The Blue Wave Can’t Stop Ice

“Deportations will continue,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote in a post on X the day after voters punished his party in the midterm election. The three-word statement appeared to be aimed at quieting an incipient debate among Republicans over whether President Trump should ease his ICE crackdown. Two years after he won back the White House promising the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history, Trump and his party suffered monumental losses in states such as Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, where voters—especially Hispanics—swung hard to Democrats. More moderate Republicans have urged the administration to adopt a quieter enforcement approach, focusing more narrowly on criminal offenders.

Although the president has reportedly expressed concern to those close to him that some ICE tactics have gone too far, he has not ordered specific policy changes, according to three senior officials I spoke with at DHS. Those officials and others I’ve talked to told me they aren’t expecting a pullback, either. Trump’s decision to name Stephen Miller as his chief of staff yesterday places the chief architect and principal ideologue of the ICE campaign in charge of his administration. Miller’s promotion will give him even more power to mobilize other federal agencies to help ICE maximize deportations.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, Republicans in Congress have given the administration nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars for the crackdown, aiming for 1 million deportations a year. ICE has obtained upwards of $110 billion, more than 11 times its annual budget, and the funding surge has created a powerful inertia. Absent a major policy reversal from Trump or a successful intervention by Democratic majorities in Congress—a longshot, experts say—Trump’s mass-deportation campaign will continue with its mandate to add more officers, more deportation flights, and more immigration jails. The campaign includes handing out wads of cash to local police and sheriff departments, which help the agency boost arrests. Prior to the midterms, ICE launched a hiring push to add 5,000 more employees—mosty deportation officers—by the end of the year.

“Regardless of the political pressures that the White House may be feeling on immigration enforcement, the money creates a huge amount of momentum on its own,” Sarah Pierce, an immigration policy expert at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. ICE has so much money that it will have to double its rate of spending to use it all before its deadline at the end of the 2029 fiscal year, she said. “Pulling that back would be extremely difficult for the White House.”

[Read: Losing the ‘big-ass truck’ vote]

Despite the midterm results, there hasn’t been a broad consensus in the Republican Party that overzealous ICE tactics were a vulnerability, and some right-wing commentators have pointed to exit-poll data showing that immigration was the top motivating issue for Republican voter turnout.

At a polling place in the Dallas suburbs where I spoke with voters on Tuesday, several of the Republican supporters I met said they wanted Trump to stay the course. “Gotta keep locking it down,” said Danny, a 32-year-old hospital staffer I met outside a public library in Plano, north of Dallas. Danny told me he didn’t want his last name published, because he worried that he’d be harassed. His hometown and surrounding Collin County were reliably Republican when he was growing up, he said, but the region’s economic boom had brought in more transplants. “They keep voting for Democrats,” he said. “Democrats vote for more immigration. It’s a vicious cycle.”

James Talarico, the Democratic winner of the Senate race in Texas, won Collin County by 12 points on Tuesday, a 23-point swing from Trump’s 2024 victory. It was the first time this century that Democrats have won statewide races in the county. Trump won nearly half the Hispanic vote nationwide in 2024, but this year Hispanics are estimated to have voted for Democrats by a 69–29 percent margin.

Could Democrats use their large majorities in Congress next year to force the administration to rein in ICE? Claire Trickler-McNulty, an attorney who has held several high-ranking roles at ICE, most recently during the Biden administration, told me that it will be hard for Democrats to change the trajectory of ICE spending. If Democrats pass an appropriations bill with language constraining or shifting ICE funds, Trump would have to sign it. “I don’t have a lot of confidence that he would sign that, but people I’ve talked to on the Hill feel like there may be a window or a path to a clawback, if you combine that with something he cares about,” Trickler-McNulty said.

Trump has said he doesn’t want to spend the next two years “vetoing everything,” although the White House has also circulated a photo of a red VETO hat sitting on the Resolute Desk with the president in the background. Trump told Politico late Tuesday night that he’d be willing to work with Democrats on immigration reform if it were “appropriate and good for the country.” But the possibility of such negotiations could reduce the likelihood that Trump orders a different tack for ICE in the meantime.

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a leading immigration-restrictionist group, told me that the Trump administration has already shifted tactics, and could do so again. After the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January, Trump demoted Greg Bovino, the performative Border Patrol commander who was leading the crackdown in the city, and replaced Kristi Noem with Mullin, who said he wanted a more low-key ICE approach. That change marked the end of what Krikorian described as “theatricality,” generating ready-for-TV images of masked federal forces staging operations that thrilled the president’s base. But Krikorian said that an “imbalance” remains between “body-armor enforcement versus briefcase enforcement.”

Trump could direct ICE to conduct more enforcement at worksites—not necessarily with raids that would send people running, Krikorian said, but with mundane audits that check Social Security numbers and other documents. “Worksite enforcement is something that has been very much lacking in this administration,” he said. It’s a lot less photogenic and a lot less politically tumultuous to just send in some bureaucrats.”

[Read: The secretary of homeland]

ICE continued to ramp up, with less fanfare, after Minneapolis, and the agency is now making more than 50,000 arrests a month, its highest rate ever. Officers have achieved those levels in part by using automated technologies, such as license-plate readers, and powerful database tools to make more traffic stops. Those public encounters deepened the backlash to ICE over the summer when officers shot several unarmed immigrants—two fatally—as they attempted to drive away. City and state governments have joined in that backlash, a trend that could accelerate with the widespread Democratic victories this week. The mayor of Houston announced yesterday that the city’s police will no longer contact ICE about nonviolent offenders who lack legal status.

White-collar enforcement would not necessarily lead to arrests and deportations, but it would make it more likely for immigrants who are in the United States illegally to leave on their own, Krikorian said. The frustrations that Trump has been hearing from business owners may weigh against a crackdown on employers.

Vice President Vance, who is considering running for president in 2028, appeared to signal a preference for that approach on Wednesday in a lengthy X post that assessed the party’s defeat. Vance wrote that he was “open” to shifting ICE’s focus to businesses that “hire illegal labor,” but said he didn’t support “amnesty,” the catch-all term used by immigration hard-liners who oppose creating a path to legal status for the estimated 12 million to 15 million immigrants who are illegally present in the United States. “Anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you,” Vance wrote.

Pierce told me that she interpreted Vance’s post as a defense of the administration’s crackdown that was aimed at Republicans who view the midterm results as a rebuke. She said she’ll be watching to see if pressure on the administration to change tactics builds in the coming weeks or if the White House remains defensive and determined to follow the same course.

[Read: Repudiation]

There were also signs in Vance’s post of the conundrum that he and other potential Republican presidential candidates will likely face if they try to succeed Trump. Although there is broad support across the electorate for the deportation of immigrants who commit violent crimes or pose a threat to public safety, those immigrants represent only 10 to 20 percent of ICE arrests. Trump officials have spent the past two years appealing to the most ardent members of the MAGA movement, especially those who want DHS to be a tool of social and demographic transformation through the removal and “remigration” of millions of immigrants. Those views are too extreme for most voters in a general presidential election. But to win the party’s primaries,

Vance, or any other potential Republican candidate, may need to embrace them.

Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer contributed reporting.