President Donald Trump has made a mess of what was one of his strongest policies in winning the presidential election in 2024. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s SWAT team approach to deportation created mass disturbances and protests that resulted in deadly violence. Trump’s approval on the issue has collapsed, along with Hispanic voting support.
The background to this turmoil was Trump’s key mistake — making the announcement early on that he would deport all illegal immigrants, tens of millions of them. A practical alternative would have been to tell the public — preferably in a major TV appearance — that his administration would arrest and deport only criminal illegal immigrants because of the large number that had poured across former President Joe Biden’s open borders.
Recommended Stories
Trump’s approach should have been based on drug trafficking and the enormous number of Americans killed by drug overdoses during Biden’s term — over 400,000 in four years, comparable to the U.S. death toll in World War II. Essentially, there should have been a clear understanding that most noncriminal illegal immigrants would fall into a set of broad categories, guaranteeing their safe residency in the United States.
HOMAN: ‘MORE ICE AGENTS THAN YOU’VE EVER SEEN’ HEADED TO MAMDANI’S NYC
Trump could have said that longtime U.S. illegal residents, here for 10 years or longer, employed or married to someone employed, and with no serious criminal record, could remain as legal residents after registration. Other categories could be for varying lengths of time as legal guest workers — short-term, seasonal, or longer. To sweeten the overall program, Trump needed carrots as well as sticks — citizenship for those eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or already signed for it under former President Barack Obama would have carried a winning message and helped gain support from Democrats in Congress.
Finally, Trump should have it clear that Biden’s open borders policies were essentially an attempt to kill the two-party system via future citizenship amnesty for the endless millions who poured in, most of them poor and Hispanic (Biden won 65% of the Hispanic vote in 2020). That would eventually have meant a Latino majority and a one-party system nationally, dominated by Democrats, essentially recreating California as the national political model, ending the contending two-party system in the U.S. since 1796, when Thomas Jefferson ran against John Adams for president.
Trump took drastic measures to avoid this political future, but he has gotten it wrong, as have nine other presidents beginning with Lyndon B.Johnson in 1965 (Bill Clinton was the sole exception, strongly backing a bill that would have cut in half annual legal immigration from Mexico, but losing in the Senate by one vote). The Senate immigration reform bill, devised in the 1960s by Sens. Robert and Edward Kennedy, was meant to reopen immigration to Poland, which had been closed by Republicans in the 1920s when they restricted legal immigration from Eastern Europe. It was also intended to add small numbers of Asians and Latinos to the mix. Both senators insisted that no major demographic changes in the U.S. would result and that the USA would remain an essentially European nation, ethnically and culturally. The yearly total was set at a modest 250,000.
The House contribution to the bill by Rep. Emanuel Celler made a decisive change by enlarging the family admitted with immigrants from the traditional spouse and children to a much broader number that, in subsequent years, due to changes by Congress, included broad categories of relatives known as “the family chain.” Polish and other would-be immigrants trapped in communist countries in the 1970s and 80s were quickly passed up as incoming Mexicans, Latinos, and Asians swelled numbers to a record million or more yearly.
Politically, this has meant a huge gain for the Democratic Party even as it moved dramatically to the “progressive” left. For decades, Hispanics have voted 2-1 Democrat in most national elections, black people nearly 90%, and Asians about 70%. 2024 was an exception, with Hispanics voting only 51% Democrat, and with Hispanic men voting for Trump, 50-48, according to the Pew Research Center.
Non-Hispanic whites, now making up only 10% of yearly immigrants, have not voted for a Democrat for president since 1992, yet whites vote within the parameters of a two-party system, no more than 60% for the winner, no less than 40% for the loser. Minorities almost never do. Non-Hispanic whites, after being a majority in English America for 400 years, will soon be a minority nationally, as they are in California today.
The obvious remedy for this would have been for Congress to have established a rule that half of all legal immigrants must be from Europe, to retain continuity with our origins, traditional culture, language, and values, including those in the 1789 Constitution.
Among Republican presidents since Eisenhower, only Trump has made immigration reform a major issue, but it is now too late for mass deportation.
DEPORTATION HITS ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION SUPPLY. MANDATORY E-VERIFY WILL ADDRESS DEMAND
He can still save the day and retain much of the Hispanic vote by changing course: All illegal immigrants should register for categories that guarantee that the vast majority will stay in the U.S., and some will get citizenship quickly. Asylum-seekers must register from their own countries, as 92% are turned down by immigration courts, in which case they would have to leave anyway.
Trump can right the ship a bit now, but only if he ends the delusion of deporting all illegal immigrants, which is physically and politically impossible.
James Delmont spent 18 years with the Omaha World-Herald. He is a University of Minnesota School of Journalism prize-winning editor and writer with The Minnesota Daily.
