President Donald Trump has acknowledged that his enforcement of immigration laws was likely perceived as too tough and contributed to the Republican debacle last week. He’s right, but that doesn’t mean he should back off of enforcement. It simply means he should focus on what he should have done all along: Push employers to enforce the laws for him.
It’s clear that the very public, and at times vicious, efforts to find, arrest, and deport illegal immigrants turned large segments of the population against Trump and the GOP. The regular confrontations between masked ICE agents and protestors may have delighted former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her indispensable aide and confidant, Corey Lewandowski. But they did quite the opposite with non-white voters, many of whom had voted Republican for president for the first time just a few months before.
