the war fought here on American soil.”

The competing tensions will be on display in Texas, where some local Republicans have warned that the Trump administration’s crackdown is ravaging the business community, especially in construction and agriculture. Members of the American Business Immigration Council, which will also have a presence at the convention, met with White House officials in late August and pointed to polling that shows that Hispanics nationally say their view of Trump is shaped primarily by the cost of living and immigration enforcement, and that over 80 percent of Texans want to see long-term, trusted immigrants stay in the country on work permits.

Those findings track with an August POLITICO poll, which found half of Americans, including nearly a quarter of Trump’s 2024 voters, still say the president’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive — figures virtually unchanged from polling numbers in January and April, after high-profile immigration raids in Minneapolis during which federal agents killed two U.S. citizens. In the aftermath, the White House softened its message on deportations.

Rebecca Shi, the executive director of ABIC, a coalition of pro-immigration reform business executives, believes that a less aggressive posture, particularly at work sites, and the issuance of work permits would help combat inflation with an increase in the labor force and show that the administration is really targeting criminals.

“We’re hoping that can get to the president. It’s a win-win, right?” Shi said. “You bring down inflation, and you also help to regain the Texas Hispanic voters who voted for President Trump two years ago by moving forward on legal status and work permit, which is actually exactly what the president said last summer over this mass roundup, indiscriminate mass roundup.”

The White House is aware of the tricky balancing act and has recently launched a public relations blitz to tout record ICE arrests and efforts to clamp down on legal immigration in the run-up to the convention, in what appears to be a bid to beat back MAGA criticism. The White House also shared a new Center for Immigration Studies report that uses Census Bureau data to estimate that the population of undocumented individuals in the U.S. decreased by over 2 million since Trump returned to office.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said there has never “been a president who has been stronger on border security and immigration enforcement.” She touted self-deportations, the president’s border security efforts and summer ICE arrest records — which reached nearly 51,000 in August, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“While extreme Democrats continue to put criminal illegal aliens before American citizens, try to defund federal law enforcement, and fight for open borders, President Trump and Republicans will continue enforcing the law,” Bis said.

A senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said deportations are “steadily going up.”

“We can hang our hat on a lot of big wins when it comes to immigration, and if anyone wants to think that a Kamala Harris administration would do better on immigration, then … they don’t have a good grasp of what’s actually going on,” the official said.

Still, the midterm convention could deepen a growing sense among hardliners that the administration is asking them to accept an immigration record they don’t believe matches the campaign rhetoric.

Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, an organization led by some prominent Trumpworld veterans, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts, said the president’s “conviction” around mass deportations is his “ticket to a successful midterms.”

“The country realizes that not enough progress has been made, but there is still time if there is enough political commitment,” he said. “I am sure there will be plenty of wealthy corporate donors there rooting against what I am rooting for.”

That skepticism among MAGA critics and immigration hardliners is driven, in large part, by the Trump administration’s handling of the immigration enforcement data. DHS has not released full data outlining immigrant removals since Trump took office, a move that has rankled some of the White House’s far right critics, including Howell — whose Oversight Project sued the administration this summer to release the figures. DHS officials have periodically leaked figures showing a huge spike in detentions and arrests, which reached a record-high under Trump in July, but they have yet to break down which figures are being counted in those totals.

“I’m not happy that I have become a critic. This doesn’t bring me solace. I voted for Trump all three times. I worked for him, and I believe in the America First agenda,” said Mark Morgan, who served as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol during the first Trump administration. “But I also believe that we’re being misled. Mass deportations are not happening.”

Megan Messerly contributed to this report.