It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Harvard University historian James Hankins celebrates the 94% reduction in illegal border crossings that the Trump Administration achieved in just its first six weeks as an “unprecedented accomplishment.” He cites polling evidence indicating that, while a wide majority of Americans supports deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of felonies, a wide majority is against deporting most undocumented but otherwise law-abiding illegal aliens. Mass deportations, he argues, are neither “good for the country” nor “politically smart.” He warns GOP leaders that stories about “immigrants suffering in detention camps, tearful family separations…and so forth…could turn into a major wedge issue for Democrats in the 2026 election cycle.” This argument for measured, not mass, deportations needs to be amended and refined—but it should not be rejected.
Start with Hankins’s rendition of public opinion. He cites a January 29, 2025 ABC News story that summarized (perfectly well) three (perfectly credible) polls on the issue, each of them conducted between January 9, 2025 and January 14, 2025. But many problems plague contemporary polling, even on simpler, binary-choice topics (like the choice between two candidates for president). A February 14, 2025 Gallup report detailed the particular challenges behind the unusually high variability in polling results on the mass deportations issue.
Still, the best and latest polls paint much the same bifurcated picture of public opinion on mass deportations that Hankins painted. For example, a March 26, 2025 Pew report, based on survey data compiled from February 24, 2025 to March 2, 2025, found that one-third of all adult Americans, and 52% of all self-identified Republicans or Republican-leaners, believed that “all immigrants in the U.S. illegally should be deported.” Support for deporting illegal immigrants who have “committed violent crimes” was 97%. But just 52% favored deporting illegal immigrants who “committed nonviolent crimes,” and majorities also opposed making arrests in churches (65%), schools (63%), and hospitals (61%).
Hankins bets that the majorities against mass deportations will grow as more Americans are exposed to stories about ostensibly law-abiding, tax-paying undocumented immigrants who appear to have been treated with undue harshness by federal authorities.
Time will tell, but what social scientists call “unobtrusive measures” (like inferring which painting in an art gallery is the most popular with visitors by looking at how worn the wooden flooring is beneath each masterpiece) can sometimes reveal and even predict more about opinion dynamics than polls. The plural of anecdote is not data, but consider the example of several 60-plus-year-old, MAGA-to-the-max, pro-mass-deportation Republican men whom I know well. These men know me as a conservative Democrat—one who, though skeptical about the administration’s “government efficiency” initiative and other policies, gives it high marks for rapidly securing the nation’s southern border. My friends were reflecting on an April 4, 2025 story in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The story featured a U.S. citizen married to an undocumented immigrant, one of an estimated 11 million who live in the country. The man had come to America at age 17 from Belize with his mother in 2002. He got arrested for a DUI in 2011; but, in the 14 years thereafter, he was by all accounts law-abiding, a good neighbor, and a husband and father of two children, a 3-year-old and a 9-month-old (about 4.4 million children in America live with at least one undocumented parent). He was arrested on February 2, 2025 for driving sober but without a license just outside of Philadelphia in Montgomery County (Pennsylvania being among the 31 states in which no undocumented immigrants may obtain a driver’s license). He was outside his home crying out for his wife when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took him away.
In informal chats among and between the aforementioned men and me, one volunteered that the story and others like it had turned him against mass deportations. We should, he averred, deport the “violent criminals” immediately but “give some special breaks” to otherwise “undocumented folks” who have been living, working, shopping, recreating, raising children, and paying taxes in America for five years or more. Another guy was moved by the story but coded it “for now” as anomalous; and a third interlocutor stood pat, suggesting that “gray area” cases were no reason “to stop or slow down deporting” or risk “the whole thing unravelling.”
Administrative Math
Hankins claims that “deporting criminals is the easy part,” by which he seems to mean “easy” relative to the political and legal hurdles attendant upon mass deportations. But when it comes to immigration policy and customs enforcement, there is no easy part. That would be true even if there was near-universal, bipartisan public support for any given policy, and even if the U.S. Supreme Court suddenly reversed or radically narrowed its precedents holding that illegal aliens have more than perfunctory due process protections.
In brief, in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and after months of partisan political wrangling, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was cobbled together haphazardly from 22 preexisting federal units, including long-troubled ones like the Federal Emergency Management Agency. With all due respect to its past and present appointed leaders, full-time workers, and scores of thousands of contractors, DHS has been, and continues to be, an organizational maze and a hot administrative mess, not least with respect to the short-staffing, under-resourcing, and overreliance on intergovernmental partnerships that conditions how it executes immigration policy.
More than 400 federal statutes govern DHS’s immigration and customs enforcement actions. Peruse ICE’s policies and procedures manuals, then read any of the many reports detailing DHS’s persistent failures on tasks ranging from managing day-to-day expenditures to monitoring the location and status of unaccompanied alien children. If that’s not enough to counsel caution, consider that when this deportations push began last January, there was already a backlog of 3.6 million cases pending in immigration court. Likewise, last year, ICE had funding for about 41,500 detention beds and 21,000 full-time-equivalent personnel, only about a third of whom were dedicated to enforcement and removal operations.
ICE is flanked by DHS’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) subunit. Since 2019, ICE and CBP together have averaged about 350,000 deportations per year. During the administration’s first ten weeks, while just “ramping up,” they made about 100,000 deportations. Just maintaining that accelerated pace for the rest of the year, let alone doubling it to one million deportations in accordance with what has been reported as the administration’s “private goal,” would betoken at least 500,000 deportations by mid-January 2026.
Even with additional funding and staffing, the feds would need ever greater formal-legal cooperation from state and local governments, including but not limited to an expansion in the so-called “278(g) agreements,” by which DHS, in effect, federally trains and deputizes state and local law enforcement personnel to screen noncitizens’ immigration status and issue arrest warrants and detainers. When they do not get it (as they almost certainly won’t), even a measured or surgical (“violent criminals only”) deportation policy will give rise to administrative maladies that multiply and magnify the policy’s political and judicial problems through sheer cumulative probability.
To wit, even if each federal action unto deportation required just seven separate and sequential steps to make happen (and, depending on how one does the counting, the actual number of steps required for any procedurally correct detention or deportation is typically well north of seven); and even if each well-planned and well-executed step was 90% likely to prove politically popular, judicially kosher, and a case study in cooperative, competent, and nonpartisan intergovernmental relations—i.e., even if each step in the deportation policy implementation chain was destined for success—by the seventh step (multiply .9 by itself seven times), the probability of success would be 47.8%.
In sum, in this particular federal public administration domain, long policy implementation chains are bound to break early and break often. Whether targeted on undocumented residents who have committed violent crimes, committed to mass deportations, or something in between, there’s nothing easy about translating immigration and customs enforcement policy rhetoric into safe, sound, and legally defensible administrative action.
But what about the administration’s aforementioned spectacular success in securing the U.S.-Mexico border, targeting drug cartels, disrupting transnational criminal organizations, and reducing illegal alien crossings to a trickle, all inside just two months? Shouldn’t it make us less circumspect or dour about the administrative challenges surrounding immigration policy?
Not really, because that success had far more to do with the Department of Defense (DOD) than it did with DHS’s ICE or CBP. As detailed in a March 13, 2025 DOD report, that mission was accomplished by a military-centered operation that fast-tracked “terrorism-related warrants”; deployed 4,000 active-duty troops “alongside 2,500 reservists already in place”; and enlisted a “4,400-soldier Stryker brigade combat team and a 650-troop general support aviation battalion,” plus Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, to bolster CPB’s southern border patrols.
Measured Alternatives
Hankins proposes a measured alternative to mass deportation policy. His plan would permit undocumented immigrants to apply for worker permits; travel abroad and apply for U.S. citizenship from their home countries; receive state and local government benefits, including special driver’s licenses; and avoid certain federal taxes; it would also debar them from joining labor unions. To make it happen, Congress would need to “appropriate substantial new resources” to DHS in order to improve the now “costly and grindingly slow process” for obtaining “worker permits, lawful residency, and citizenship.”
In 2007, President George W. Bush proposed a more comprehensive package of measured alternatives. In sum, his no-amnesty immigration policy overhaul called for prosecuting illegal aliens who committed serious crimes or trucked with terrorists while simultaneously encouraging undocumented but otherwise law-abiding immigrants to emerge from “the shadows,” pay fines, learn English, pay taxes, undergo background checks, and hold a job for years before heading to the “back of the line” for citizenship behind everyone who legally applied for it.
Senate Republicans killed President Bush’s plan back then, and it would be a surprise if either today’s GOP-led Congress or President Trump embraced anything like Hankins’s plan now.
This much, however, seems likely: whether or not explicitly acknowledged as such by decision-makers at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, before the 2026 midterm elections, the search for measured alternatives to mass deportation will be back on in earnest.
