There is No ‘Nice’ Way to Do Mass Deportations
Predictably, a fresh wave of outrage against President Donald Trump and his administration’s immigration policies followed the shooting in Minnesota of anti-ICE activist Renee Good. Viral videos of alleged outrages committed by ICE agents are bolstering the case against the ongoing raids and deportations. While the majority of those speaking out against them are on the left, some on the right are also falling prey to this pressure campaign. These queasy conservatives now claim that their objections to the ICE raids are grounded in a suspicion that they may be detrimental to the goal of mass deportations.
Popular podcaster Darryl Cooper, who goes by the pseudonym “Martyr Made” on X, is one such right-wing figure advancing this claim. In response to a video purportedly showing an ICE agent detaining a citizen (the citizen in question was arrested for assaulting federal law enforcement officers), Cooper excoriated the administration for allowing this to happen. “Anyone being cavalier about how this is playing with the general public doesn’t care about deportations or demographics,” he wrote in an X post. “They’re nihilists who just want a good show. The number of highly-committed 3-time Trump voters I know who have stepped away over the past week is astonishing.”
In a deleted follow-up post, Cooper insisted President Barack Obama managed to deport more migrants than Trump “without the theater.” His point, he said, was to suggest there might be a way to push out 10 million illegals without upsetting the public in the process.
Yet the oft-repeated line that Obama deported more illegals than Trump is simply fake news. The reason our 44th president appears on paper to have removed so many migrants is owing to the fact that so many more illegals tried to cross the border during his administration. Officials, therefore, counted “turnaways” as deportations. But this is a category error. Under Obama, interior enforcement was “nearly dismantled due to executive-decree amnesties and so-called ‘prosecutorial discretion,’” according to the Center for Immigration Studies. The only migrants deported were those caught at the border (and only some of them, as many were released into the country) and criminals handed over by police to federal immigration officers.
If we want to carry out more deportations than that, however, there is no nicer way to do them. The assumption that there is a kinder and gentler way to accomplish this goal is based on misinformation about the deportation figures of past Democratic administrations, failures to acknowledge the success of the current administration, and misunderstanding about the possibility of conducting such operations without drawing the attention of activists and mass media.
There are only two options here for Trump: either he continues his strong immigration enforcement policies in the way he is doing them, or he drops the goal of mass deportations altogether. There is no secret third way that will somehow please liberals and also simultaneously remove millions of illegals.
It’s strange to see purportedly right-wing influencers suddenly working to revive the myth that Obama was somehow a “Deporter-in-Chief” when the truth is that deporting people has long been contrary to the Democrats’ obvious political strategy. The new arrivals appeared to Obama’s party as future voters—they just needed a “pathway to citizenship” to show their love for the Democrats. They no longer cared that illegals took the jobs of working-class whites. Those citizens were no longer their voters; the immigrants, however, were.
Trump’s first year in office has seen the fewest illegal entries since the Nixon administration. In 2025, there were only 109,000 apprehensions at the border, fewer than the monthly average for most of the Biden administration.
Moreover, unlike under Obama and Biden, virtually all illegals caught at the border today are detained and deported. This demonstrates Trump has effectively ended further illegal immigration, but the absence of a deluge of border crossers to turn away means the Trump administration cannot artificially boost its deportation figures as Obama did when it suited his interests. Increased interior enforcement is now the only way to achieve mass deportations. Naturally, this leads to cell phone videos that make liberals uncomfortable.
The idea that Obama deported more illegals is just one of many false notions that have taken root among the disaffected and highly online right. There’s a sentiment in some quarters that there has been no significant decrease in the illegal migrant population, and the administration is only doing theatrical ICE raids to keep up appearances and satisfy the base. Both suggestions are simply wrong. It’s estimated that the foreign-born population in the United States has decreased by 2.3 million in the first nine months of Trump’s second term. It marks the first time in 50 years that America’s immigrant population has significantly declined. That’s serious progress.
The Trump administration is undertaking more than performative ICE raids to deter illegal immigration. The One Big Beautiful Bill introduced remittance taxes to penalize migrants who send their earnings back home. The administration is seeking to deny public benefits to illegal immigrants. Officials have proposed an alien registration to pressure migrants to leave, as well as financial incentives to self-deportation. The feds have cracked down on universities offering tuition assistance to “undocumented” immigrants. They have also targeted employers who hire illegals.
More could be done, of course. More can always be done. But most options, such as increasing remittance taxes, would require congressional authorization, which has not been forthcoming. It took a miracle just to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill. Congress can’t be counted on to do much more. The administration is working through all available options.
The current strategy seems to be working, however. What some have falsely labeled “terror tactics” have deterred future illegal immigrants from coming to the country and convinced hundreds of thousands of illegals already here to leave. That’s far more than any president has accomplished since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Cooper and others assume there are ways to deport millions of illegals with hardly anyone noticing. That is frankly impossible. The high-visibility raids are a natural result of the feds trying to carry out their mandate to do mass deportations in the first place. We live in a world full of cell phone cameras. Any person with an agenda can turn a routine ICE arrest into a source for media outrage by hitting the record button. There is no way for immigration enforcement officers to do this work and avoid this consequence. They are always going to attract attention just by doing their job. The high visibility is the result of that, not of the administration intentionally drawing as much attention to the effort as possible.
It is absurd even to consider that mass deportations might be done in a way that would incur minimal public backlash. Liberals were always going to get mad at the sight of uniformed officers hauling away immigrants. That’s the inherent cost in trying to make America great again. It’s necessary to do things that will cause discomfort for Americans who demand things that are bad for the country.
Some right-wingers will counter that instead of arresting and deporting illegals, the better strategy is to zealously prosecute illegal-hiring employers. The two issues with this are that the strategy would also likely cause a massive public backlash, and it’s unclear whether it would have the same deterrent effect as the so-called “terror tactics.”
ICE agents raiding the homes of citizens who claim they accidentally hired undocumented maids and gardeners would not sit well with a lot of people. We would have a whole new genre of “sob story” in which hardworking American businessmen are punished severely for not doing proper checks to see whether an employee is illegal. It wouldn’t just be rich factory owners who intentionally discriminate against American workers who get charged. It would be anyone who they find doesn’t check these things—including plenty of small businesses and ordinary citizens who may have hired illegals for handyman jobs.
Renee Good’s death generated so much outrage, in part, because people saw her as an everyday American citizen. When everyday American citizens become the targets of immigration enforcement, we can expect a real wave of public backlash. It could also cause problems for the economy, further inciting voter outrage.
Moreover, it’s not certain that this kind of enforcement would dissuade illegals from coming to the U.S. or persuade them to leave the country. Many of the illegals who came here under Biden were drawn in by the promise of government assistance, not work. This is the primary draw for immigrants who go to Europe, for example. Many of them don’t work at all, which results in the majority of welfare recipients in some countries now having a migration background. Many illegals in America would remain even if their employers were arrested. It is still better to be poor here than poor in Nicaragua.
None of this is to suggest that it would be wrong to go after employers. It is just that it wouldn’t be the most effective way to rid the country of illegal aliens. Nevertheless, all options available to the administration should be utilized, and those who flaunt our laws should be punished, regardless of whether they’re citizens.
To reiterate, there is no magic third option between mass deportations and no deportations. Every attempt to push illegals out of the country will result in a backlash from the left and savage media attacks. It is the price we must pay to achieve our goal of mass deportations.
It’s clear that Trump’s current tactics are effective. We should ignore liberal hysteria rather than capitulating to it.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/there-is-no-nice-way-to-do-mass-deportations