In recent days, mass protests in Los Angeles have dominated the headlines. Images of demonstrators facing off with National Guard members and flaming cars have filled the news.
The primary cause of this unrest has been less visible, but no less disorderly or disruptive. Behind the tensions in LA lies a radical escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
To accelerate deportations, top White House adviser Stephen Miller instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in late May to dispense with norms and legal niceties that had previously constrained its activities, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Since then, the agency has deprioritized the removal of immigrants implicated in crimes, opting instead to target undocumented workers at random. It has stopped drafting lists of immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally and started arresting day laborers at businesses like Home Depot and 7-Eleven en masse, ensnaring some US citizens in the process. One such raid ignited the LA protests.
Under Joe Biden, ICE had generally refrained from raiding schools, churches, and hospitals. Now it is reportedly arresting new mothers in maternity wards and then denying them their right to legal counsel.
Most alarmingly, some ICE agents have allegedly embraced violent and unconstitutional tactics, according to the Journal’s report. A union organizer for Washington farmworkers was driving his wife to her job at a tulip farm, when ICE agents stopped him, smashed in his car windows, and pulled him from the vehicle, all without showing badges or identification. A Russian man with a pending asylum case was reporting for his scheduled check-in at an ICE office, when a team of agents arrested him and then allegedly beat him.
And ICE has not merely been targeting undocumented immigrants, but also those who exercise their First Amendment rights on the undocumented immigrants’ behalf. In Irvine, California, ICE sent a “phalanx of military vehicles” into an Orange County suburb to arrest a man who had allegedly posted fliers warning neighbors that ICE was in their area.
The Trump administration’s decision to greenlight such tactics might seem like an act of desperation — unable to stem the tide of undocumented immigration by conventional means, the White House is resorting to radical ones.
But the opposite may be closer to the truth: The Trump administration is escalating its war on migration because it is winning that conflict. Unfortunately, the fruits of Donald Trump’s victory appear to be weaker economic growth and more social unrest.
Trump’s bid to deter immigration has been wildly successful
Trump campaigned on a promise to end the Biden-era surge in unauthorized immigration and restore order at the border. He has largely done so.
Border crossings were already slowing during Biden’s final year in office, after his administration tightened rules around asylum last summer. But inflows have plunged even further under Trump. Through belligerent rhetoric and restrictionist policies, the president has successfully deterred both legal and illegal migration into the United States.
Over the past two months, America witnessed the largest decline in its foreign-born workforce since the pandemic in 2020. This contraction was driven partly by a collapse in unauthorized border crossings. Between January 2022 and June 2024, US Customs and Border Protection encountered an average of 200,000 people per month at America’s Southwest border. According to an analysis of government data from Deutsche Bank, that figure has fallen to just 12,000 people per month since Trump’s inauguration.
How Trump’s success on immigration is fueling his radicalism
Yet the Trump administration has found little satisfaction in this success. And for a simple reason: The slowdown in border crossings has made it more difficult for the president to exceed Biden’s deportation numbers.
When border control was encountering 200,000 migrants each month, it was easy for the government to rack up high deportation totals. Such new arrivals possessed fewer legal protections than longtime US residents and were already in the government’s custody. Although many qualified for the asylum process, border control could swiftly expel those who did not.
Trump’s success in deterring border crossings has therefore reduced the pace of deportations. Headlines earlier this year spotlighted the fact that Trump was deporting immigrants at a slower rate than Biden. Shortly after Trump took office, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy posted on X, “In the first week, Trump removed 7,300 people. On average, Biden was removing 15,000 a week…These guys are terrible at everything.”
Such unfavorable comparisons apparently displeased Trump. The Wall Street Journal suggests that it was Trump’s failure to exceed “the number of daily deportations carried out by the Biden administration in its final year” that led Stephen Miller to give ICE its new, draconian marching orders. Unable to generate flashy deportation statistics by turning away new arrivals at the border, the administration has opted to ramp up enforcement against law-abiding, long-time US residents throughout the country — and to do so in a violent and seemingly lawless manner.
Trump’s handling of immigration has been economically and socially destructive (but politically popular)
If Trump’s success at deterring immigration has brought him little contentment, it has brought his country little discernible benefit.
The slowdown in new arrivals is hurting the US economy. Compared to native-born workers, immigrants are more willing to relocate to US communities that have labor shortages, or to enter industries suffering from chronic shortfalls of workers, such as construction, food processing, and childcare. The mass entrance of migrants into the US during the Biden administration therefore helped to mitigate supply chain disruptions and reduce inflationary pressures in key sectors.
This immigration surge was also immensely beneficial for economic growth and the national debt. America has an aging population. As a result, we need immigrants to sustain the growth of our workforce and shore up funding for Medicare and Social Security. Partly for these reasons, the Biden-era surge in immigration increased America’s projected economic growth over the coming decade by upwards of $8.9 trillion, while reducing its expected federal deficits by $900 billion, according to an analysis from the Dallas Federal Reserve.
Trump’s successful deterrence of immigration threatens to reverse these gains, slowing growth and exacerbating labor shortages in construction, agriculture, and other key industries. According to Deutsche Bank, the collapse of immigration under Trump “represents a far more sustained negative supply shock for the economy than tariffs.”
Although immigration restriction is bad for the economy, many have argued that it’s beneficial for political stability and social peace. After all, large surges of immigration tend to induce nativist backlashes. And Biden’s failure to avert a historically large jump in migration plausibly helped Trump return to the White House.
For the moment, however, the collapse in border crossings appears to be increasing social tension and political unrest. The migration slowdown has translated into lower deportation figures, which has led the administration to embrace radical enforcement tactics, which have predictably sown mass protest and clashes between civilians and agents of the state.
We are therefore getting all the economic harms of immigration restriction, without its theoretical benefits for social harmony.
Yet the destructiveness of Trump’s policy is unlikely to trouble the president until it disconcerts his coalition. And for now, the White House is facing little political blowback. A CBS News/YouGov poll released last week found that 54 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of deportations, while his overall approval rating has crept up by more than 2 points over the past month.
