Nine months after President Trump’s new deportation policy, immigrant communities are in fear
Even undocumented immigrants without criminal records, who can be targeted because of their race or where they work, are fearful.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump is preparing an even more aggressive crackdown on immigration in 2026, with billions of dollars in new funding, including more workplace raids, even as a backlash mounts ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
President Trump has already flooded major U.S. cities with immigration officials, where they have swept through neighborhoods and clashed with residents. Federal agents have carried out major raids on some businesses this year, but have largely avoided raids on farms, factories and other businesses known to employ economically important immigrants without legal status.
ICE and Border Patrol will receive an additional $170 billion in funding by September 2029, a huge funding jump over their existing annual budget of about $19 billion after the Republican-controlled Congress passed a massive spending package in July.
Administration officials said they plan to hire thousands more staff, open new detention centers, admit more immigrants in local jails and partner with outside companies to track people without legal status. The expansion of the deportation program comes despite growing signs of political backlash ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Miami, one of the cities hardest hit by President Trump’s crackdown because of its large immigrant population, last week elected its first Democratic mayor in nearly 30 years, a move the mayor-elect said was partly a response to the president. Other local elections and opinion polls suggest growing concerns among voters wary of aggressive immigration strategies.
“People are starting to see this as no longer an immigration issue, but a violation of rights, a violation of due process, and a militarization of neighborhoods that goes beyond the Constitution,” said Mike Madrid, a political strategist for the moderate Republican Party. “There’s no question that that’s a problem for the president and the Republican Party.”
Overall approval ratings for Trump’s most controversial immigration policy had fallen from 50% in March, before the crackdown began in several major U.S. cities, to 41% by mid-December. Growing public anxiety has focused attention on undercover federal agents using aggressive tactics such as deploying tear gas in residential areas and detaining American citizens.
“The numbers are going to explode.”
In addition to expanding enforcement actions, President Trump is stripping the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian, Venezuelan, and Afghan immigrants and expanding the pool of people eligible for deportation as he pledges to remove 1 million immigrants each year, a goal he almost certainly will not reach this year. Approximately 622,000 immigrants have been deported since President Trump took office in January.
White House border czar Tom Homan told Reuters that President Trump had delivered on his historic deportation operations and promises to remove criminals while cutting off illegal immigration from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Homan said arrests will skyrocket as ICE hires more officers and expands detention capacity with new funding.
“We’re going to see that number increase significantly next year,” Homan said, adding that the plan “absolutely” includes more enforcement measures in the workplace.
Sarah Pearce, director of social policy at the center-left group Third Way, said U.S. businesses have resisted President Trump’s immigration crackdown over the past year, but could be encouraged to speak out if the focus turns to employers.
Pearce said it will be interesting to see “whether businesses ultimately stand up to this administration.”
Trump, a Republican, took back the White House by promising record levels of deportations, saying the deportations were necessary because of years of high levels of illegal immigration under his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden. He launched a campaign to send federal agents to U.S. cities to search for potential immigrant criminals, sparking protests and lawsuits over racial profiling and violent tactics.
Some businesses close to avoid raids or due to a lack of customers. Arrest-prone parents may not send their children home from school or walk them with neighbors, while some Americans have begun carrying passports.
Despite the focus on criminals in public statements, government data shows that the Trump administration has arrested more people who have not been charged with anything other than immigration violations than the previous administration.
Of the roughly 54,000 people ICE arrested and detained through the end of November, about 41% had no criminal history other than suspected immigration violations, agency statistics show. In the first few weeks of January, before Trump took office, only 6% of people arrested and detained by ICE were not charged with other crimes or had previous convictions.
The Trump administration is also targeting legal immigrants. Law enforcement authorities have arrested spouses of U.S. citizens during green card interviews, excluded people from certain countries from naturalization ceremonies just before they became citizens, and canceled thousands of student visas.
Plans to target employers
The administration’s planned focus on job sites next year could lead to more arrests, impacting the U.S. economy and Republican-leaning business owners.
Replacing immigrants arrested in workplace raids could lead to higher labor costs and undermine Trump’s fight against inflation, which analysts expect will be a key issue in November’s elections that will determine control of Congress.
Administration officials exempted these companies from enforcement earlier this year under President Trump’s order, but quickly rescinded the move, Reuters reported at the time.
Some immigration hardliners are calling for greater enforcement in the workplace.
“Ultimately, we’re going to go after these employers,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “When that starts to happen, employers will start to clean up their act.”
(Reporting by Ted Hesson and Jeff Mason in Washington and Christina Cook in San Francisco; Editing by Craig Tinberg and Aurora Ellis)
