Immigration Enforcement Needs ‘You’re Fired’

There are many ways to shrink the illegal immigrant population—use all of them.

In the months since President Donald Trump sent “Border Czar” Tom Homan to de-escalate the situation in Minneapolis, some immigration hawks have feared that the administration is backing off its commitment to large-scale removal of illegal aliens.

Everyone remembers the “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the 2024 Republican National Convention. But long-time GOP voters also remember decades of betrayals by their own leaders, who talked tough at election time but afterward served the interests of cheap-labor employers.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was notorious in this regard. He led major legislative efforts for amnesty and increased immigration during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Yet amid a tough primary challenge in 2010, McCain ran the disingenuous “Complete the Dang Fence” ad.

Does the Trump administration’s turn away from ousted Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino’s enforcement approach mean that “Mass Deportation Now!” was just the 2024 version of “Complete the Dang Fence”?

I don’t think so—though time will tell. What’s certain is that significant reductions in the size of the illegal population are both necessary and eminently achievable. And this reduction can be done without theatrical enforcement sweeps that spur equally theatrical insurrectionary violence, which led to the deaths of two “protesters” and prompted the president to change tactics earlier this year.

Attrition Through Enforcement

Let’s start with numbers. Despite claims of much higher figures, there are probably around 14 or 15 million illegal aliens in the United States—close to half of them let in by the Biden administration.

I’m not opposed to considering amnesty in some targeted cases, especially after we’ve regained control of our immigration system, but the amnesty-centric approach that has shaped so much establishment thinking cannot work. Mass amnesty is unfair to legal immigrants, denies opportunity for low-skilled legal workers, burdens the social safety net, and is a general offense to the rule of law. Most importantly, mass amnesty incentivizes additional illegal immigration and reinforces the sense that our elected leaders prioritize the interests of foreigners over Americans.

So, if we’re not going to legalize most of the illegal immigrants, how do we go about removing them? It’s important to note that there is already significant churn in the illegal population. Even now, there are some new illegal aliens arriving, and even under the Biden administration, some left voluntarily—to retire back home, open a business with their savings, start over after failing here, or protect their kids from our toxic popular culture.

The key is to reduce the number of new arrivals while increasing departures. I call this “attrition through enforcement” rather than the catchier “mass deportation,” but the point is the same: shrinking the illegal population is a process, not an event. Fewer come, more leave, and instead of swelling, the illegal population declines over time.

The first part of this strategy has seen great success since January 2025. Under President Biden, Border Patrol agents were forced to play the role of Walmart greeter to millions of border-jumpers from around the world. Today, I think it’s likely that we have a lower number of unauthorized border crossings than at any point since the nineteenth century.

That doesn’t mean the problem of new illegal immigrants is “solved”—eternal vigilance is the price of border security. Smugglers are ferrying illegals by boat up the California coast before heading to shore, people will always try to enter through legal ports of entry by hiding in cars or using fake documents, and some foreigners admitted on visas will try to stay after their documents have expired.

The bigger challenge is the other half of the equation—maximizing outflow. Here the pithiness of “mass deportation” can lead people astray, causing them to expect the dragnets, roundups, and neighborhood sweeps that many middle-of-the-road voters found so alarming.

The majority of the public still supports “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally”, according to the latest Harvard/Harris poll, but, as my colleague Andrew Arthur notes, “they just don’t want to see or hear much about it.”

To resolve this contradiction, it helps to think of the illegal population as consisting of two groups—public safety threats, and everyone else.

Notice I did not say “criminals.” Virtually every illegal alien is guilty of multiple federal crimes. Crossing the border without inspection is just the start—a misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on each subsequent attempt. Border-jumpers also have failed to register with the federal government, another crime. Then there’s identity theft and identity fraud, Social Security fraud, tax fraud, perjury (signing an I-9 form for employment when the documents are fake, stolen, or borrowed), re-entry after deportation, failure to depart when ordered to do so, falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen, and even failing to register for the draft. There is no such thing as an “otherwise law-abiding illegal alien.”

But when voters say they back the deportation of criminals (which even a majority of Democrats support), they’re not thinking about someone who used his brother-in-law’s Social Security number to get a job but rather aliens who threaten public safety. Most illegal immigrants aren’t rapists or murderers, drunk-drivers or drug-dealers; they’re just working stiffs with no right to be here.

The authorities need to approach these two groups somewhat differently. I’ve described the strategies as “body-armor vs. briefcase enforcement,” with ICE-enforced deportations for the public safety threats and self-deportation for the rest.

Regarding the first category, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a simple approach: arrest them and expel them. Police and sheriff’s departments take illegal aliens into custody every day for state and local crimes, and the fingerprints of all arrestees are scanned and sent both to the FBI and to the Department of Homeland Security. ICE identifies the illegal immigrants (or, sometimes, legal immigrants who’ve committed crimes serious enough to warrant deportation) and sends the locals what’s called a “detainer” notice in order to pick up the perpetrators.

That’s harder than it sounds because about half of illegal aliens live in “sanctuary” jurisdictions that limit communication and cooperation with federal agents. Direct ICE enforcement also requires making sure there’s sufficient detention space to hold them until their deportations can be arranged, pressuring recalcitrant countries to take their own citizens back, arranging for aliens who, for whatever reason, can’t be deported to their home countries to be sent to a third country, and much more.

The Enforcement Key

In any case, there will never be enough ICE agents to take every illegal alien into custody. That’s where the briefcase enforcement comes in. The overarching goal is to make it untenable for ordinary, non-violent illegal aliens to live here by making them unemployable, unbankable, and unlicenseable. That way they’ll leave on their own.

Job-related enforcement is key. Removing the jobs magnet was the central promise of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which traded amnesty for the first-ever ban on employing illegal aliens. In that event, the amnesty came first and the promised “employer sanctions” enforcement mechanism never really happened, leading to today’s record illegal-alien population.

The 1986 law’s requirement that employers check the identity and legal status of new hires was based on a paper system of I-9 forms which were easily evaded with fake or stolen IDs. That’s no longer the case. DHS has used an online system called E-Verify for nearly two decades now, and it’s successfully being used to screen millions of new hires. Yet only about half of new hires nationwide are screened this way because participation is voluntary.

A few states have their own E-Verify mandates, framed as a condition of receiving a business license, but any serious effort to reduce the illegal population has to start with universal use.

Conventional wisdom holds that only Congress can mandate E-Verify use by all employers, and lawmakers routinely introduce bills to that effect—which go nowhere. But it’s possible that E-Verify can be mandated through regulation, and if anyone can challenge the conventional wisdom, you’d think it would be President Trump. Unfortunately, the president does not seem to be a fan of mandatory E-Verify, which may doom his deportation goals.

Yet even mandatory E-Verify isn’t a silver bullet. It’s a vast improvement over a paper-based system, but can still be evaded by illegal workers or crooked employers. Luckily, there are many other ways to deter illegal hiring.

Raiding worksites filled with illegal laborers is one. This tactic blurs the body-armor vs. briefcase distinction, but it’s an important part of any deportation strategy. And in cases of particularly egregious employers, it can expose a whole slew of other law-breaking, as was the case in the 2008 immigration raid of a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, where authorities also uncovered widespread child-labor and safety violations.

If an administration doesn’t relish the news coverage that accompanies such raids, there are other options.

Regular audits of employer I-9s can serve as a strong deterrent to illegal hiring. A similar tactic is the use of no-match letters, which the Social Security Administration used to send to employers who submitted payroll information that didn’t match its records (usually because the Social Security numbers were fake or didn’t match the names provided). The problem here is that such letters don’t require any employer action. The key is to pair these notices with instructions from ICE about how employers should respond, and to levy fines or other punishments if they don’t.

De-banking is another option. Banks are subject to know-your-customer rules that make it difficult for criminals and terrorists to access the financial system. But a loophole created in the aughts allows banks to open accounts for people using the illegal-alien IDs that many governments issue (most famously, the Mexican matricula consular). Closing this loophole, which the Trump administration is reportedly working on, would be a major step toward making illegal residence in the U.S. untenable.

Yet another tactic is the levying of civil fines against people who have disregarded deportation orders. There are well over 1 million illegal immigrants who fit this description, and the fines can theoretically amount to almost $1,000 a day, though they’ve never been levied in the past. Now they are, and as an added incentive, they can be waived if the illegal alien uses DHS’s CBP Home app to self-deport.

The Mass Deportation Coalition Playbook details other ways the government can squeeze out illegal aliens short of high-profile sweeps through residential neighborhoods

The upshot is that reducing the number of illegal aliens in the United States requires a whole-of-government approach. Some will be arrested and forcibly removed; more will be persuaded that it’s too risky to remain and leave on their own.

Illegal immigration will never go away so long as America is a more desirable place to live than the alternatives. But we have it in our power to use normal law-enforcement means to reduce it to the level of a nuisance rather than a crisis. The Trump administration has made significant strides, but there will be real progress only with a significant increase in employment-related enforcement. Stay tuned.