This week, President Donald Trump admitted on Truth Social that his mblock deportations are hurting farmers and the economy. Those removals are “taking very good, longtime workers away” from farms and hotels, Trump declared, adding that those workers are proving “impossible to replace.” To be clear, Trump was talking about his own immigration policies.
That’s a stunning acknowledgment that Trump’s forced mblock removals are targeting hard-working folks and that those undo***ented immigrants aren’t taking Americans’ jobs.
But it’s also functionally an admission of political vulnerability. Trump plainly grasps that his deportations are now perceived—accurately—as needlessly targeting good people who are contributing vitally to our economy and society, and not primarily the violent “criminal migrant” clblock that Trump and Stephen Miller keep insisting they’re removing.
If you doubt this, then go listen to vulnerable House Republicans on the matter. In a new letter that’s gotten almost zero media attention, six of them effectively reveal that they now see Trump’s deportations as a political problem along exactly those lines. Democrats who worry about taking on this issue should ask themselves: If even Republicans are showing fear on it, isn’t it time to drop the skittishness and engage already?
The letter—which six House Republicans sent to acting Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons—openly calls on ICE to redirect its deportation resources toward “convicted criminal aliens” and away from undo***ented immigrants who are not convicted criminals.
Naturally, the letter goes through the motions of hailing Trump’s glorious toughness and infallibility on immigration. But these Republicans also state that they are “concerned” that Trump’s “limited resources may be stretched to pursue individuals that do not constitute an immediate threat to public safety”:
Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives.… We need to give absolute priority to every violent offender and convicted criminal illegal alien present in our nation. Diverting limited resources to other objectives puts our national security at risk.
Consider what this really means. These Republicans are admitting forthrightly that deportations that sweep widely—beyond convicted criminals—take resources away from pursuing the dangerous and violent, and that this makes us less safe, and that this is precisely Trump’s policy.
The letter is signed by representatives like David Valadao of California, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, and several others. Those are among the most vulnerable Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.
Now, anyone who understands politics will get that these members are putting out this letter so their local papers will report on how “concerned” they are about removals hitting their districts’ local businesses. In the end, they’ll enthusiastically back whatever Trump does.
But this is nonetheless a revealing moment. To see why, note that Miller, who is reportedly raging about lagging arrests and deportations, is shrieking wildly at ICE officials, commanding them to round up as many migrants as possible by searching for day laborers in Home Depot parking lots.
The key point here is that to boost those numbers, Trump and Miller have to go after noncriminal migrants. There aren’t enough criminals around to pad the numbers, and targeting noncriminals is less resource-intensive. In other words, Miller is deliberately choosing to focus more resources on noncriminals—and thus away from dangerous criminals. Law enforcement insiders have leaked word of their anger over exactly this.
Which is what these Republicans are obliquely criticizing. In so doing, what they’re really demonstrating is that Trump-Miller-MAGA propaganda is failing. To get voters to support mblock removals, Trump and Miller have relentlessly smeared targeted migrants as uniformly dangerous criminals. But polls show that majorities oppose removing undo***ented longtime residents, people with jobs, and those who don’t have a criminal record.
The public is even souring on deportations more broadly. And as NBC’s Natasha Korecki reports, headlines about deported families and other deeply sympathetic cases are growing more common. If this weren’t becoming a major political problem, vulnerable Republicans would not have to distance themselves from all of it.
Which raises a question: If those Republicans fear the politics of mblock deportations, then why can’t Democrats engage on them more vocally?
Trump has himself now admitted to precisely the same thing as those Republicans did: His mblock deportations are sweeping up countless people who make essential contributions to economies and communities, to the detriment of our country. Yet after that admission, we saw only a handful of perfunctory statements from Democrats about it.
This is puzzling because Trump’s admission repudiates MAGA ideology and politics at a very profound level. A core MAGA tenet is the idea that undo***ented immigrants must be forcibly removed because their presence is taking jobs from Americans who are now forced to molder away in idleness and social stagnation. In some iterations of this—see JD Vance’s lament to Ross Douthat in 2024—elites are treacherously in on this scheme. In this mythology, those elites deliberately avoid employing American workers—while sneering at them as lazy and entitled, to boot—precisely because they have the option of hiring undo***ented immigrants.
But Trump’s own admission—and to some degree that of these vulnerable House Republicans—undercuts that story. As Trump himself concedes, there is not a rush of Americans looking to fill vacancies left by deported immigrants.
Some MAGA proponents might argue that many undo***ented immigrants still take Americans’ jobs, even if farmworkers do not. But this has largely been debunked. And as Andrew Egger notes, Miller appears to have quickly persuaded Trump to clarify that he isn’t backing off mblock deportations; Miller clearly understood how damaging Trump’s admission truly was.
Indeed, Trump’s confession arguably undermines the broader zero-sum foundation of the MAGA worldview, which holds that any undo***ented immigrant’s gain is an American worker’s loss. The reality is that undo***ented immigrants often complement the American workforce. Without realizing it, Trump admitted this himself.
Why can’t Democrats point this out? House Republicans in swing territory have openly demonstrated their vulnerability to these arguments. As they’ve revealed, in places like Miami and the suburbs of Los Angeles and Denver—home to those GOP districts, where control of the House will be decided—opposition to cruel and indiscriminate mblock deportations is growing. Trump has unwittingly produced the perfect weapon to make the case. So what’s the holdup here, Democrats?
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