On the evening of January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to, ostensibly, “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.” It was among a slew of presidential actions announced in those first days of the administration aimed at rolling back the agenda of his predecessor, from defunding sanctuary cities to tearing down the Affordable Care Act. (Over his four years in office, Trump went on to implement 472 executive actions in an effort to reshape the immigration system.)

“When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before.”

But for many observers, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” would go down as the most memorable and infamous: the “Muslim ban.”

Touted as an anti-terrorism measure, the first iteration of Trump’s travel ban on foreigners from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—was a watershed moment. It had a particularly harsh toll on Syrian refugees, indefinitely suspending their resettlement (which was considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” despite America’s role in the conflict). But, more so, it showed the extent to which the new administration would make its nativist agenda real.

The morning after Trump signed the proclamation, thousands of protesters rushed to airports across the country as word got out that travelers were being stopped and detained. House and Senate Democrats gathered outside the Supreme Court in opposition to the ban. International condemnation followed, with global leaders denouncing Trump’s actions as shameful and divisive. Former President Barack Obama praised in a statement “citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize, and have their voices heard by their elected officials.”

Back then, the anger and outrage that this could not be normal or, indeed, American, felt palpable and spurred fierce resistance among a cohort unmoored by the Trump administration. But years of anti-immigrant policymaking and rhetoric—especially a flip by Democrats away from condemnation of Trump to tough border talk to win back centrist voters—have changed the landscape. There is now a normalization of the idea that America should restrict immigration.

Facing the prospect of a second Trump administration—and, with it, an escalation in hostility against immigrants and organizers—immigrant rights activists, advocates, and lawyers are building their defenses back up.

In a time of apparent collective amnesia about Trump’s actions, many of the activists have not forgotten what they had to stand up against. Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), an advocacy organization representing more than 200 groups across the state, helped lead a nationwide pushback against the travel ban. “As a Muslim American,” he later recalled in a USA Today op-ed, “it was impossible not to feel directly and personally targeted.”

Now, Awawdeh, and countless other veteran immigrant rights organizers who were at the forefront of the firewall to mitigate the harm of the Trump White House’s attacks on immigrants are gearing up for another battle. Only this time around, they have the benefit of knowing what to expect—and something of a blueprint for how to respond.

“In the scenario where Trump is elected,” Awawdeh tells me, “we go into defend and protect mode. We’ve seen what he’s done to our communities in his first term…He had no regard for the law and he continued to run afoul of the laws on the books, even our own constitution. That didn’t stop him.”

They have their work cut out for them. The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration: the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; deploying the military within US borders (against migrants and, presumably, protesters); ending birthright citizenship for American-born children of undocumented immigrants; and possibly reviving the “zero tolerance” policy of family separation.

If reelected, Trump has also vowed to restore the “Muslim ban” executive order. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” he said in 2023. “Remember the famous travel ban?” Trump reportedly said in September about stopping refugees from Gaza from being allowed into the United States. “We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world.” He added: “We’re not taking them from [terror] infested countries.”

Trump has made expelling the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants from the United States the cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign. In interviews and rallies, he has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest deportation operation in US history, a sweeping effort that would involve gulag-like detention camps on the border and likely the use of the military within US territory—on top of the human cost to immigrants and their families and economic devastation.

“Even if he is unsuccessful in moving mass deportation forward,” Awawdeh says, “What he will do is instill a deeply chilling fear within our communities.”

Awawdeh hopes to take lessons from those first four years of resisting not only the travel ban, but also family separation and a rule punishing immigrants for accessing public benefits. “The biggest piece that we did but didn’t do as strongly in his first go-around was litigation,” Awawdeh says, “and I think that’s the piece that we’re all going to be doubling and tripling down on.”

Policy and legal experts at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) are actively keeping a growing list of policy proposals from the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook and drafting legal memos for potential lawsuits. “Part of the analysis is really asking: What are the things that we know are patently unconstitutional?” says Kica Matos, president of the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund. That list includes the promise to end birthright citizenship for US-born children of undocumented immigrants and the plan to deploy the US military to conduct arrests and deportations in the interior of the country.

“The threats to carry this in a bloody way are indicative to us of intentionality to willfully disregard the constitutional rights that we all have and to violate the civil rights of people who might be impacted,” Matos adds.

During “Trump 1.0,” as she puts it, the federal courts served as a bulwark against some of the former president’s most extreme policies. But the Supreme Court has only gotten more conservative and willing to see the limits of presidential power extended, including to dictate immigration policy. In this environment, fighting back will require a collective effort, from inside the courthouses all the way out to the streets.

“We are bracing for the worst, and we have to think ahead because the stakes are too high to wait,” Awawdeh says. “Think of the worst case scenario in your mind of what a white supremacist would do in office with Project 2025 as their manifesto. That’s the way we’re planning right now.”

Strategic litigation is only part of their calculus. Another huge component is community education and readiness. Across the country, advocates are expanding know-your-rights trainings and campaigns about interactions with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They’re also distributing family safety plans to immigrant households and coordinating with local communities to establish safe spaces—including offices doubling as rapid response hubs—where immigrants can seek shelter during raids or roundups, and setting up emergency funds.

In scenario-planning meetings with partner organizations, Lindsay Toczylowski, the co-founder and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), says they have been asking themselves: Can we look at the past post-election periods and what can we learn from how we all responded as an immigrant rights movement?

ImmDef is a 200-people legal services organization based in Los Angeles that specializes in deportation defense work. (The city has one of the largest number of immigrants with pending deportation proceedings in immigration courts in the country—113,292, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.) In 2023, the nonprofit represented about 2,500 immigrants in removal proceedings and assisted many more with other legal issues, including newly arriving asylum seekers.

“Every time somebody goes into a courtroom,” Toczylowski says, “their potential exile from their communities, their permanent separation from their families, and oftentimes their life itself is on the line.” For clients facing persecution or violence in their countries of origin, she puts in no uncertain terms, “we’re talking about death penalty cases in immigration court.”

The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration

What keeps Toczylowski up at night these days, having seen parents in her own neighborhood get picked up by ICE after dropping off their children at school, is the thought of cases where a lawyer couldn’t intervene in time to stop a deportation. As the November election nears, she wonders what a mass deportation operation will do. “We see what gets left behind when someone is ripped out of our community,” she says.

If sweeping raids and mass deportation come to pass, boosting the legal defense infrastructure to be able to quickly mobilize a network of pro-bono immigration attorneys will be critical. ImmDef has long been investing in building deportation defense capacity. For one, they have been recruiting and training lawyers who are interested in doing that work but lack the legal expertise, cultural competency, or language skills, and have brought on more attorneys to join the strategic litigation and advocacy teams.

Over the last couple of years, the group has tripled their team in San Diego to help prospective asylum seekers with their initial screening credible fear interviews and launched a welcoming project to inform immigrants facing deportation orders about their rights. To that end, they have partnered with Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an organization serving indigenous migrants, to create and disseminate educational videos in languages other than English and Spanish.

Toczylowski acknowledges a “whole of immigrant rights movement response” will be necessary, but she believes they’re ready. “We’ve survived things once before and we will survive this time around,” she says, “because there’s no other choice. Our communities need us to be there.”

If implemented, the Project 2025 agenda could undermine deportation defense services and further strain critical and already scarce legal aid for asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors. Among other things, the project’s playbook chapter on DHS pushes for restricting access to federal funds to organizations unless they “support the broader homeland security mission.” Advocates also fear the conservative plot could lead to pressure on local and state jurisdictions to defund legal services, make immigration courts more hostile to immigrants, and even open up legal providers to criminal penalties.

“There’s no question that Project 2025 would shift the landscape enormously,” Shayna Kessler, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s advancing universal representation initiative, says, “and require some real recalibration.” In 2017, in response to an environment of heightened immigration enforcement, the organization established a network of governments, service providers, and advocates to implement publicly funded deportation defense programs at the state and local governments, for immigrants who, unlike their counterparts in the criminal justice system, aren’t entitled to free legal representation.

“If we do enter a period of really intense immigration enforcement again,” Kessler says, “those legal teams will be poised to continue that defense.”

In our conversations, Kessler and others stressed that the fight for immigrants’ rights doesn’t stop at the ballot box. Nor is it contingent on the outcome of the election. If elected, Vice President Kamala Harris might continue the Biden administration’s crackdown on asylum at the southern border. And the immigration system will not cease to be broken. While preparedness is key, so is mobilizing the American public to resist the vilification and dehumanization of immigrants. That will require large scale mobilizations, not unlike the resistance to the travel ban, to draw visibility and push for intervention from elected officials.

“Grave injustices preceded the former administration,” says Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas legal services nonprofit founded in 1986. “And for all intents and purposes will continue into a next administration, no matter who is elected into office.”

This year, former President Donald Trump’s central campaign pledge has been to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

In his first term, Trump couldn’t deliver mass deportation. This was partially a result of his administration’s haphazard policy implementation, but also because a mass deportation campaign would require an almost unimaginable amount of resources: Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.

Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal without bankrupting the economy and likely harming millions of immigrants and many more US citizens in the process.

On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence.

Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

“Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” says Tom Homan, head of ICE during Trump’s family separation policy. https://t.co/If9G1sNEzj pic.twitter.com/TIWhi25Vdu

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 28, 2024

“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan said. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests.” But, as I’ve reported before, that’s quite different from the actual plans Trump’s hardline adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly laying out:

When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention. 

To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”

In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”

“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. We’re going to remove people that the judges order deported.”

As a retired government official, Homan has making the rounds of conservative media to declare an “invasion” at the southern border. And he has made an enterprise out of it by launching the nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and traveling across the country spreading fear-mongering about migrants.

When asked on 60 Minutes how many people would be deported under Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents they would have. Currently, ICE has about 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more then a decade, would require hiring hundreds of thousands of government employees.

“If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?” Vega asked.

“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referencing the less than successful slur-named militaristic “Operation Wetback” from the Eisenhower administration that Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But historians agree that campaign not only led to far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also ensnared US citizens.

A mass deportation of the scale Trump and Homan have been touting would likely have the same result. And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Six years on, families remain separated. The Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy of splitting families at the border to deter migration is not just a shameful chapter of US history but an ongoing disaster. To this day, the Biden White House is still scrambling to clean up the mess. Some families may never reunite.

It was previously unthinkable: a government program for immigration deterrence predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms.

The cruelty of that policy defined the first Trump term. Images of separated children held in Walmarts converted into shelters sparked comparisons to the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Audio obtained by ProPublica and released in June 2018 underscored the brutality: Guards joked, over the sounds of children wailing and calling for their moms and dads while in custody of Customs and Border Protection, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.”

The idea of family separation as an immigration deterrence strategy had floated around before during the Obama administration. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump came into office that hardliner senior adviser Stephen Miller pushed to implement it. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in May 2018 when making the zero-tolerance policy public, months after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had already started tearing families apart. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” (Sessions even invoked the Bible to defend the policy.)

The unspeakable—and previously unthinkable—horror of a systematic government policy predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms was such that even Donald Trump seemed chastened. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said in 2018 upon signing an executive order ending the practice. 

But it was too late. By then, more than 2,000 children had already been taken from their parents and potentially condemned to a lifetime of trauma and negative health outcomes. Ultimately, around 5,000 children were separated and, as of earlier this year, 1,360 hadn’t been reunited with their parents or legal guardians, according to a progress report by the Family Reunification Task Force launched by the Biden administration.

Lawyers and advocates working on the reunification process have witnessed heartbreaking instances of children who were so young when the separation happened that they no longer recognized their parent. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Nan Schivone, the legal director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, told me earlier this year.

Even in face of the irreparable harm done to thousands of children and their parents, the Trump campaign won’t rule out bringing back family separation in a potential second term.

“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump said during a CNN town hall last year. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.” When pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump added: “We have to save our country, all right?”

All these years later, some of the children victimized by family separation are now speaking out. “The worst thing about being [in the shelter] was at night because I always dreamed about my mother and that she was with me,” one unnamed teen says in a video posted on an X account called Same Story, “but when I woke up she wasn’t there.” In another, Billy describes being separated from his father: “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad be taken away from me.” Reuniting with his father, he says, “was the best moment in my life because it was the first time that I finally felt like I was secure and I was safe.”

Families belong together and free. In 2018, Billy was separated from his dad when they immigrated to the United States in 2018. Now that he’s reunited with his family, he hopes that no family ever has to experience the same story. Share his story because #FamiliesStillBelong. pic.twitter.com/j9Ban3Uye3

— Same Story (@samestoryvoices) September 24, 2024

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

Twelve years ago, when former President Barack Obama proudly created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to shield undocumented youth from the threat of deportation, all involved thought of it as a temporary fix. It would be, as Obama said, a “stopgap measure.” Eventually, everyone assumed Congress would get together and pass legislation for the so-called Dreamers brought to the country as children.

But, as I’ve written about before—despite the seeming bipartisan consensus of the time and DACA’s outsized weight on the lives of the 800,000 undocumented young people who have benefited from it and built their lives in the United States—the long-envisioned legislative agreement that would have afforded DACA recipients a pathway to citizenship never came to be.

Now, the prospects of a bill to help Dreamers seem grim. Both presidential candidates are more focused on talking up border security. And this year, when Democrats supported a proposed bipartisan immigration bill, they all but ignored the predicament of the undocumented youth as part of the discussion.

With Dreamers off the agenda, DACA has lived far past its intended transitionary period. That means recipients are stuck in legal limbo and at the mercy of presidential transitions and the whims of the judiciary.

Now, the fate of hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth sits in the hands of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguably the most conservative jurisdiction in the nation where Trump-appointed judges are pushing the MAGA agenda to reshape the United States one radical ruling at a time.

“Living as a DACA recipient, not a day passes that I do not think about how my life could be so different if I had a permanent sense of security in my country, the only country I know,” Jose Barrera with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) said in a statement ahead of this week’s hearing. “Others who, like me, are DACA recipients try to live their lives the best they can every day, but you can’t help but feel forgotten when year after year, Congress and our elected leaders fail to resolve this issue. Our lives cannot be kept on hold forever.”

On Thursday morning, a panel of three federal judges—none of whom are Trump appointees—heard oral arguments in Texas v. United States. The case was brought by Republican-led states in 2018 challenging the legality of DACA. Outside the courthouse, DACA recipients and supporters chanted, “Home is here.”

In 2021, Texas District Court Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that Obama exceeded the executive branch’s authority in creating DACA and that the memorandum violated the rulemaking process. In so doing, Hanen blocked the processing of new applications nationwide.

After the Biden administration appealed and issued a final rule to codify DACA into federal regulation, the Fifth Circuit sided with the states and upheld the district court’s decision. The judges—one Bush and two Trump appointees—rejected the government’s argument that DACA is an appropriate exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The case then went back to the lower court, where in 2023 Hanen declared DACA unlawful. “While sympathetic to the predicament of DACA recipients and their families,” he wrote, “this Court has expressed its concerns about the legality of the program for some time.”

Twelve years after DACA’s signing, and after years of legal wrangling, the program is in a perilous place. At Thursday’s hearing in New Orleans, there were a slew of specific questions before the judges: whether the Biden administration acted within its authority when it attempted to strengthen and safeguard DACA in 2022; if the lower court’s ruling halting new applications nationally was excessive; and whether the state of Texas, a plaintiff, successfully showed evidence of harm as a result of costs associated with social services provided to DACA recipients.

The Texas v. United States case could drag for weeks or months and eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. But what happens to DACA will also hinge on the outcome of the November presidential election. While in office, Donald Trump tried to rescind the program. The Supreme Court ruled the move was “arbitrary and capricious.” (It did not address the underlying issue of DACA’s validity.)  If Trump takes back the White House, Cecilia Muñoz, who served as director of the Domestic Policy Council under Obama and helped establish DACA, told me, “You can expect DACA to shrink or disappear entirely.”

On the other side, Vice President Kamala Harris, throughout her career, has voiced strong support for DACA. As she sought the Democratic nomination in 2019, Harris put forward a comprehensive plan to provide a pathway to citizenship to more than 2 million Dreamers through executive action. The roadmap, which mirrors ongoing demands from immigrant rights groups, included measures to expand DACA eligibility and the use of the so-called “parole in place” power to remove barriers preventing Dreamers with American espouses from qualifying for a green card.

“Dreamers cannot afford to sit around and wait for Congress to get its act together,” Harris said at the time. “These young people are just as American as I am, and they deserve a president who will fight for them from day one.”

It remains to be seen if she’ll honor that pledge as the 2024 Democratic nominee. So far, Harris’ commitments have been somewhat more modest. In June, on the occasion of the program’s anniversary, she vowed to “continue fighting to protect Dreamers,” but placed the responsibility of addressing the issue of a pathway to citizenship on Congress. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” she said at the Democratic National Convention in August.

At the hearing, the US government lawyer Brian Boynton and counselors for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the state of New Jersey defending DACA, disputed Texas’ legal standing to sue, arguing the harm the state claims to experience from health care and education costs—as well as their assertion that in the absence of the program, recipients without legal status would choose to leave the state or the country—is too indirect and speculative. (One of the judges seemed to agree, pressing the lawyer for Texas to provide concrete evidence to back up the assumption that DACA recipients would likely “self-exile.”) They also asked the court to consider the impact of the program on thousands of US citizen children whose parents have DACA, as well as on businesses across the dozens of states that benefit from it.

One of the judges also challenged Texas on the issue of whether states can rely on lower courts to “usurp” federal immigration policy. He cited a “sea change” decision by the Supreme Court last year reaffirming the executive branch’s authority to govern on immigration. Towards the end of his arguments, the Texas counsel acknowledged that they’re asking for DACA to be wound down across the country. The lawyer representing the Biden administration petitioned the court to at minimum continue to preserve DACA for the more than 500,000 current recipients.

“This case should not even be in court in the first place. DACA recipients only bring benefits to the states in which they live,” Nina Perales, the attorney arguing for MALDEF, said at a press conference afterwards. “Consistently since the very beginning of this case Texas has never been able to point to any DACA recipient that caused any harm to the state of Texas and Texas was the only state that tried.”

It was only a matter of time before former president Donald Trump resorted to race science to further denigrate migrants, who he believes to be “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, the former president—who once described himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines—accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.”

“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue,” Trump said. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (Trump’s claims are false.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP nominee has spread overtly racist and dangerous lies about immigrants. Immigrant-hating has become his entire brand and ending all forms of immigration his main fixation. But Trump’s latest rant comes as a reminder of one of his lifelong guiding beliefs: that some people are innately better than others. It also begs the question of what Trump might be willing to do to the people he believes to have “bad genes.”

As my colleague David Corn wrote in this magazine in 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that success and moneymaking are contingent on genetics.

During a campaign rally in Minnesota in 2020, Trump addressed a crowd of overwhelmingly white supporters in a county that had voted to reject refugee resettlements, “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (On the occasion, he also explicitly referenced the discredited eugenics “racehorse theory” embraced by Nazis and white supremacists that selective breeding can produce genetic superiority.)

“More than anything else,” Trump penned in his The Art of the Deal, “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey, “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

Trump and his running mate JD Vance don’t disguise their contempt for immigrants, especially those of color. When pressed, they double down on it. Recently, Trump injected into his immigration platform policy the notion of “remigration,” a proposal favored by the European far-right to forcefully repatriate or mass deport non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. 

They couldn’t be any clearer about their ideals and desire to make America a “homeland” where, presumably, only those they consider to have the right genetic composition are welcome.

It was only a matter of time before former president Donald Trump resorted to race science to further denigrate migrants, who he believes to be “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, the former president—who once described himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines—accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.”

“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue,” Trump said. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (Trump’s claims are false.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP nominee has spread overtly racist and dangerous lies about immigrants. Immigrant-hating has become his entire brand and ending all forms of immigration his main fixation. But Trump’s latest rant comes as a reminder of one of his lifelong guiding beliefs: that some people are innately better than others. It also begs the question of what Trump might be willing to do to the people he believes to have “bad genes.”

As my colleague David Corn wrote in this magazine in 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that success and moneymaking are contingent on genetics.

During a campaign rally in Minnesota in 2020, Trump addressed a crowd of overwhelmingly white supporters in a county that had voted to reject refugee resettlements, “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (On the occasion, he also explicitly referenced the discredited eugenics “racehorse theory” embraced by Nazis and white supremacists that selective breeding can produce genetic superiority.)

“More than anything else,” Trump penned in his The Art of the Deal, “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey, “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

Trump and his running mate JD Vance don’t disguise their contempt for immigrants, especially those of color. When pressed, they double down on it. Recently, Trump injected into his immigration platform policy the notion of “remigration,” a proposal favored by the European far-right to forcefully repatriate or mass deport non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. 

They couldn’t be any clearer about their ideals and desire to make America a “homeland” where, presumably, only those they consider to have the right genetic composition are welcome.

In the waning days of the Trump presidency, Russell Vought, the outgoing director of the Office of Management and Budget, had a request.

After years in Washington, DC, soaking in the minutiae of policy, Vought had come to both know and loathe the bureaucracy. A rare voice in an administration committed to “draining the swamp” who had actual Beltway experience, he found in the Trump era he could put his expertise to use.

On November 20, 2020, Vought wrote to the head of the Office of Personnel Management for approval to reclassify dozens of career civil servant jobs within his agency. A few weeks before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new category of at-will employees—so-called Schedule F positions—which would be exempt from the rules designed to protect civil servants from partisan hatchetmen.

Despite Trump’s loss, Vought pushed to recategorize scores of OMB roles. To an outsider, this might have seemed like a technical adjustment. But in practice, reassignment would have stripped 415 employees—68 percent of the agency’s personnel—of work protections, effectively making it easier for political appointees to fire them. Vought called it “another step to make Washington accountable to the American people.”

In the end, Vought couldn’t get it done by inauguration. But this combination of lofty public rhetoric and ruthless behind-the-scenes gamesmanship has become his trademark. By the tail end of Trump’s turbulent four years in the White House, the OMB director had turned into one of the president’s most trusted and obsequious officials—an acolyte with a knack for making the half-formed schemes from his boss achievable.

As Trump runs for a second term, Vought’s years of faithful service haven’t gone unnoticed; his name has been widely floated for chief of staff, and he is a key policy adviser. One of the masterminds behind Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s presidential transition blueprint to overhaul the executive branch and usher in an ultraconservative agenda—Vought, an avowed Christian nationalist, is the man best positioned to realize Trump’s visions.

A wonk with a neatly trimmed beard and tortoiseshell glasses, Vought, 48, looks like a generic bureaucrat. He has referred to himself as the “boring budget guy” and to his coterie of paper pushers as a group of “propeller heads.” He can be self-effacing, claiming that if he can get the job done, anyone can. But this modesty belies his strategic ability to bend the mechanics of government to the president’s will.

“What makes Vought especially dangerous is he combines ideological extremism with a familiarity and comfort with Washington’s political processes,” says Katherine Stewart, author of the forthcoming book Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. “He knows how to undermine agencies, how to create new bureaucratic forces, how to block funding, and how to engage with other practical features of our political system.”

For the 920-page Mandate for Leadership policy playbook from Project 2025, Vought wrote a chapter that exults in the “enormous power” of the president and previews how a conservative administration would radically subjugate the federal government. He has also crafted a 180-day battle plan to arm an incoming president with hundreds of ready-to-go executive orders, regulations, and secretarial memos. Although the details remain secret, he has hinted at pre-plotted ways to enact Trump’s mass deportations, reclaim federal agencies’ independence, and deploy the US military domestically to police migrants (and, conceivably, quash protests).

“[Trump] has never had an army of people that could serve in government, believe fully in what he believes in, and can execute it with enemy fire that’s coming over the target,” Vought said in June on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, where he is a frequent guest. “We will give this next term [the potential for] something that the country has never seen before.”

Every president makes a mark on the civil service with the political appointees they select to lead government agencies. But Vought nurtures a far more expansive—and alarming—ambition: to institute a new governing paradigm predicated on unrestrained presidential authority. With Vought as the architect, Trump could take his “dictator” on “day one” aspirations beyond words, prosecuting political opponents while avoiding accountability for his own crimes.

In a second term, Trump—and Vought—would complete unfinished business, like the OMB shake-up. Trump left office before the agency could implement Schedule F, and the Biden administration rescinded the executive order. Former staff and experts warned it would have undermined institutional knowledge in favor of blind allegiance. Stuart Shapiro, who worked at OMB from 1998 to 2003 and is the author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence, still describes this first attempt to upend the agency as “a significantly traumatic event.”

Vought and the rest of the Project 2025 administration-in-waiting plan to revive Schedule F—and take it beyond the budget office. Potentially, 50,000 federal workers could be affected, their expert roles open to partisan MAGA loyalists ideologically vetted to ensure little resistance to Trump’s project for an imperial presidency. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” Vought told Heritage President Kevin Roberts on a podcast last year.

For Vought, politics is downstream from religion. He sees a strong presidency as a way to bring forth a Christian nation. Vought opposes abortion and has referred to transgender identity as a “contagion.” He has suggested migration policy should be rooted in Judeo-Christian principles, with immigrants tested on their readiness to “assimilate.” If Trump wins, Vought wants to infuse the next conservative administration with the values of Christian nationalism—the conviction that the United States is bound to the teachings of Christ, from which all else follows.

“Vought could be one of the key figures leading us into a new and violently authoritarian future.”

Since leaving government, Vought has worked from the outside toward this goal. He founded the Center for Renewing America, part of the “nerve center” of MAGA groups laying the groundwork for Trump’s return. With the stated mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God,” CRA is a player in a coalition advising Project 2025.

As much as Trump has tried to distance himself from the initiative in recent months, Vought’s prominent role in it—and his clear ties to the campaign—tell a different story. In May, the Republican National Committee picked Vought to be the policy director of their official 2024 platform. In a secretly recorded interview, Vought—thinking he was talking to prospective donors—told the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting that Trump’s public disapproval of Project 2025 amounted to “graduate-level politics.” He also left no room for doubt as to his motivation for helping Trump get back to the White House: “I want to be the person that crushes the deep state.”

“Vought is maybe the most centrally connected hub in the wheel of what a second Trump administration would look like,” says Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan who has been closely following Vought’s moves. In return for their service, Moynihan says, Vought and others in Trump’s orbit see him as “a destabilizing force that would allow them to fundamentally change much of America as a society—starting with American government.”

The youngest of seven children, Vought grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut. His father was an electrician and his mother a schoolteacher whom he credits with leading him “to the Lord” at the age of four. Vought attended Christian summer camps and later studied at Wheaton College, a private Christian school in Illinois. “Ever since college,” Vought said on the Founders Ministries’ podcast in January 2023, “I’ve been pouring into political theory, policy.”

In his senior year, Vought discovered German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned by the Nazis for his opposition to Hitler and died in a concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. Vought pored over Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers, borrowing from his thoughts on personal responsibility as an act of freedom in response to God’s call. Vought began to view politics as a necessary instrument of Christian morality. God did not want his followers to just melt into “armchair criticism” of the world, Vought said he learned from reading Bonhoeffer; instead, one should be “sitting and engaging and making mistakes [while] being willing to accomplish all that you can because that moment has been given to you by God.”

After graduating in 1998, Vought went to work on Capitol Hill. As a fiscal hawk staffer for GOP Sens. Dan Coats of Indiana and Phil Gramm from Texas, he immersed himself in legislative procedure and federal budget policy. Vought describes working for Gramm—an unbending free-market advocate known for his antagonistic style—as a “seminal experience.” Gramm, like Vought, took joy in combining technocratic arcana with conservative fundamentalism.

While serving as policy director for Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Vought assisted in forging a federal budget overhaul bill lauded by conservatives as the “gold standard” for such a proposal. It called for slashing entitlement programs—including veteran and retirement benefits—by $1.8 trillion. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted at the time the cuts would have represented the most severe in modern US history. Vought, Hensarling said, showed “unwavering devotion to the conservative principles.”

In 2004, Vought got a JD from George Washington University as a prelude to a steady rise through leadership positions. He worked in the House Republican Study Committee, the bulwark of right-wing strategy in Congress, then chaired by Indiana Rep. Mike Pence. For the caucus, Vought helped craft Operation Offset, a deficit-reduction plan proposal for Hurricane Katrina relief that would have cut billions of dollars in assistance programs for low-income families, including Medicaid. He defined the job as being the “aide-de-camp in [Congress members’] legislative skirmishes.”

Still, by 2010, Vought had grown frustrated. There was an unwillingness, he believed, among Republican establishment figures to really embrace ideological fights. He transitioned from apparatchik to rebel, joining Heritage Action for America, the foundation’s lobbying arm.

Operating from what the group called a “frat house” in Washington, Vought kept tabs and scorecards on Republicans in Congress based on their conservatism. He helped build a program to train conservative activists and campaigned to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee supported the arms reduction treaty with Russia, Vought angrily led a public charge against him as a RINO. Vought ranted about the cost of food stamp programs and opposed a Republican-sponsored highway bill, saying, “Long-term success of transformational conservative reforms is won and lost in trenches such as these.”

This time outside the government allowed him to speak honestly. Vought, it became clear, saw compromise as a sign of betrayal, fiscal clashes as power struggles, and conflict as opportunity for change. “We need elected officials free of calcified political assumptions of what is possible that reveal only their own level of accommodation with the liberal welfare state,” he wrote on the right-wing website RedState. “And we need officials with the courage to actually shape public opinion with urgency in favor of the policies that are necessary to bring the nation back from the brink.”

Vought quickly earned a reputation as a political brawler. A former Heritage colleague described him to the Washington Post as “ideological in the extreme.” (Vought and CRA did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

For some, his unflinching religious zeal might have proved disqualifying. But it was an asset to his former boss, Pence, an evangelical Christian who was now headed to the White House as Trump’s vice president. In the spring of 2017, with Pence’s endorsement, Trump tapped Vought to be deputy director of OMB, the epicenter of policy influence in the executive branch.

At Vought’s Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) grilled him over a 2016 blog post in which he defended his alma mater’s decision to put a professor on administrative leave for stating that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology,” Vought had written, they “stand condemned” for rejecting Jesus Christ. Vought—confirmed with a tiebreaking vote from Pence—later called that confrontation with the Vermont senator a “warning shot to Christians across the country.” After almost a year as the confirmed second-in-command at OMB, Vought became acting director in 2019 just after Trump chose then-Director Mick Mulvaney to be his chief of staff.

Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”

“They’re going to push forward the boundaries of executive authority as far as it can go.”

This was a somewhat radical departure from the norm of OMB. Part of the Executive Office of the President, the agency’s 500 or so career civil servants pride themselves on acting as impartial advisers on policy, budget development and execution, and federal regulations. The work requires a tough balancing act between carrying out the administration’s vision and mitigating the risk of bad decisions. Under Vought, the agency’s culture of serving the presidency—not one particular president—was put to the test. “Vought was seen as valuing political support far more than the competence,” Shapiro writes in his book. OMB employees Shapiro interviewed describe leadership willing to push the boundaries of legality and ignore precedent with “budget gimmicks.”

“A lot of what [Trump] wanted to do and how…was contrary to all the traditions, past practices, and sometimes the law,” Sally Katzen, who served at OMB during the Clinton administration, says. “Trump’s political appointees didn’t want to hear [that] from [civil servants]. It’s like in so many different agencies when Trump was president: The people who knew anything were shut out of the process.” Katzen says Trump’s people “didn’t like hearing ‘no, you can’t; no, you shouldn’t.’”

Vought has made this frustration public. He criticized recalcitrant political appointees as “unwilling to think creatively” and harbored special contempt for career civil servants who worried about violating the law. “The nature of the bureaucracy is that if it isn’t status quo, it must be impossible,” Vought said in 2019. “However, most of the time, when we actually dig into the ways to do what the president wants, we find a way to accomplish it.” He views his legacy at OMB as reining in the broken bureaucracy and “pioneering the type of government that is necessary for an America-first, populist administration.”

Such willingness led Trump to ask Vought for help at key junctures. When rolling out an anti–critical race theory executive order barring anti-racism trainings for federal workers, Trump went to Vought, who dismissed internal resistance as activism to be beaten down. Vought was also behind Trump’s national emergency declaration to unlock billions of dollars in funds from the Pentagon to build the border wall without congressional approval; the office did so despite objection from White House counsels, whom Vought called his number-one adversary in the administration. (An appeals court later ruled the move illegal.)

“He very much knows how to use the executive office to push their policies,” says former Trump White House aide Olivia Troye, who describes Vought as one of Trump’s main enablers. “I think he’s also learned a lot of lessons from the first time around of how to go about doing things.”

These edge-of-the-envelope workarounds (or, as Vought put it, “innovative ways”) put OMB at the center of Trump’s first impeachment over the freezing of congressionally appropriated security assistance to Ukraine as part of a reelection bid to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating the Biden family. Vought helped provide a legal rationale for the hold, ignoring concerns from national security and Department of Defense officials and, ultimately, in violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act (ICA) limiting the president’s authority to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. When subpoenaed to testify in the House impeachment inquiry, Vought declined and called it a “sham process.”

Now, Vought and his colleagues at CRA have been making a case for a future Trump administration to exert even more control over the federal budget. They claim the ICA, which Vought has characterized as “an albatross around a president’s neck,” is unconstitutional and should be overturned. In a second term, Trump has vowed to challenge the 50-year-old law and “squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy.” By overriding spending decisions enacted by Congress, Trump would be more empowered to terminate agency programs he disagrees with.

“We are in an era where presidents already are too powerful,” Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, wrote of Trump’s plan to seize control of impoundment power. “They’re going to push forward the boundaries of executive authority as far as it can go,” he tells me, adding, “They want a president to be like a king.”

Vought launched CRA in 2021, with Trump’s blessings and fundraising support, as a government-in-exile. The venture included other former Trump officials like ex–Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli and Jeffrey Clark, the Department of Justice attorney involved in the plot to subvert the 2020 election. (At a CRA event this year, Bannon praised Cuccinelli and others in the organization as “madmen.”) A sister entity of the deep-pocketed Conservative Partnership Institute, CRA boasted of raising $4.75 million from undisclosed donors last year.

Vought sees himself and CRA as the tip of the spear in a counterrevolution against the left. Everything from the FBI to the Department of Education has been gripped by a “post-constitutional order” imposed by “a corrupt Marxist vanguard.” In this view, wokeism has ruined America, and it’s incumbent on them to correct course. That means going even more on the offensive on cultural battles—pushing anti-CRT model legislation for school districts in several states and urging Republican governors to circumvent federal immigration law by declaring an “invasion” at the southern border.

It also requires wielding budgetary austerity to defund and bring to heel agencies conservatives believe have gone rogue. “I love to cut spending wherever it is,” Vought told the New Yorker, “and I like to cut spending the most in the bureaucracy.” What excited him most, he said, was “cutting the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education.”

As the budget guru for House Republicans, Vought recently played a pivotal role in the debt ceiling showdown, displaying his acumen for budget-cutting power plays. Throughout the crisis, Vought pushed the insurgent Freedom Caucus to stand their ground and extract concessions for the conservative cause. Career disrupters like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had in Vought a key ally. He “understands strategy and leverage as well as anyone in Washington, DC,” Gaetz said with delight. The battle culminated in the ousting of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

At CRA, Vought has merged the culture battle of the new right with the old right’s love of small government. It was Vought who planted the original idea for what would become the House subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. And it was Vought’s organization that put forward a 2023 budget model outlining $9 trillion in spending cuts that reads like a list of grievances, from supposed “neo-racism and gender theory” programs to “climate extremism” policies. “America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought wrote in his budget’s introduction. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country.”

The document also offers a look into how Vought and his allies hope to manipulate federal agencies. When it comes to the FBI, the group would take away resources from counterintelligence and other areas “not salvageable due to a willful and repeated pattern of partisan lawfare waged against Americans.” At the same time, the budget proposed channeling more funding to the criminal investigative division to “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels.”

In papers and legal memos, Vought and his associates have articulated a vast array of dubious maneuvers to remake American democracy, from ending the Department of Justice’s independence from the president to allowing federal troops to act as domestic law enforcement. Their plans to remove checks and balances and challenge long-established constraints on executive overreach, if realized, would unleash a Trump presidency battle-tested to turn gripe into policy.

If Trump returns to the White House, says Stewart, the author of Money, Lies, and God, “Vought could be one of the key figures leading us into a new and violently authoritarian future.”

Over the weekend, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to elaborate on how he would “end the migrant invasion of America.” The candidate for president—who has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in US history—exhumed the usual laundry list: He would “stop all migrant flights,” do away with the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app, and halt refugee resettlement. None of these proposals are new or surprising coming from the Trump campaign.

But one part of the GOP nominee’s weekend post stood out. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump wrote. Former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reposted it, saying “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

What did Trump and Miller mean by “remigration”? Even seasoned immigration policy analysts had to look the term up:

Trump here uses the phrase "remigration." I was unfamiliar with the term, so I googled it.

Wikipedia describes it as a "far-right and Identitarian political concept" largely used to describe the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants from Europe. https://t.co/i8K5yK0sPk pic.twitter.com/vECWjE1DVK

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) September 15, 2024

“Remigration,” as a 2019 article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrant language in Europe from the Associated Press explains, is the “chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.” The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. With little fanfare, Trump seems to be hinting at bringing an even more radical idea into his immigration proposals (to Miller’s all-capped cheers) that goes further than the mass deportation of the undocumented population.

“He knows what he is doing,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history who studies fascism and authoritarianism, said of Trump’s statement. “He chooses his words carefully.”

The value-neutral term “remigration” has been employed in anodyne ways—for instance, in the context of Jews returning to Germany after World War II. But the word has been co-opted by far-right groups, mainly in European nations, and is synonymous with these movements now.

In France, one-time far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour proposed the creation of a “remigration ministry.” Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels this April, Zemmour denounced the “Islamization of the continent” as an existential threat to the European civilization.

Most notably, “remigration” has gained a stronghold in Germany. In 2023, a jury of linguists in the country elected remigration the “non-word” of the year for its “deliberately ideologically” appropriation as an euphemism for the forced expulsion of people to “achieve cultural hegemony and ethnic homogeneity.”

“The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the [Alternative for Germany] AfD [party] and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror said.

Last November, members of the far-right AfD, neo-Nazis, and businesspeople reportedly gathered in Potsdam to discuss plans for mass deportation, including of “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The man behind a master plan to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with lawful status, and some Germans of foreign origin to a so-called “model state” in North Africa was the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner. (Even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took issue with the secret meeting, expressing “total disagreement” with the remigration discussions.)

More recently, according to local reports, an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan “Rapid remigration creates living space,” a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.

Trump’s mention of remigration didn’t go unnoticed. Sellner, who has been barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and had his visa-free travel permit canceled by US authorities in 2019 over suspected links to the Christchurch shooter, appeared to celebrate on X the former US president’s “calls for remigration” as a victory.

According to Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political uses of language at Stanford University whose works touches on issues of nationhood and the mythology of national and ethnic identities, remigration is “flagship far-right lexicon.” The word, which is the same in French, is a neologism, she explained in an email. “The far right is fond of creating new words, such as ‘immigrationism’ or ‘remigration’ or ‘francocide’ or the concept of ‘big replacement’ because they argue that only them can see the new reality, and that this new reality needs a new vocabulary to shake people’s mind into more awareness of the dangers at play.”

As I’ve written about here, anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the center of the revival of the right globally, including in the United States. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, this summer, speakers repeated some of the very beliefs animating the notion of remigration, from an emphasis on assimilation to the characterization of multiculturalism as “anti-Western,” and calls to “decolonize America.” One anti-immigration hardliner floated the idea to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

The use of this kind of language fits the context of an escalation in dangerous rhetoric about immigrants in the United States. Lately, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has played a key role in disseminating false rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. The lies have resulted in bomb threats and unleashed fear in the community. (They are also seemingly deliberate. When pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on why he continues to perpetuate the debunked claims, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”)

If given the opportunity, Trump and his acolytes could turn hateful discourse into expulsion policies targeting all immigrants. Last week, the former president said he would start the mass deportation operations in Springfield and Colorado’s Aurora, two cities caught in the vortex of right-wing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Most Haitian migrants in the United States have received legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or a Biden administration humanitarian parole initiative and are authorized to work.

But that would mean little to Miller, who has boasted of a potential second Trump presidency’s move to take away people’s citizenship. “We started a new denaturalization program under Trump,” he posted on X in October of last year. “In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.”

Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who studies international migration, noted on the social media platform, “It is not about who should get US citizenship—it is about some US citizens illegitimizing other US citizens.”

During the ABC News presidential debate on Tuesday night, Donald Trump invoked over and over the issue he believes will win him the November election: immigration.

That meant a deluge of disparaging comments about migrants. He falsely claimed they are “pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”; he said immigrants coming in are “at the highest level of criminality.” Trump couldn’t even stop himself from repeating the unspeakably racist lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating domestic pets. (The final of these led to a bizarre interaction: The moderators fact-checking the former president’s claims of animal eating as Trump interrupted to say “people on television say my dog was taken and used for food.”)

But, when it came to the framing of immigration, Trump did ultimately have the last word on the debate stage—both literally and figuratively. Just before the head-to-head came to a close, the former president used his final remarks to define the issue on his own perverse terms: “What these people have done to our country, and maybe toughest of all, is allowing millions of people to come into our country, many of them are criminals, and they’re destroying our country,” he said.

The entire debate about immigration, to the extent it even happened, existed within Trump’s harmful idea. The only political points made on immigration on stage were about enforcement.

Vice President Harris hinted at an agenda focused on border enforcement and reviving a now-defunct sweeping bipartisan Senate immigration bill that would have added 1,500 border patrol agents to the force and raised the standards for asylum claims. That proposed legislation, which the Biden administration described as the “toughest” border enforcement measure in decades, has somehow become synonymous with compromise on immigration, despite doing little to advance Democrats’ long-standing promises of legalization for undocumented populations. (Trump torpedoed the bill to avoid handing Democrats a victory on a seemingly intractable issue.)

Trump’s misleading generalizations about “migrant crime,” went largely unchallenged—both by Harris and the media. At times, they were even reinforced. In reactions to JD Vance’s post-debate defense of Trump’s Springfield lies, CNN commentators eagerly pushed back on criticism that the media hasn’t been covering isolated incidents of migrants perpetrating violence. “There have been all kinds of stories and all kinds of coverage of immigrant crime and every state is a border state,” Chris Wallace said. (He did not note that data shows immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.)

On stage, Trump didn’t have to account for how he would carry out his potentially catastrophic and inhumane plans to mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States. He just ranted about “millions of criminals” and “terrorists” entering the country to vote for Democrats. Nor did Trump answer why he killed a bipartisan deal that would have delivered on Republicans’ wishlist of border restriction measures without providing a path to legalization for the undocumented. Instead, he evaded the question by disputing Harris’ dismissal of his rallies’ crowd before shifting to pet-eating-migrants.

It should go without saying that the contrast between Harris and Trump on all things, including if not especially immigration, is as clear as day. For one, she’s not proposing building sprawling detention camps to hold thousands of immigrants or vowing to use the military to police the border. But when given the opportunity to further stress that distinction to her advantage, Harris didn’t take it. She didn’t call out Trump’s mass deportation plot or challenge his repeated assertions that migrants commit crimes and represent an existential threat to the United States.

When asked about the Biden administration border policies, Harris—who has a proven track record of advocating for immigrants—instead defaulted to putting on her prosecutorial hat and linked immigration to criminality by touting her experience tackling “transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings.” To attack Trump for tanking the bipartisan border deal, Harris said, “he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Given the current state of the immigration debate, that may as well be the safer strategy when it comes to such a polarizing issue. But advocates and immigrant rights groups have long disputed the notion that immigration is inherently a liability for the Biden administration—and by proxy Harris—urging them to adopt an unapologetically pro-immigrant stance and go on the offensive against Republicans’ xenophobic agenda.

Ahead of the debate, I spoke with Michelle Ming, political director at the immigrant-youth led United We Dream network. On Monday, the organization’s political and electoral arm endorsed Harris, saying in a statement the goal is to block another Trump presidency and prevent mass deportations. “We know the fear that our communities lived with under his presidency, and just the uncertainty of making it through another day in this country without being rounded up, deported or arrested,” Ming said. “We feel deep in our bodies this understanding that we can’t go back to that, our communities can’t survive another four years of that.”

Still, that doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly approve of Harris. “I think what Kamala Harris needs to do is get up there and really make herself stand apart from Trump, rather than trying to be more Republican than Trump on immigration, which is, frankly, something that it feels like she’s trying to do right now, or that the Democrats are telling her to do,” she added. “That’s not a winning strategy.”

At tonight’s debate, former President Donald Trump repeated baseless claims, increasingly popular among Republicans, that there is mass noncitizen voting in the United States. It has been a persistent theme of the campaign—one that combines two of Trump’s main recurring grievances: anti-immigrant sentiment and the Big Lie.

“Our elections are bad,” Trump said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one. Some of it goes back to a debunked video. In late July, the Oversight Project—a self-described “legal and investigative” group linked to the Heritage Foundation that purports to be “battling corruption and weaponization”—promoted a video with supposed evidence of widespread cases of noncitizens admitting to being registered voters. Behind the camera, a man introduces himself to residents of an apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia, saying he works at a company that helps Hispanic people register to vote. He goes on to ask them if they’re US citizens or not, and a handful of respondents appear to confirm that they are noncitizens who are registered to vote.

In the video, Anthony Rubin—the founder of the right-wing Muckraker website known for pulling undercover stunts like infiltrating migrant caravans to denounce an “invasion” and exposing flyers allegedly calling on migrants at a border encampment to vote for Joe Biden—says 14 percent of noncitizens with whom they spoke admitted to being registered to vote, and then extrapolated that statewide to claim 47,000 noncitizens would be registered to vote in Georgia. “Based on our findings,” he concludes, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.” The video reached 56 million views on X, with a boost from Elon Musk, who has been spreading false claims about noncitizen voting and accusing Democrats of “importing voters.”

NON-CITIZENS REGISTERED IN GA

Footage obtained by @realmuckraker shows numerous non-citizens admitting to being registered voters.

A staggering 14% of the non-citizens spoken to admitted to being registered to voters. pic.twitter.com/0p38irDBZH

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) July 31, 2024

It turns out, these unfounded allegations of noncitizen voting can be—and have been—easily and exhaustively debunked.

As the New York Times recently reported, three of the seven people depicted in the video later provided context that contradicts the assertions made, saying they had either only told the man what they thought he wanted to hear to make him go away, or that they feared that by telling the truth, meaning that they weren’t registered to vote, they might be coerced to register and get in trouble with immigration authorities. Georgia investigators also found no evidence that those people had voter registrations, according to the Times.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of “suspected noncitizen voting” for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes. In 2020, the Cato Institute concluded that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.” Even the Heritage Foundation’s own data proves that the idea of massive noncitizen voting in the United States amounts to a long-lasting myth. An analysis by the American Immigration Council of Heritage’s database containing 1,546 instances of voter fraud found just 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s. And only 10 of them involved undocumented immigrants.

Despite all the evidence, the GOP and right-wing activists continue to push conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting and are even proposing legislation barring noncitizens from voting in federal elections (which already is the law).

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference earlier this year about the introduction of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), a bill making it a requirement to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

With Johnson now trying to attach the proposed legislation to a stopgap funding bill, Donald Trump suggested congressional Republicans should force a government shutdown if the effort is unsuccessful. “The Democrats are trying to ‘stuff’ voter registrations with illegal aliens,” he posted on Truth Social. “Don’t let it happen—Close it down!!!”

Critics of the SAVE Act say the legislation can only result in more voters of color and naturalized citizens being disenfranchised, pointing to the fact that millions of US citizens don’t have access to a passport or birth certificate to present as proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Moreover, states already have systems in place to verify the citizenship status of voters. “This bill would do nothing to safeguard our elections, but it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the White House said in a statement in July.

“In 2020, we heard wild stories of voting machines flipping votes, of boxes of ballots, of ballot paper that supposedly had bamboo fibers in it to prove it came from China,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said in a congressional testimony. “This year, we’re hearing the beginning of wild stories about widespread, huge numbers of noncitizens voting in federal elections.”

Why now?

“It’s being pushed preemptively, I believe, to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election,” Waldman added. “This year, the ‘Big Lie’ is being pre-deployed.”

Less than a month ago, President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump and his allies all but assumed they would easily carry the 2024 presidential election in November. But since Biden’s historic decision to step out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the dynamics of the race have dramatically changed. Democrats seem reenergized and Trump and his campaign now have reasons to worry. And recent polling numbers show why. 

According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris entering the race has shaken up the political map and made crucial Sun Belt states competitive again. In Arizona, for example, Harris is now leading Trump 50 to 45 percent. She also has a narrow advantage in North Carolina, a state Trump carried in 2020. The GOP nominee is still heading in Georgia and Nevada, but the two candidates are essentially tied across an average of those four Sun Belt states. An earlier Times/Siena poll also showed Harris edging Trump in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

“A dead heat is a big deal today,” Nate Cohn, the Times‘ chief political analyst writes. “It represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, when Mr. Trump’s relative strength over Mr. Biden among young, Black and Hispanic voters had propelled him to a surprising lead across these relatively young and diverse states.” It also spells bad news for Trump, he argues, “who may need to take all three of Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona to win in November.”

Kamala Harris puts the Sun Belt back in play, with the race tied across AZ, NC, NV, GA
AZ: Harris 50, Trump 45
GA: Trump 50, Harris 46
NV: Trump 48, Harris 47
NC: Harris 49, Trump 47https://t.co/IGTZftpHUJ

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 17, 2024

Ahead of the Democratic National Convention next week, Harris on Friday made a campaign stop in North Carolina, where she unveiled her economic policy agenda. It includes a ban on grocery price gouging, eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans, and tackling the housing affordability crisis.

“There’s a choice in this election: Donald Trump’s plans to devastate the middle class, punish working people, and make the cost of living go up for millions of Americans,” Harris said, “and, on the other hand, when I’m elected president, what we will do to bring down costs, increase the security and stability financially of your family, and expand opportunity for working- and middle-class Americans.”

Although Democrats haven’t won North Carolina since Barack Obama did so in 2008, some are feeling more optimistic about Harris’ chances. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, whose name had been floated as a potential vice president pick for Harris, told the Times he hasn’t felt “felt this much excitement” since Obama’s win. The new Times/Siena poll shows 85 percent of Harris voters are at least “somewhat enthusiastic” about voting.

It also indicates Harris is fairing better than Biden among key Democratic constituencies. Harris, who would make history as the first woman president of the United States, has stronger support among Black voters in North Carolina and Georgia, as well as among Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. She also has a 14-percentage point lead with women in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. “Mr. Trump, in turn, is maximizing his support among white voters without a college degree, winning 66 percent support from them across the four Sun Belt states,” the Times reports.

On Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released an update that one would think would please Republicans decrying a Joe Biden-made “border crisis.” The number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in July was the lowest in almost four years. Last month, CBP apprehended 56,408 migrants along the border, a 32 percent decline in comparison to June and the lowest since September 2020. It marked the fifth consecutive monthly drop, according to CBS News.

The decrease in migrant crossings follows the implementation of a border crackdown policy by the Biden administration. In June, the White House announced a sweeping executive order, based on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration, allowing border officials to temporarily suspend some asylum processing and swiftly return certain migrants to neighboring Mexico and their countries of origin at times when crossings reach a certain threshold. 

Since June, the CBP announcement states, the agency has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to 130 countries, including via at least 300 deportation flights. “July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019,” the agency says, “and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic.” Increased enforcement by the Mexican government also explains the lower numbers.

But these record-breaking statistics have not deterred Republicans from advancing their narrative of a “Biden border crisis” or trying to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for it. In response to the newly released CBP numbers, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement saying, “the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.” As I previously explained here, Harris, now the Democratic nominee, was never appointed “Border Czar” or put in charge of managing migration:

As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.

Former Trump senior adviser and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took to X to distort the border numbers. “CBP just issued a press release admitting that Border Czar Harris has quietly smuggled nearly 1M illegals aliens into the US using a fast-pass entry phone app,” he claimed in reference to the 765,000 migrants the agency says have lawfully followed the Biden administration’s rules and sought appointments through the CBP One mobile app since January 2023.

If Republicans don’t want to buy into CBP data, perhaps they should look at another indication that the numbers at the border have been in decline. A recent investigation by NBC News found that fewer border crossings are having an impact on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, which has transported thousands of migrants to cities across the country, from Denver to New York. Officials from cities that have previously received busloads of migrants from Texas told NBC News that they hadn’t gotten any buses since January.

While the Biden administration is claiming the border crossing slowdown as a win, migrants with legitimate asylum claims are being turned away at the border, potentially facing harm and danger as a result. Since the June executive order, which also released CBP agents from the mandate of asking migrants coming to the border if they had a reason to ask for asylum, referrals for “credible fear” interviews (a first step in the screening process) have fallen by 90 percent, according to the American Immigration Council.

In early June, the Biden admin implement a new regulation telling Border Patrol agents they no longer had to ask migrants if they were seeking asylum. With that safeguard eliminated, credible fear referrals have dropped over 90% in two months, falling below 2,000 total in July. pic.twitter.com/skx3PxZz0h

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) August 15, 2024

Less than a month ago, President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump and his allies all but assumed they would easily carry the 2024 presidential election in November. But since Biden’s historic decision to step out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the dynamics of the race have dramatically changed. Democrats seem reenergized and Trump and his campaign now have reasons to worry. And recent polling numbers show why. 

According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris entering the race has shaken up the political map and made crucial Sun Belt states competitive again. In Arizona, for example, Harris is now leading Trump 50 to 45 percent. She also has a narrow advantage in North Carolina, a state Trump carried in 2020. The GOP nominee is still heading in Georgia and Nevada, but the two candidates are essentially tied across an average of those four Sun Belt states. An earlier Times/Siena poll also showed Harris edging Trump in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

“A dead heat is a big deal today,” Nate Cohn, the Times‘ chief political analyst writes. “It represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, when Mr. Trump’s relative strength over Mr. Biden among young, Black and Hispanic voters had propelled him to a surprising lead across these relatively young and diverse states.” It also spells bad news for Trump, he argues, “who may need to take all three of Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona to win in November.”

Kamala Harris puts the Sun Belt back in play, with the race tied across AZ, NC, NV, GA
AZ: Harris 50, Trump 45
GA: Trump 50, Harris 46
NV: Trump 48, Harris 47
NC: Harris 49, Trump 47https://t.co/IGTZftpHUJ

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 17, 2024

Ahead of the Democratic National Convention next week, Harris on Friday made a campaign stop in North Carolina, where she unveiled her economic policy agenda. It includes a ban on grocery price gouging, eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans, and tackling the housing affordability crisis.

“There’s a choice in this election: Donald Trump’s plans to devastate the middle class, punish working people, and make the cost of living go up for millions of Americans,” Harris said, “and, on the other hand, when I’m elected president, what we will do to bring down costs, increase the security and stability financially of your family, and expand opportunity for working- and middle-class Americans.”

Although Democrats haven’t won North Carolina since Barack Obama did so in 2008, some are feeling more optimistic about Harris’ chances. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, whose name had been floated as a potential vice president pick for Harris, told the Times he hasn’t felt “felt this much excitement” since Obama’s win. The new Times/Siena poll shows 85 percent of Harris voters are at least “somewhat enthusiastic” about voting.

It also indicates Harris is fairing better than Biden among key Democratic constituencies. Harris, who would make history as the first woman president of the United States, has stronger support among Black voters in North Carolina and Georgia, as well as among Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. She also has a 14-percentage point lead with women in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. “Mr. Trump, in turn, is maximizing his support among white voters without a college degree, winning 66 percent support from them across the four Sun Belt states,” the Times reports.

On Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released an update that one would think would please Republicans decrying a Joe Biden-made “border crisis.” The number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in July was the lowest in almost four years. Last month, CBP apprehended 56,408 migrants along the border, a 32 percent decline in comparison to June and the lowest since September 2020. It marked the fifth consecutive monthly drop, according to CBS News.

The decrease in migrant crossings follows the implementation of a border crackdown policy by the Biden administration. In June, the White House announced a sweeping executive order, based on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration, allowing border officials to temporarily suspend some asylum processing and swiftly return certain migrants to neighboring Mexico and their countries of origin at times when crossings reach a certain threshold. 

Since June, the CBP announcement states, the agency has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to 130 countries, including via at least 300 deportation flights. “July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019,” the agency says, “and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic.” Increased enforcement by the Mexican government also explains the lower numbers.

But these record-breaking statistics have not deterred Republicans from advancing their narrative of a “Biden border crisis” or trying to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for it. In response to the newly released CBP numbers, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement saying, “the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.” As I previously explained here, Harris, now the Democratic nominee, was never appointed “Border Czar” or put in charge of managing migration:

As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.

Former Trump senior adviser and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took to X to distort the border numbers. “CBP just issued a press release admitting that Border Czar Harris has quietly smuggled nearly 1M illegals aliens into the US using a fast-pass entry phone app,” he claimed in reference to the 765,000 migrants the agency says have lawfully followed the Biden administration’s rules and sought appointments through the CBP One mobile app since January 2023.

If Republicans don’t want to buy into CBP data, perhaps they should look at another indication that the numbers at the border have been in decline. A recent investigation by NBC News found that fewer border crossings are having an impact on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, which has transported thousands of migrants to cities across the country, from Denver to New York. Officials from cities that have previously received busloads of migrants from Texas told NBC News that they hadn’t gotten any buses since January.

While the Biden administration is claiming the border crossing slowdown as a win, migrants with legitimate asylum claims are being turned away at the border, potentially facing harm and danger as a result. Since the June executive order, which also released CBP agents from the mandate of asking migrants coming to the border if they had a reason to ask for asylum, referrals for “credible fear” interviews (a first step in the screening process) have fallen by 90 percent, according to the American Immigration Council.

In early June, the Biden admin implement a new regulation telling Border Patrol agents they no longer had to ask migrants if they were seeking asylum. With that safeguard eliminated, credible fear referrals have dropped over 90% in two months, falling below 2,000 total in July. pic.twitter.com/skx3PxZz0h

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) August 15, 2024

On July 28, millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote in the country’s highly anticipated presidential election. For the first time in years, there was hope that the opposition would unseat the long-ruling antidemocratic leader Nicolás Maduro and restore a sense of future post-Chavismo—late President Hugo Chávez’s populist political project of a “socialist revolution” that has slid into authoritarianism—to a once-prosperous nation wrecked by prolonged economic collapse, political repression, and a massive exodus of people that has had repercussions across the region.

But in the wake of the vote came terror. The electoral authority—controlled by a pro-government majority—declared Maduro, the political successor of Chávez, the winner, despite questions about the integrity of the process. The opposition disputed Maduro’s claim with evidence that their candidate, little-known former diplomat Edmundo González, had won by a wide margin. (The United States government agreed.) The Carter Center, which sent an expert group to Venezuela to observe the election, said it “did not meet international standards” and couldn’t “be considered democratic.”

The fraudulent election has sharpened the focus on the utter collapse of what used to be the richest nation in South America. Deadly antigovernment protests have since erupted across Venezuela, and several countries have pressured the Maduro government to present verifiable proof of his reelection to no avail. “Venezuelans are ready to throw off the dictatorship,” the popular leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, who was barred from running and backed González, wrote in an op-ed. “Will the international community support us?” Back in 2023, Machado had predicted two possible outcomes for the election: “landslide victory or an obscene fraud.”

Venezuela’s fate is not restricted to South America but has been bound up in the US election this year. With the southern border as a central issue, much has been made of the spike in migration from Venezuela to the United States during the administration of President Joe Biden. On the right, the surge has been played up as a way to hit the left twice: a socialist government in Latin America failed; the poor policies of a Democratic administration led to the border being overrun. At the Republican National Convention in July, Donald Trump suggested Venezuela—as well as El Salvador—was sending “criminals” to the United States.

But that misses a far more complex story, one that ranges from the long history of US involvement in the region to the specifics of the Trump era, when, as the Washington Post recently reported, despite warnings that it would cause massive migration, President Donald Trump pushed devastating sanctions onto Venezuela. (Trump also appointed Elliott Abrams, who played a role in the Iran-Contra affair and was linked to a failed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, as the special envoy to Venezuela.)

“I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” Thomas Shannon told the Washington Post.

The results of years of economic mismanagement, exacerbated by US policies cracking down on the country, have been dramatic. One poll suggested as many as one-third of Venezuela’s population was considering migrating if Maduro, who has been president for more than a decade, held onto power for another six years. They would join the more than 7.7 million Venezuelans who have already left the country of fewer than 30 million since 2014. Most have fled to neighboring countries such as Colombia and Brazil, but thousands of others have made their way through the treacherous Darien Gap to the US-Mexico border. Many have been bused to cities like New York and Denver, where politicians have turned them into political pawns.

Since fiscal year 2021, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has registered more than 837,000 encounters with Venezuelan nationals. (The number of migrant apprehensions at the border has fallen significantly as of late in part as a result of increased enforcement by the Mexican government.) There are also currently 242,000 Venezuelans in the United States who benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and hundreds of thousands more who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, are potentially eligible based on “Venezuela’s increased instability and lack of safety due to the enduring humanitarian, security, political, and environmental conditions.”

Given all these factors, how did one of the region’s most prosperous and stable nations fall apart? The answer is more complicated than “extreme socialism,” as Elon Musk tweeted.

Once Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. By 1970, it had a higher income per capita than many European nations. But during the last quarter of the 20th century, Venezuela entered a period of economic contraction.

“There were a number of things that happened during that very long period,” says Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and author of the forthcoming book The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020. “Mostly they had to do with the country not being able to adopt reasonable economic policies and policy reforms because of conflict between its elites.”

Home to the most proven oil reserves in the world, Venezuela enjoyed a boom from exporting its oil. But then global prices plunged, going from $100 a barrel in 2014 to less than $30 two years later. Chávez, who led Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, directed oil revenue to massive social spending programs that benefited the poor. But heavily dependent on that commodity, the country hadn’t sufficiently saved or invested and fell into debt. After Maduro took over in 2013, the economy went into free fall.

In the years since, Venezuela has experienced some of the highest inflation rates worldwide—with a staggering 130,060 percent in 2018. Compounding the crisis for Venezuelans has been a devastating shortage of basic goods, food, and medicine. An estimated 80 percent of the population lives in poverty and the monthly minimum wage of 130 bolivars is equivalent to about $3.60 in the United States. A survey in 2017 found that 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds due to lack of nutrition. Between 2012 and 2020, the economy contracted by 71 percent—more than any other country in modern history not in war and more than double the magnitude of the Great Depression. Crude oil production by the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) also plummeted, reaching a 75-year low during the pandemic.

Adding to the economic downward spiral was government mismanagement and corruption. As Marcela Escobari, who served as assistant administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, explained, years of “expropriations, underinvestment in the oil industry, massive foreign indebtedness, and the gradual undermining of institutions overseeing government expenditures” have hurt the economy badly.

A US government watchdog report concluded that sanctions “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy, primarily by limiting revenue from oil production.”

But so did the various sanctions imposed by the United States over almost 20 years. While the Obama administration resorted to targeted sanctions against Maduro’s allies, Trump opted for a “maximum pressure” strategy. He broadened economic sanctions in response to escalating human rights abuses and corruption by the Maduro government. In 2018, Maduro secured a second term after what was generally considered illegitimate elections. Dozens of countries, including the United States, recognized Juan Guaidó as interim president. In late 2022, amid waning support for Guaidó, Venezuela’s opposition National Assembly voted to dissolve the shadow government. Guaidó went to exile in Miami, while an unpopular Maduro has stayed in power and replicated his 2018 response to the 2024 elections.

Starting in 2017, Trump barred the Venezuelan government from borrowing from financial markets, blocked assets, and prohibited US businesses from dealing with PDVSA, the state’s largest source of revenue. At the time, then–national security adviser John Bolton said the measures were necessary to mitigate “the poverty and the starvation and the humanitarian crisis.” But the United Nations human rights chief warned even then that the sweeping sanctions would more likely have the opposite effect and harm the most vulnerable groups.

“It’s one thing to sanction certain regime officials and not let them travel internationally and freeze their bank accounts in the United States,” Rodríguez, who estimates sanctions have contributed to around half of Venezuela’s economic contraction, says. “It’s another thing to hurt the Venezuelan economy because if you hurt the Venezuelan economy, you are hurting ordinary Venezuelans. You’re not hurting Maduro.”

According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had been warned that sanctions could heighten Venezuela’s economic and social crises and incentivize more migration, including potentially to the United States. “This is the point I made at the time: I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” Thomas Shannon, undersecretary of state for political affairs under Trump, told the Post.

Just how much the sanctions have pushed Venezuela to the brink is a subject that continues to be debated. Some analysts have argued that even before the 2017 sanctions, the economic recession, living conditions, and oil production in Venezuela were already on a negative trend and that pre-sanction underlying factors played a greater role in contributing to the country’s collapse than sanctions. As researchers with the Brookings Institute and the Harvard Center for International Development wrote, “Rather than being a result of US-imposed sanctions, much of the suffering and devastation in Venezuela has been, in line with most accounts, inflicted by those in power.”

Others argue that even if true, sanctions have only exacerbated existing problems. In a country heavily dependent on oil—accounting for 90 percent of all exports—the sanctions have been linked to a decline in production “of a dimension seen only when armies blow up oil fields,” one report about the human consequences of economic sanctions by the Center for Economic and Policy Research states. Diminished oil exports have had a negative impact on the country’s revenue and ability to import food and other essential goods with foreign exchange.

A US government watchdog report concluded that sanctions “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy, primarily by limiting revenue from oil production.” The UN Special Rapporteur found that no “strata of society has been untouched” by the negative impact of unilateral sanctions.

In a 2019 paper titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,” Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot argued that the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration “reduced the public’s calorie intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans.” By making it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, they wrote, sanctions contributed to “an estimated more than 40,000 deaths” from 2017 to 2018.

In the months before Venezuela’s presidential election, the Biden administration offered conditional energy sanctions relief in a stated effort to pressure Maduro into committing to a free and fair electoral process. But the White House later reinstated the sanctions because the Venezuelan government failed to uphold their end of the bargain on a deal that included allowing top opposition candidates to run in the presidential race.

“The [Biden] administration has thought of sanctions relief as a ‘switch’ that could increase Venezuela’s economic prospects and keep people in place,” says Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That strategy has failed, he adds, and lifting sanctions “would be to reward Maduro for what is being called the mother of all electoral frauds in Latin American history.”

For some observers, the path forward is a transition to democracy that allows for the normalization of relations with other countries and economic recovery—without sanctions. There have been some fragile signs of improvement. Inflation, while still high, was down to 190 percent last year and Venezuela’s oil exports increased by 12 percent. Luis Oliveros, an economist at the Universidade Metropolitana in Caracas told El Pais that oil production can continue to increase if sanctions stay flexible.

But uncertainty remains as Maduro tightens his grip on power despite the will of voters, blaming the unrest on “North American imperialism and the criminal fascists” and saying he wouldn’t “hesitate to summon the people to a revolution.” Rodríguez at the University of Denver sees one possible scenario where the pariah Maduro regime collapses in the face of mass protests. But more likely, he says, the “viable way out to avoid the consolidation of a full-fledged autocracy” is through a power-sharing agreement. Meanwhile, the US government has reportedly discussed extending Maduro a pardon offer to convince him to step down.

“The polls showing that large numbers of Venezuelans will migrate if Maduro remains in power prove that it isn’t about the economic situation so much as it is about Maduro,” Berg says. “That is to say, it’s about regime type. Without a change in government, Venezuelans will lose hope and migrate. Absolutely nothing changes in Venezuela until Maduro leaves.”

Five years ago, the first National Conservatism conference—a gathering on the right to propose a more populist version of conservatism—was held at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC.

The event, organized by the then-nascent Edmund Burke Foundation, drew rising stars of the New Right: Sen. John Hawley (R-Mo.), a clean-shaven JD Vance, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and tech billionaire (and eventual backer of Vance’s run for Congress) Peter Thiel. The coalition convened to push a new ideology. They hoped to create a conservative ethos “inextricably tied to the idea of the nation” and an “intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.”

In a taxonomy of young conservatives, Sam Adler-Bell in the New Republic pointed out that these NatCons (as they’re called) are among a variety of alternative ideas popping up to intellectualize Trumpism. But, in recent years, they have taken on a larger cache. New York Times columnist David Brooks, dismayed by the conference’s rise, would in 2021 call NatCon attendees the “terrifying future of the American right.”

During his opening remarks at that first conference, organizer David Brog invoked a recurring theme throughout the event—the dilution of the essence of the American nation. “We give no aid to our immigrants,” Brog said, “when we permit the erosion of the very culture that motivated them to move here in the first place.” Brog’s statement could be generously interpreted as charitable to immigrants, but it veiled a belief that was, and is still, at the heart of national conservatives’ pitch: Immigration is to blame for the fall of the Western world. It has become a source of weakness and an existential threat to the social fabric holding countries like the United States together.

To national conservatives, immigrants seem to hold no value unless fully assimilated. And no one drove that point home more forcefully at the inaugural conference than Amy Wax, a controversial University of Pennsylvania law professor, who made a “cultural case for limited immigration.” Conservatives, she offered, should push for an approach that preserves the country’s identity as a “Western and First World nation” and considers the “practical difficulties of importing large numbers of people from backwards states.”

In building a framework for the future of the Republican Party rooted in nationalism, Vance and others are essentially saying: the nation is not an idea but our people.

That meant adopting a “cultural-distance nationalism” that embraces the vision “that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Wax argued that Donald Trump was right to question why the United States would want immigrants from “shithole countries.” (He was referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa.) The celebration of diversity, she concluded, “means that we lose some of these norms…that make our life what it is.”

National Conservatism began as an effort to intellectually retrofit Trumpism with a coherent framework. Today, the annual conference previews the direction of thought on the right in the United States and abroad. The most recent edition, which happened in downtown DC in early July, assembled a handful of Republican lawmakers such as senators Rick Scott of Florida and Utah’s Mike Lee, a failed presidential contestant supportive of Trump (Vivek Ramaswamy), Hungarian emissaries, and a constellation of right-wing groups plotting the next conservative administration.

“National conservatives started out as a thoughtful intellectual movement,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, a political analyst and author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, who has attended several national conservatism conferences over the years. “As time goes on, they’ve taken more and more the characteristics of a tribe.”

Their “big tent” elite movement rejects the laissez-faire economic tradition of the past and faults a “cosmopolitan” regime with the unraveling of the American “way of life.” They repudiate imperialism and globalism and wish for a muscular government that stands for the traditional values of family and Christianity. But the one reigning conviction bounding US conservatives and their international counterparts appears to be an inflated, when not outright fabricated, fear that immigration equals doom—be it from cultural change or the Great Replacement.

The halls and stage of the fourth National Conservatism conference in the US capital reeked of jubilant and, at times, vengeful confidence. “This is the first conservative conference in memory where we can look around at our country and the world and say, we’re winning,” Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the MAGA Conservative Partnership Institute, said. “National conservatism is the only kind of conservatism there is,” the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts declared.

The largely youthful looking, groomed men in attendance were told that the woke radical left, fake news media, corrupt ruling elites, and anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian social justice warriors destroying the American way of life in a totalitarian fashion were being found out. Manhood is under attack and progressives are brainwashing and forcibly changing the sex of children, while imposing a “group quota regime”—and finally, this group gathered to fight back. All this had been done with the acquiescence of spineless mainstream Republicans and the legacy right who seem unaware of a brewing “Cold Civil War,” as Tom Klingenstein of the Claremont Institute put it. No more. Here comes the New Right.

For all the “owning the libs” discourse, the attacks on so-called gender ideology, the harangues against identity politics, and the warnings of the ever-present specter of neo-Marxism, the gathered “army of spirited counterrevolutionaries”—powered by nitro cold brew provided by the American Moment, an organization recruiting and training conservatives to work in Washington—at the Capital Hilton hotel rallied themselves most fervently around anti-immigrant sentiment.

The threat as they perceive it takes many forms. In the words of Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior adviser on all things immigration, it is a border being invaded by millions of would-be Democratic “illegal voters” and “the world’s fugitives, the world’s predators, the world’s rapists and murderers.” For Mark Krikorian, from the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, it is vulnerable asylum seekers.

“Where the national conservatism movement has made the most progress, not just here, but I think overseas as well is the recognition that the real threat to American democracy it’s certainly not Donald Trump, it’s not even some foreign dictator who doesn’t like America or our values,” JD Vance said during a dinner. “The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more. That is the threat to American democracy.” 

Never mind the fact that the long-term prospects of declining birth rates, a rallying cry for Vance, and shrinking population call exactly for more immigration, not less. The Congressional Budget Office projects that starting in 2040 net immigration will account for all population growth in the United States. But for Vance, the idea here is not actually about population decline as much as who is declining. As Margaret Talbot recently wrote in the New Yorker, Vance is more pronatalism than pro-family. “And pronatalism, as it’s been developing lately in certain conservative circles,” she notes, “typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.”

Vance made a populist economic and cultural argument for curbing immigration, which he said “has made our societies poorer, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced.” It is the cause of lower wages for American workers, spikes in housing prices, and crowded emergency rooms, he has claimed without evidence. “The country has simply taken in too many, too quickly,” Vance posted on X in May, “and unless we fix it the United States won’t exist.”

To that end, the New Right, and Vance, have been working to define what the “nation” means in common parlance.

For a long time, it has been said that “America is an idea.” Joe Biden repeated the line in his statement to the country after withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race; telling viewers that the US is “an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant.” Former House Speaker Paul Ryan once said, “America is the only nation founded on an idea, not on an identity.” But national conservatives want to move past the “myth” of a propositional nation based on universal principles of freedom and equality.

“I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” said Trump’s former head of ICE.

This country, “Never Trumper” turned vice presidential candidate Vance said during his speeches at the National Conservatism conference and later at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, “is not just an idea,” but “a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” It is a homeland. In building a framework for the future of the Republican Party rooted in nationalism, Vance and others are essentially saying: the nation is our people.

“Commitments to abstract principles or institutions are simply less capable of inspiring a feeling of belonging and a strong sense of identity than appeals to a shared history, a shared culture, a shared religion or ethnicity, and sometimes a shared race,” says Rogers Smith, a University of Pennsylvania scholar of American political thought. “We’ve had those kinds of appeals throughout American history.” He cites as an example the rise of nativism in the mid-1800s in response to the increased arrival of poor Irish and German immigrants.

But Vance and others within the national conservatism movement today, Smith explains, associate with new conservative thinkers who go further. “They don’t just say that you need a sense of identity that doesn’t rest on an idea alone,” Smith notes. “They say the ideas of the American founding were bad ideas.” He adds: “It scares me to death. I think it appeals to some of the worst features of American society.”

The fact that the “conservative movement is leaning into this, fueling it, is no surprise,” says Janelle Wong, a University of Maryland professor who researches race, immigration, and political mobilization. “Those who view or agree with the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world—that’s ethnic Christian nationalism—agree with the great replacement theory rhetoric.” Sixty percent of Republicans said they believe “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” in a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. “We’re talking about something that has become relatively mainstream among conservatives,” Wong says.

National conservatives’ reverie of immigrants as the downfall of the West is so powerful that it calls for the harshest of responses. The asylum system, Krikorian, from the anti-immigration think-tank, said at NatCon, represents a “surrender of sovereignty” and a reframing of “immigration as a right rather than a privilege.” His solution? To have the United States withdraw its longstanding commitment to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Later, in his speech, he toyed with a plan similar to one proposed in the United Kingdom, in which asylum seekers would be sent to Rwanda. “All kinds of countries,” he told the crowd “would be willing to take our money to host a small number of illegal immigrants.”

It was like this throughout my time at the conference. Another speaker advocated for doing away with the commonly held distinction between legal immigration as positive and unlawful immigration as negative, suggesting ending certain categories of work visas and the diversity visa program. “Please replace us, just do it legally,” Kevin Lynn, executive director of the deceptively named Progressives for Immigration Reform, said mockingly. He also suggested a screening of tourists to prevent potential “anchor babies.”

Theo Wold, who served in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice and on domestic policy issues, took it even further. He called out the experiment of “massive importation” of immigrants to the United States, saying it is “unfair to millions of Americans who have been pushed aside for the arrival of millions of foreign nationals.” The only sustainable form of immigration, Wold added, comes with assimilation. (Wold bemoaned that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs discourages “Americanization” efforts.) “Multiculturalism is, at its core, an anti-Western philosophy,” he said. “Disunion is its expressed goal. It’s time not just to end mass immigration, but to reverse it. It’s time to decolonize America.”

“The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more,” said JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president.

This is the intellectual foundation of Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, which are shared by the Republican National Committee’s official 2024 policy platform and were cheered on by RNC attendees carrying “Mass Deportation Now” signs. If elected, Trump and his aides want to pursue sweeping removal operations regardless of due process and build sprawling detention camps.

Speaking at the National Conservatism conference, Tom Homan, former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, told the audience he was ready to lead the deportation campaign: “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he proudly said to a round of applause. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

At times, the bubbling rage against immigrants was palpable. During the Q&A portion of the border discussion with Krikorian, Wold, Homan, and others, a woman approached the mic to shout at the panelists, urging them to confirm her suspicion that immigrants were being purposefully brought into the country to be turned into Democratic voters, a baseless claim given credence by Republicans, who recently passed a law in the House requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. When the panelists didn’t give her the exact answer she was looking for, the woman got increasingly aggrieved. At a different session, after a speaker posed a rhetorical question about what’s the biggest threat facing the country, someone in the audience angrily yelled, “Illegals!”

“There’s a lot of speculation that the kind of conservatism we see nowadays is in some sense a resurgence of the Old Right and that it’s coming along with those xenophobic attitudes, explicitly Christian nationalist attitudes, a sense of valorization of America as a people—and largely Eurocentric people—rather than America as a creedal nation,” Kabaservice says. “I think what you’re seeing is one end of a cycle within American conservatism. It’s not clear that this is the future of American conservatism going forward. But it certainly seems to be until such a time that Trumpism ceases to be the main operating force on the conservative movement and the GOP.”

He recalls Ronald Reagan’s famous 1989 farewell address to the nation. In it, Reagan talks about America as a “shining city on the hill” and “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Kabaservice says, “It’s very odd for those of us who’ve lived long enough to remember Reagan to see how there’s almost no trace of that kind of attitude in today’s populist Republican Party.” 

Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Carol Guzy/ZUMA; Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty (2)

For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

This election cycle, former President Donald Trump has made one campaign promise the most prominent: Mass deportation. It is a long-standing vow. In 2016, Trump said he would deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Once in the White House, he ordered sweeping worksite raids, enacted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, and deliberately separated migrant families, many of whom have yet to be reunited.

But thanks to outside resistance, internal opposition, sanctuary policies, legal guardrails, and sheer ineptitude, the Trump administration removed fewer than 1 million people from the country—far behind the number Barack Obama deported during his first four years in office.

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

The nation’s undocumented immigrants grow and harvest the food we eat, construct our homes, and care for our young and elderly. They pay billions in taxes, start businesses that employ Americans, and help rebuild in the wake of climate disasters.

Not only would Trump’s plan rip families and communities apart, but it also would have devastating effects for years to come, including on US citizens who perhaps have overlooked how integral undocumented immigrants are to their everyday life. Trump frames immigration as an existential threat to the United States. He has said immigrants are “taking our jobs,” are “not people,” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The reality is that if his plan were implemented, American life as we know it would be ruined—even for those cheering for mass deportation.

Here’s how this “mass deportation” agenda would fundamentally reshape the country:

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According to a 2016 report by the Center for American Progress, deporting 7 million workers would “reduce national employment by an amount similar to that experienced during the Great Recession.” GDP would immediately contract by 1.4 percent, and, eventually, by 2.6 percent. In 20 years, the US economy would shrink nearly 6 percent—or $1.6 trillion. Trump’s plan would lead to a dire shortage of low-wage workers, which would “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation,” predicts Robert J. Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration.

“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers,” Miller told the New York Times last November. Most economists disagree. “The only reason a politician would say such a thing is that they think that lots of people believe it,” says Michael Clemens, an economist at George Mason University. “It’s certainly not based on any research or empirical fact whatsoever.”

Instead of freeing up employment opportunities, findings from one study suggest that the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants could result in 968,000 fewer jobs available for US citizens, losses that would be compounded each year the policy remained in effect.

 

A recent study projected that if 7.5 million workers were deported, inflation would rise by 3 percent in two years.

The price of services would be almost 10 percent higher by 2029.

 

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Food

Half of all farmworkers in the United States are undocumented. A mass deportation program would lead to reduced domestic production and increased reliance on imports. Pierre Mérel, an agricultural and resource economics expert at the University of California, Davis, says labor-intensive fruit and vegetable harvesting would be most affected. Based on a 2022 study he co-authored, Mérel estimates that a 50 percent decrease in the farm labor supply could result in a 21 percent increase in the prices of hand-picked crops. “If [immigrant workers] just disappeared overnight,” says Andrew Mickelsen, whose family operates a potato farm in Idaho, “[the sector] would be devastated...I do not think that we in this country could grow enough food.”

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Care

Some 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, with more than two-thirds employed as providers or in supporting jobs. On top of that, more than 160,000 are employed as cleaners and housekeepers. “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms, and empty our bedpans,” says Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition. “When former President Donald Trump talks about mass deportations and enforcement, he’s talking about eradicating the type of quality of life that Americans enjoy right now.”

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Infrastructure

One in five undocumented workers—1.4 million people—are ­employed in construction. That’s more than 10 percent of the entire labor force, and 32 percent of roofers. With the industry already facing a shortage of about 500,000 workers, Trump’s deportation scheme would grind the construction of new housing to a halt, turbocharging the affordability crisis. Joshua Correa, a builder in Dallas, estimates a $300,000 house might cost anywhere from $40,000 to $45,000 more if just a fraction of the immigrant workforce is deported. “You can’t build things in the United States,” says Brian Turmail of the Associated General Contractors of America, “without people to build them.” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas put it more simply: “The economy would collapse.”

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In Arizona, there are roughly 100,000 undocumented homeowners.

If they were all deported—and their homes foreclosed on—it would result in a $44.2 billion hit to the state’s housing market.

 

Some immigration experts and former government officials have questioned the feasibility of Trump's radical plan, citing logistical and legal obstacles. But, even if he only attempts to unleash the full force of the federal government to uproot millions of noncitizens, there could be a lasting toll on immigrants and Americans. The effects of Trump's cruel practice of separating families at the border, known as "zero tolerance," are still felt today even though the policy was eventually reversed. Six years after its implementation, children and parents remain apart.

[Related: The Migrant Families Separated Under Trump Are Still in Legal Limbo]

Children would almost certainly be hurt again. More than 3.4 million unauthorized immigrants have a US-born minor child. Eighty percent of unauthorized immigrants entered the country before 2010, and almost 10 million citizens or lawful residents live in mixed-status homes. One study found a mass deportation program would slash the median income of mixed-status households by almost half, plunging millions of families into poverty.

Even if not fully realized, Trump's plot would crash the economy, leave food fallow in the fields, target vulnerable neighbors, and hurt the very population he claims to want to uplift—the American worker.

Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.

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