Trump administration’s early immigration moves risk bipartisan pushback

Donald Trump’s pledge to deport some 11 million undocumented migrants is likely unrealistic, many experts have said, purely because of the limitations on federal resources. Still, a ramp up in immigration raids and the potential for mass arrests in local communities — and attendant negative press — could fuel a bipartisan backlash: “You get calls from Republican members of Congress [asking], ’why are you deporting this guy? I’m getting these calls from the pastor and from congregants,’” a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official explained to the Financial Times. “If they send an army into New York, and you have 10,000 troops carrying semi-automatic weapons, I think it’s a terrible image, and I oppose that. But it’s not that I oppose removing people,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, said in an interview with Fox News.

Legal immigration has presented another point of discord among Donald Trump’s closest supporters and allies. While the president previously described H-1B visas — awarded to a number of skilled immigrant workers every year — as “very bad” and “unfair,” Trump has since signaled his support for allies like Elon Musk, who want to expand the visa. Musk and other leading tech figures’ ardent support for the visa has pitted the anti-immigration populist right against the tech billionaires, a populism expert argued for the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Tech experts told Business Insider that stricter US immigration laws could see the industry face worker shortages on a similar scale to the pandemic era, potentially hampering US AI innovation.

Immigration experts told The Guardian that while some of Donald Trump’s directives are unlikely to survive legal challenges, the “chaotic tempo” of Trump’s initial orders seem “designed to stoke panic.” That could help foster what Vice President JD Vance has described as a desired “chilling effect” on migration more broadly. Raids on farms in California have left many migrant workers afraid to turn up to work, local outlet The Mercury News reported, while immigrant families in Massachusetts fear schools are no longer safe, according to The Boston Globe. “We can affirm and pledge to stand with all our residents,” one Massachusetts city mayor told the Globe, adding that “the federal government is the federal government… That is a dark specter over people’s lives.”