Republicans split over ICE tactics as Democrats adopt border security framing
President Donald Trump’s second-term immigration campaign has produced the enforcement volume it was built to deliver: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested almost 51,000 immigrants who were in the country illegally in August, up from 49,000 in July and 43,000 in June, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Yet the same enforcement campaign is generating the backlash that now threatens the party’s midterm prospects. Polling cited by The Associated Press shows voters disapprove of Trump’s approach to immigration, a striking turnaround for the issue that fueled his return to the White House, though some support remains for his handling of the border.
Trump’s allies argue that the president is the victim of his own success. “The disaster at the border and the impunity of people just walking over and being released into the country was hard to ignore,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Krikorian praised Trump for adopting low-profile, highly effective sweeps that produced month after month of record arrests, and said the president dramatically reduced illegal border crossings, “and that’s often politically bad.”
The reversal is easier to understand against what came before. During his 2024 campaign, American television screens were filled with images of migrant tent camps on both sides of the border, caravans of people walking through Central America and concerns about newcomers overwhelming social services. That turmoil faded as President Joe Biden tightened immigration enforcement, before Trump clamped down even further. The disruption has shifted to American streets, according to The Associated Press, where violent and even deadly clashes have defined a deportation campaign designed to fulfill hardliners’ goals of uprooting anyone in the country illegally.
Trump warned repeatedly of an immigrant “invasion” and said of people crossing the border illegally, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.” He also insisted, falsely, according to The Associated Press, that immigrants were behind spikes in crime and eating household pets. That focus resonated with voters who had seen illegal immigration soar during the Biden administration, with border arrests from Mexico reaching a record 250,000 in December 2023.
After taking office, Trump cranked deportations into higher gear, and Congress gave the effort a statutory lift. Forty-six Democrats in the House and a dozen in the Senate joined Republicans in voting for the Laken Riley Act, a bill named after a Georgia student killed by a man in the country illegally. The law requires detention without bond for noncitizens accused of murder and other violent crimes.
The administration’s actions drew a court challenge and, eventually, a Supreme Court order. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, was sent to his native El Salvador despite a court order forbidding it, and was confined in that country’s notorious central prison, which had also housed other Trump deportees. The U.S. Supreme Court directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, and Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador to meet with him. “The American people supported strong border security,” Van Hollen said. “What they got instead was shredding the Constitution, mass deportations and killing American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis.”
Minneapolis was the turning point. Gregory Bovino, the top Border Patrol commander, had swaggered through raids in tactical gear and deployed forces to Los Angeles and Chicago, where he led a helicopter raid on an apartment building. In Minneapolis, more than 2,000 federal officers were sent, and scenes of masked agents spilling from convoys of unmarked vehicles became commonplace. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets. Two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, were killed during confrontations with agents.
In the weeks that followed, the White House pushed aside Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Michael Pretti, Alex’s father, said this week that the family is still troubled by bystander videos of the shooting. His son had a holstered gun that he was legally allowed to carry, and none of the footage shows him brandishing the weapon or attacking federal agents in the moments before he was killed. “I think it haunts many Americans to see a U.S. citizen who was peaceful and in his community shot multiple times on the back, in the back, while on the ground,” Pretti told reporters. Arrests dropped after the killings, although they eventually returned to record numbers.
The politics became more complicated after the killings, and Republicans’ immigration message has fractured. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is vowing more deportations as she runs for governor, while Cuban-American Florida Rep. Maria-Elena Salazar criticized the administration’s immigration enforcement in a campaign advertisement filmed outside the White House. Salazar has sponsored legislation that would allow immigrants who are in the country illegally to remain as long as they have otherwise followed the law, with Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, who is trying to distinguish himself from Trump while running in a Colorado swing district, among the sponsors. In New Hampshire, former Sen. John Sununu, running for an open Senate seat, has been critical of ICE tactics and the agency’s use of masks to conceal agents’ identities.
Republicans also continue to tie immigration to voters’ concerns about high prices. Ohio Sen. Jon Husted blasts Democratic opponent Sherrod Brown as someone who “voted to raise your taxes repeatedly and give those tax dollars to illegals.” Frank Sharry, a longtime immigrants’ rights activist who consults with the centrist Democratic group Third Way, said the Republican strategy is aimed at defining Democrats. “Republicans are trying to turn voters against Democrats because of what Joe Biden did in failing to control the border effectively,” Sharry said. “So they’re trying to define Democrats as being for open borders and not serious about removing criminals.”
Many Democratic candidates are shifting away from Biden-era messaging. In Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico calls himself a “border security Democrat” who wants to hire more Border Patrol officers and increase the use of surveillance technology. Talarico criticizes many of Trump’s immigration policies as wasteful, but doesn’t hold back when it comes to criticizing the last Democratic president. “Joe Biden and his administration failed us on our southern border,” Talarico said in a July press conference in a Texas county on the Mexico border. Even some of the most liberal Democratic candidates, like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, are careful to note that they want strong borders.
Van Hollen said some Democrats have moved from watching to voting: “We’ve gone from some of that sniping on the sidelines to a clear vote among Democrats to defund ICE,” he said. Some Democrats had earlier questioned the wisdom of confronting Trump on an issue where the president was so popular, the senator recalled, but he said his party is now more emboldened on the issue. “I don’t know of a candidate who’s in a swing race who’s saying anything other than ‘We’ve got to secure the border’ and ‘We’ve got to remove criminals,’” Sharry said.
Both parties are now repositioning around the same issue. The administration is carrying record enforcement numbers while falling short of its own deportation goal — an estimated 660,000 people deported in the past fiscal year, according to the Migration Policy Institute, against a goal of 1 million annually — and Van Hollen said Democrats who once watched from the sidelines are now voting to defund ICE. Trump, who said at a recent Florida rally that Democrats let migrants “pour across our borders from all over the world,” warned that a Democratic win would mean repeating the past: “If they win in the midterms, they’ll do it again.”