Trump’s mass deportation campaign grinds on—but now away from the cameras

In the opening days of 2026, the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation faced a crisis, thanks to brave resistance of ordinary people in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. After Trump’s armed thugs murdered Renée Goode and Alex Pretti in broad daylight, when hundreds of cell phone videos refuted the Homeland Security secretary’s Kristi Noem’s bald-faced slanders of the dead, the administration reset.

Trump fired Noem and cashiered Greg Bovino, the white supremacist Customs and Border Protection commander. Both Noem and Bovino had reveled in displays of immigration cops’ brutality and degradation of immigrants caught in their dragnets. They brought camera crews with them to create “content” of the terror campaign against immigrants for MAGA-aligned media.

Trump put “border czar” Tom Homan in charge of operations in Minnesota and then appointed Sen. Markwayne Mullin to take over for Noem. These two dullards are no less committed to Trump’s anti-immigration agenda than were Noem and Bovino. But they have the good sense to keep themselves out of the limelight.

Trump suffered a political defeat in Minnesota. But in the months since Trump staged that tactical retreat, the mass deportation campaign grinds on. In fact, it may be more successfully achieving its aims while minimizing social media images of armed goons terrorizing neighborhoods.

Let’s take note of the sheer breadth of the deportation machine as it has built up through 2026. According to the latest figures the Vera Institute of Justice compiled (current as of August 2026), ICE detains around 70,000 people daily in more than 1,400 facilities across the U.S. and its territories. The number of detained hit its peak in January (at 73,000 per day), declined sharply to about 55,000 in mid-May, and climbed again to 68,000 per day by early August.

From these patterns, it certainly appears that DHS took a step back from the high-profile mass raids that hit a wall of opposition in Minnesota. But that step back looks like a temporary regrouping of forces before ramping up arrests again. DHS is on pace to “remove” (aka deport) about 460,000 people this year, according to Open Immigration, a database of U.S. immigration court records.

These numbers also reflect the opening of the floodgates of money Congress earmarked for immigration roundups and the creation of a gulag archipelago of “detention centers” (perhaps more accurately described as concentration camps). The enormous budget passed in 2025, authorizing $170 billion for immigration enforcement over most of Trump’s term, represents a five-fold increase in ICE’s and CBP’s pre-Trump budgets.

In June, the Republicans used “budget reconciliation,” a legislative tactic that allows Congress to pass budget-related bills by simple majority (end-running the Senate filibuster) to add another $70 billion to ICE and CBP through the end of Trump’s term.

One of the most effective uses of these vast sums is to pay for the recruitment of local law enforcement agencies as deputies in the mass deportation machine. Homeland Security’s “287(g)” program, created by the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996, aids law enforcement agencies who sign up to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP.

To DHS, agreements with locals are a “force multiplier” because immigrants who might have an encounter with a cop over a trivial traffic violation might quickly find themselves being turned over to ICE. The symbiotic relationship between the Feds and the locals is clear. Police agencies receive millions in federal assistance, and the Feds receive bodies to feed into the deportation maw—without facing the political blowback that armed goons snatching people off the streets generates.

In January 2025, at the beginning of the Trump administration, 139 local agencies representing areas covering about 15 million people, had 287(g) agreements with the Feds. In September 2026, that number has ballooned to 2,054 agencies covering 56 million people (or one-sixth of U.S. population), according to 287(g) Watch.

DHS agreements with local law enforcement extend to contracts turning city and county jails into immigration jails.

“As of August 5, ICE has detained 104,800 people across 303 jails in 2026. Compared to the same period in 2024 under the Biden administration, this reflects an 84 percent increase in the number of local jails used for ICE detention and triple the number of people held by ICE in local jails,” the Vera Institute reported.

In many local areas, including in some traditionally conservative areas, community mobilizations have stopped ICE from purchasing warehouses and other buildings to convert to immigrant detention centers. While those local efforts are a testament to the unpopularity of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, they have not necessarily deterred DHS. DHS has turned to buying and repurposing former prisons to add to the gulag. And for the time being, money is no object.

This network of concentration camps is central to the Trump strategy. Not only do they supplement ongoing immigration roundups, but the horrible conditions inside of them are deliberately aimed to motivate immigrants to “self-deport.” In 2025, the number of detainees’ deaths and suicides in custody was the highest in ICE’s 23-year history, with 2026 figures likely to be higher still.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration—with the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval—has stripped legal status from groups of immigrants. In so doing, the government creates thousands of newly “illegal” immigrants subject to deportation. It also means that the government knows exactly where to find them. Arresting people at immigration offices or courts or requiring them to wear ankle monitors as DHS required of Haitians, adds to the roster of arrestees.

It certainly isn’t the case that the anti-immigration campaign has become more popular as it has stayed out of the news. In fact, one recent survey showed that 57 percent of registered voters oppose Trump’s approach to immigration issues, compared to 39 percent who support it. And just last month, public opinion on Trump’s position on “border security”—long considered his signature position—turned negative for the first time. Support for abolishing ICE has hit its highest point ever.

But continuing the mass deportation campaign in stealthier and more comprehensive ways makes mobilizing mass resistance against it more difficult. This new political environment also takes pressure off politicians who won’t feel the same urgency to oppose the anti-immigrant campaign as they did when the administration was staging its well-publicized invasions of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. The Migration Policy Institute makes this point explicitly in noting that the administration is “driving a quieter, and more diffuse wave” of separations of children and parents that has “muted” the public response to it.

Democrats have pledged to “hold ICE accountable” if they attain a majority in one or both houses of Congress in November. But they have pointedly refused to say they have any plans to “abolish,” or restructure ICE. House Majority Leader (and presumed future House Speaker) Hakeem Jeffries has announced a Democratic agenda that focuses on restoring the administration’s cuts to Medicaid and to the Affordable Care Act.

However worthy (if unambitious) those goals are, it’s telling that they aren’t paired with pledges to cut funds to the Trump deportation machine. Yet, it was clear from the 2025 passage of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that massive cuts to federal health care programs are helping to fund the anti-immigration spending binge.

As always, Democrats want to have it both ways: opposing Trump’s deportations just enough to give their voters some hope for change, but not enough to deliver that change. Especially if that might (which it will) kick up opposition from nativists. The party’s incoherence was on display at the Democratic National Committee’s meeting in Texas in August. The DNC passed two resolutions: one calling for “abolishing” ICE and another calling to reform the agency.

Democrats continue to propose a list of minor reforms—that agents wear body cameras, that they seek judicial warrants, that ICE allows oversight of its facilities, and the like. These reforms are insufficient to put a stop to the mass deportation complex. And they signal that the Democrats aren’t against mass deportations per se. They just want the government to follow “bipartisan” rules and procedures.

If the Democrats have a vision of an immigration policy that they support, it’s likely to be very similar to the Clinton/Obama/Biden policy: a technocratic regime that efficiently deports people without the social media bombast and roving thugs that have become the hallmark of Trump’s efforts. In other words, the same type of operation that the Trump administration is stumbling toward today.