President Donald Trump isn't deporting undocumented migrants in the mass quantities he'd like Americans to believe, according to an opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.
Despite the administration's directive that ICE meet the lofty quota of arresting 3,000 migrants each day, Zakaria wrote that "Donald Trump has deported fewer people per month than Barack Obama did, and barely more" than Joe Biden, according to ICE data.
"Since February, his administration has deported 14,700 people per month on average, according to NBC News," Zakaria wrote. "That’s far below Obama’s peak in 2013, when he deported 36,000 per month. And it’s not even close to the Trump administration’s reported goal of deporting 1 million people in a year."---
The perception of Trump's immigration policy as a massive success comes down to two things, according to Zakaria: Trump is simply "louder and meaner" about it.
"Trump’s deportation dragnet is less effective than those of his predecessors because it is chaotic, theatrical and detached from the systems that work," Zakaria wrote. "Rather than effectively coordinating with local law enforcement, following rules, laws and norms, or expanding and expediting legal processing, Trump has prioritized optics over outcomes. What his administration lacks in strategy, it tries to compensate for with spectacle — sweeping up schoolchildren, targeting families, broadcasting raids on social media."
He warned, "this is a rare case of Trump’s Teflon wearing thin. Immigration was once his strongest issue politically. Today, it is fast becoming a vulnerability," as a recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Trump’s approval on immigration "dropped sharply, with 55 percent disapproving and only 40 percent approving."
"A recent Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans who view immigration as a good thing has risen from 64 percent in 2024 to 79 percent now, a record high. Even more telling is the erosion of support among independents, many of them suburban voters who had once been sympathetic to a tougher border stance but are now recoiling at scenes of cruelty and overreach," he added."
The lesson is clear, he said: "Americans want immigration to be managed with competence and decency, not bombast or cruelty.
But Zakaria wrote that Trump may be more interested in using the immigration issue as a "political cudgel" rather than coming up with an actual solution for immigration reform, as evidenced by his "torpedoing" of a bipartisan Senate immigration deal when he was between terms.
Zakaria argued that true reform must honor America's laws as well as the immigrants themselves.
"It is finally time to replace fearmongering with solutions, and to turn away from performance and toward policy," he concluded.