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With all the talk about the lack of professionalism on the part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents and about how deportations are a less efficient measure than punishing employers I would like to offer an alternative perspective.
As much as I would personally love to just start "picking up the tuna cans", there is a problem with that plan. The tuna factory has a lot of pull in this town, and the crazy cat-lady is one of their best customers. If I make too much trouble for her, a couple burly guys from the docks might just pay me a visit.
What I'm saying is that companies like Amazon, Marriott, and Tyson Foods are "big fish" and they have far more money and resources invested in fighting things like mandatory E-Verify, employee audits, and eventual prosecution than the proponents of such measures have available to support them. Whether directly through lawfare or indirectly through media-buys, campaign contributions, etc... trying to fight them is not a winning move, it is the last 30 years of US immigration policy. IE exactly what got us into this mess.
Now granted this does not stop the Trump Administration from going after smaller fish, but it has been decided within the administration that the risk of bad optics and taxpayer blowback from going after the local bistro while letting Tyson off the hook far outweighs any possible reward. Furthermore, building out the staff and infrastructure required to actively vet and surveil tens-of-thousands of businesses runs counter to the administration's populist ethos, and said infrastructure would almost certainly be weaponized against Republicans the moment a Democrat took office. As such we are simply not going to do that.
So how do we remove the maximum number of Illegal immigrants while staying within the bounds of both our capabilities and principles?
Ironically this is somewhere where the policies of Sanctuary states like Minnesota and New York present an opportunity. By allowing illegal immigrants to work, to run business/employ others, and to vote in local and state elections all "legally", they have rendered their illegal population "legible" in a way that the day-workers standing outside a Home Depot in New Mexico are not. We know where they live and in cases where their employer is also an illegal immigrant we don't even need to deport them directly we can just deport their employer, killing two birds with one stone. Now that's efficiency even @PmMeClassicMemes can get behind ;-)
Other options are to fight the opposition where they aren't. While raids by ICE may make the headlines auditors working for the Department of Transportation may have a greater impact.
While Driver's Licenses are issued and administered by the individual states they are required to comply with federal guidelines which is why a license issued in Massachusetts is considered valid in Nevada and vice-versa. These guidelines allow for the issuance of non-resident and non-domiciled licenses. The intent being that people who are not citizens or who do not have a permanent residence should still have a means of driving legally. A foreign student should be afforded the option to drive to school, the retiree living out of their RV should be allowed to live their best van-life. What has been happening in practice though is that sanctuary cities and states would use these allowances to issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.
After a spate of fatal crashes caused by illegal immigrants went viral four months ago and it became public knowledge that the State of New York has been issuing driver's licenses without requiring the applicant to provide a full legal name Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has announced that the issuance and renewal of non-resident/non-domiciled driver's licenses would be suspended and that there would be an audit of commercial licenses already issued to ensure compliance with federal guidelines.
As a bit of context for our foreign readers or anyone else here who hasn't worked a low level job, the state of US labor law and legal precedent is such that vetting for worker eligibility effectively runs on the honor system. If you have a valid ID of any sort and check the box on the application that says "I am legally eligible to work in the US" your new employer will be considered to have done their "due diligence". This is one of the reasons going after employers, especially the big fish, is so difficult and thus so rarely done. "How was my client to know that the the driver they hired was an illegal" Amazon's attorneys will ask, "they checked the box, and they had a valid driver's license" and Amazon will win that case handily.
If the license isn't valid the big fish's case doesn't have a leg to stand on. Suddenly "tuna" is back on the menu.
I have seriously considered this possibility and it just doesn't comport with how the administration actually acts. When the administration succeeds, such as when they removed Maduro, it's not something that requires competence on the part of the administration themselves, they just have to give the word, because conservatives already wanted Maduro gone and the US military's already the best in the business. But when anything requires competence on the part of the admin, especially things like Liberation Day, DOGE, they're just poorly executed and don't particularly accomplish their stated goals or any obvious secret ones.
If this is true then you've already lost! Your premise is that anything you do that actually removes enough illegal immigrants to matter by your values, to cause the real changes to the American economy and society, by your values will be blocked by business interests who don't like those changes. And your response to that is - how can we remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter, but we still feel like we're doing something? Why even bother at that point? I don't think the premise is correct, a lot of things are possible, things happen today that didn't seem very possible a few decades ago. I think it's possible a more competent Trump could succeed with mandatory e-verify, and also possible that he could fail, and that Trump mostly just doesn't care enough about generic illegal immigrant laborers (as opposed to criminals from insane asylums in the Congo) to take the risk, and also is acting through the lens of an entertainer and e-verify just isn't good TV.
I really feel like that's where we are right now, except I'd remove the word "feel" and replace it with "look". Trump is all about spectacle. Miller may be a true believer and he and the president may be working at cross purposes.
But everything I've seen about what's actually happening on the ground is about (1) arresting really bad people that they were going to arrest anyway without a surge of personnel or budget and (2) treating random brown/yellow people with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness with the specific intent of horrifying and spurring to action the soccer moms and VA nurses.
The latter is the spectacle, both the action and the reaction, and it overwhelms every news cycle. Trump loves that, as far as I can tell. It's all part of his "suck the oxygen out of every room" approach to governance.
Which random brown/yellow people are being treated with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness? The closest I've seen there was the arrest of the one Hmong guy, who refused to identify himself and who they thought was a different really bad Hmong guy they were trying to arrest. They arrested him in the cold when he had only boxer shorts and a robe on, I think -- this is cruel but it's not "over-the-top" cruelty, arrests that aren't pre-arranged surrenders are almost always "come as you are". He was released the same day, I believe.
Sorry, the way I stated that made it unclear what I meant. If I had broken it up into multiple sentences rather than one long one it could have been clearer.
When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the Mexican-American teenager who was working at Target when ICE or CBP tackled him and dragged him out of the store in cuffs. Evidently he was repeatedly shouting that he was an American citizen. They ignored that, threw him in a van and drove off. They quickly figured out that he was in fact a citizen, but not before they beat the shit out of him and dumped him bleeding and crying in a Walmart parking lot a mile from where they picked him up. Evidently the person who found him posted a video of the boy shivering and weeping in the parking lot. I did not see that video, but I did see a clip from the video where he was led from the store.
I don't know what is true and what is not true about this story. Yes, there's video evidence, but there could easily be other information that would make the federal agents' actions seem less extreme. In any case, when I read the news (which is a mix of mainstream left and right leaning outlets as well as lots of twitter threads for hot takes and substack posts for analysis), I come away with the impression that someone wants me to believe that the federal government is acting with cruelty and viciousness for no damn good reason in Minnesota, except that they want to piss people off.
Whether that's because it's true or because of a concerted propaganda campaign, or a mix of the two, is beside the point. If that's the way it's widely perceived, that's all that matters. If, that is, you buy into the idea that the administration's true goals are for spectacle, an idea that makes more and more sense to me as the term progresses.
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