Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet already, mostly thanks to his dumb trade war, which seems to be pushing the country toward the recession that was widely predicted but failed to materialize during Biden’s presidency. It’s a giant self-own because all the orange fart cloud had to do was what he did the first time a plurality was irresponsible enough to elect him: sit back and take credit for a predecessor’s work.
Immigration is the one issue where Trump still has significant public support. In recent polls (example at Axios), about half of Americans approve of how Trump is handling immigration.
I suspect that support is thinner than the numbers suggest. It probably depends on how the questions are phrased. If you dig down and ask questions about specific incidents (like shipping non-criminal U.S. residents to foreign gulags) or techniques (targeting law-abiding foreign students for protected speech), public support numbers would likely drop, but that’s just speculation.
A piece by Nick Miroff in The Atlantic on Trump’s upcoming mass deportation plans indicates we’ll find out soon enough. The article says Republicans will increase ICE funding dramatically in a reconciliation bill they’re currently hammering out in Congress:
Using the budget-reconciliation process, Republican lawmakers are now preparing to lavish ICE with a colossal funding increase—enough to pay for the kind of social and demographic transformation of the United States that immigration hard-liners have long fantasized about achieving.
Although GOP factions in the House and Senate have squabbled over the contours of the bill, spending heavily on immigration enforcement has bicameral support. The reconciliation bill in the Senate would provide $175 billion over the next decade. A House version proposes $90 billion.
To put those sums in perspective, the entire annual budget of ICE is about $9 billion.
The Atlantic piece has details on how the administration plans to spend those pallets of cash. It will be a giant cash infusion for private prison outfits and Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which will target undocumented immigrants using data illegally exfiltrated from public agencies by Musk’s DOGE kinderchuds.
The plan also involves local sheriff and municipal police operations as manpower to do an unprecedented roundup targeting anyone who’s out of status and using data analytics to pick them up outside their homes to avoid the need for warrants.
Paul Hunker, who was formerly ICE’s lead attorney in Dallas, likened Trump’s deportation campaign to a gathering wave. “It seems intense now, but wait until five months from now when the reconciliation bill has passed and ICE gets a huge infusion of cash,’’ he told me. “If that money goes out, the amount of people they can arrest and remove will be extraordinary.’’
If these plans come to fruition, there won’t be a community that’s untouched in the country. The MAGA dopes who waved “mass deportations now” signs at rallies will love it (until they have to pay $5 for a tomato), but what about everyone else?
We’ve seen many leopards/faces moments in the past, where people in even the Trumpiest areas were sad and/or indignant about their hardworking immigrant friend being abruptly deported. I don’t think we know how the swing voters who decide elections will react to something on this scale.
Open thread.
