Donald Trump doesn’t have to deport 10 million illegals

Two news items from last week point to where US immigration enforcement is headed: 1) the number of foreign-born people in the country fell by 1.5 million in the first six months of 2025, and 2) ICE is on track to deport just 400,000 illegal immigrants for the whole year.

The obvious conclusion: A lot more illegal migrants are self-deporting than being expelled — which is surely how most Americans want things to proceed, and a lot more practical than any kind of mass round-ups.

The Trump administration is increasing deportations: This year’s 400,000 is up from the last reported Biden annual total of 271,000 which itself reflected a belated effort to show greater toughness as Democrats finally admitted how badly their open-borders policies had angered voters.

But Team Trump’s fierce rhetoric matters plenty, too: sending a message to strongly override the “everybody come on in” signals of the prior four years.

See the feds’ plans to review the status of 55 million visa holders as yet another signal: a warning that those who’ve been abusing their visas — it’s time to acquire permanent legal status if you mean to stay permanently, or make plans to head home.

Prodding and persuasion were always going to be crucial in undoing the Biden mess: ICE — despite a big expansion of its budget and the firm support of the president — can’t detain and deport that many people.

It would require mass roundups that aren’t remotely politically practical: Voters want all the worst illegal immigrants sent home, but will balk at ham-handed enforcement.

So seriously reducing the illegal population, even the millions of bogus Biden-era “asylum seekers,” is going to involve a lot of self-deportation.

Doing it on your own also preserves the chance to return legally.

President Donald Trump won re-election by promising to get everything back under control.

By stopping new illegal migration cold, he’s proved Democrats were simply lying when they said it couldn’t be done without passing new laws.

Now he needs to show that greatly reducing the illegal population, particularly the millions waved in these last few years, doesn’t require “police-state tactics” and other “savage cruelty” — that is, to expose Dems’ new lies.

Of course, lefties who oppose policing of all kinds will keep screaming about even reasonable immigration enforcement — but that just exposes their extremism to the broader public.

High-profile but deft toughness is delivering exactly what the public wants; expect Team Trump to stick to what’s already working.