The mass protests in Los Angeles began as a rejection of President Donald Trump’s new blitz of immigration raids.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement descended on locations throughout LA on Friday, including Home Depot and the city’s garment district. During the raids, immigration authorities reportedly arrested more than 200 people, though the Trump administration has not yet released official figures. Some of them have already been deported, according to the Washington Post.
But why did Trump order the raids in the first place?
This is not just a matter of routine immigration enforcement, but a significant escalation of his deportation tactics. For Trump, it means getting closer to his goal number of daily deportations after falling short during his first few months in office. For undocumented immigrants, it means more fear in their communities, driving them further into the shadows and leaving them further vulnerable to labor exploitation.
Any benefit to Americans is unclear, especially given how much the US economy relies on undocumented labor, including in industries such as construction and agriculture.
“This approach certainly doesn’t make us any safer,” said Debu Gandhi, senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “It is focused on large numbers of people, including lots of folks who are working and don’t have a criminal record, as opposed to targeted enforcement, focusing on those who actually pose a public safety threat to the American people.”
Undocumented workers will bear the immediate cost, while Trump, who has himself employed undocumented workers at his hotel and golf club properties, seeks little accountability from their employers. The approach suggests a wariness on the administration’s part to upend the status quo in which American companies benefit from undocumented labor. But the administration, clearly, also has a political imperative to deliver — or at least give the appearance of delivering — on Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
Trump is trying to get his deportation numbers up
As a candidate, Trump repeatedly promised to deport “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants. To do so, he would need to exceed the record deportations set by former President Barack Obama in 2013, when he averaged more than 35,000 per month. But in the first few months of Trump’s second term, he was far off from that pace.
In February, his first full month in office, ICE deported about 11,000 people; in March, it deported a little more than 12,300.
In April, the most recent month for which data is available, deportations increased to 17,200 for the first time, surpassing the number of deportations during the same period last year under the Biden administration.
Trump has reportedly expressed frustration that the number of deportations remains low in spite of his efforts to mobilize federal resources from the National Guard to the IRS to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants.
And now, Trump has broadened the scope of the immigrants he’s targeting for deportation. While the administration initially stated that it was prioritizing the approximately 1.4 million of them who have final orders of removal — essentially the final step in legal proceedings before deportation — it has become clear that the administration is not just targeting them alone.
One reason that the number of deportations isn’t higher is that Trump’s immigration policies appear to have driven down new arrivals at the border. New arrivals have accounted for a significant share of deportations in recent years.
Instead, Trump now seems to be turning to selective workplace raids to find and deport undocumented immigrants. He may also soon have a bigger budget to carry them out: The House spending bill, which is now under consideration in the Senate, allocates $185 billion for immigration enforcement, including $27 billion for ICE operations such as raids. That’s an increase of about $150 billion over the current funding levels for immigration enforcement.
Trump seems to be deliberately targeting workers over their employers
Trump hasn’t invoked the enforcement tool of immigration raids in an equitable manner.
Worksite immigration enforcement under Trump has focused on undocumented workers in blue states like California rather than their employers.
“We haven’t seen employers who hire undocumented workers being arrested and charged in red states the same way that we’re seeing workers being targeted in blue states across the country in these actions,” Gandhi said.
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A more effective means of discouraging the hiring of undocumented workers might be pushing for mandatory employment eligibility verification for all new hires. Noncitizens need authorization to work in the United States, whether that be through a visa, green card, or humanitarian protections. Currently, however, only the federal government and its contractors are required to confirm an employee’s work authorization via a program called E-Verify. While there have been proposals in Congress to make E-Verify required for all US employers over the years, they never went anywhere — in part because a robust business lobby opposed it.
Instead of pushing for such legislation that would place responsibility on employers, Trump is making undocumented workers pay the price. Though it seems unlikely that he could deport all 8.3 million of them, selective workplace raids may have enough of a chilling effect to deter them from seeking critical social services or labor protections, leaving them more vulnerable than ever.
“Protecting workers and making sure that abuses of workers are addressed is certainly not a priority of this administration,” Gandhi said.
Undocumented workers power key sectors of the US economy — and without them, those sectors would face labor shortages. For instance, American farms are already facing a critical labor shortage, and according to the Center for Migration Studies, 45 percent of all US agricultural workers are undocumented.
Deporting them would also mean that they would no longer contribute to the economy as consumers supporting the jobs of American workers. That means Americans could also see job losses, and according to an analysis by Robert Shapiro, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, national wage and salary income could decrease by $317.2 billion.
“It’s going to shrink the economy,” Gandhi said. “Deporting millions of workers and families could hurt the supply of food. It could hurt the supply of housing Americans need. It could drive up inflation.”
