US midterms 2026: Is ICE still a Republican strength? | This Is America

Hello, this is America. That is the Rio Grande River, the border with Mexico. Now, Republicans won big here in 2024 with a promise to secure that border and bring in mass deportations. But now, as the midterms near, a shift in support after nearly two years of ICE crackdowns. What can Republicans do to reclaim that message? And can the Democrats turn anger into votes? There is lots to unpack from here in Texas shortly, but first to Washington, D.C. Thanks, Bill. President Trump vowed mass deportations and Republicans led the way on immigration with voters for years. But now, after two years of violent ICE crackdowns, they're tied with Democrats on who voters trust more on that issue. More than half of all Americans say they think enforcement has gone too far on an issue that is set to be one of the main drivers in the upcoming midterm elections. Let's go back now to Phil Lavelle in McAllen, Texas, on the U.S. border with Mexico. Border crossings down, ICE arrests up. Around 50,000 a month lately. Now both parties are trying to turn immigration into midterm votes. There are two parts to this. Securing the border and immigration enforcement inside the country. Remember this? We're doing the worst of the worst. Is your sister the worst of the worst? She's not. I'm sorry. Like I told everybody, she's always been a good girl. Nearly three quarters of those arrested by ICE in July had no criminal conviction. Homeland Security says around 70% are criminals if you include pending charges. Jocelyn Peñaloza was arrested by ICE after a traffic stop in Houston two months ago. She is still in custody. We're always afraid. We're uncertain of what's going to happen, if she's going to be sent back to Mexico, if we're ever going to be together again, or how this is going to change our lives forever. President Trump won nearly half the national Latino vote in 2024, promising mass deportations. They came in the form of ICE raids nationwide, a border issue extending deep into American cities. Dozens have died in custody since, at least 14 in Texas alone. We need more. We need more arrests. We need more deportations. That's why, you know, we got back and I pushed for, you know, 100,000 beds. Texas shares a border with Mexico. There it is, the Rio Grande River. And this is a conservative state with a huge Latino population. And promises to secure that border were a big rallying cry in 2024. Now, add ICE to the equation, there are signs of a shift. Nationally, Republicans led on immigration for the last four years until recently. Now it's a tie with the Democrats. And more than half of voters say enforcement has gone too far. 6 in 10 independents, 6 in 10 Hispanic voters, both crucial voting blocs. Many Republicans say a secure border is not enough. The law has to be enforced inside the country too. A mess was created and now cleaning it up is dirty business. You're having to find people, arrest them against their will and remove them from the country because they don't want to leave. For Democrats, the problem is how it's done and who gets caught in it. So what would the Democrats do differently? Well, I would hope they'd abolish ICE. I mean, in my perspective, I think that the agency has just lost its identity, and there's no way to rehabilitate that. The administration says most Americans back deporting people with criminal records. But on how ICE is doing it, the voters will answer that on November 3rd. Phil Lavelle, Al Jazeera, in McAllen, near the Texas-Mexico border. All right, let's get more on this with our guest. Scott an Shukart is the former assistant director for regulatory affairs and policy at ICE during the Biden administration, and Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Mark, Scott, we'll start with you. President Trump, his first term, illegal crossings went way down, and then under Biden, we saw them spike way back up, millions of people crossing the border and being detained by the Department of Homeland Security. I wonder if it's safe to concede at this stage, looking back, that immigration was at least a pretty big reason why the Democrats lost in 2024? Well, I think border security was a big issue. I don't know that I would characterize it the way you did. There was a little pandemic in there that had something to do with why people were and weren't crossing. Why they went down under Trump. Yes. And what ended up happening was that border crossings plummeted in mid-2024, and it was too late to affect the 2024 elections. But largely what the Trump administration has done in 2025 and 2026 is continue and build on the things the Biden administration started doing in mid-2024. So I think you're right that because border crossings are down, the nature of the immigration conversation has changed. So what the Trump administration has done is effectively solve the issue of illegal border crossings. Mark, tell me if you disagree, but for the last 16 months, DHS says there have been zero, what Republicans would call catch and release. People detained, cross the border illegally, and then released back into the country. They're now sending them straight back. It seems like this isn't really a huge issue anymore. Did Republicans do what they said they were going to do? they certainly did at the border. I mean, under Biden, six million inadmissible aliens, people had no right to be here, were taken into custody and then just let go into the United States. That ended. And the thing is, politically, that is what was driving the issue, the politics of the issue. And in a sense, the Trump administration's a victim of its own success because they solved the immediate problem, the bleeding at the border. And now they're dealing, as one of the people said in that bit at the beginning, the harder part of it is how do you unwind some of what, some of the damage that the Biden administration did? Okay, so now it seems like, correct me if you guys disagree, but it seems like this election now, the issue is how the enforcement in the interior of the country is being done. So last week, the shooting of an undocumented Dominican man in New York City by plainclothes ICE officers sparked huge protests and political backlash. So Oscar Belgal had his five-year-old son in the car with him. They both survived the shooting. ICE agents say they opened fire because he drove his car into their vehicles and the agents feared for their lives. So here's the reaction from the Secretary of Homeland Security and the New York City Mayor. Listen. We weren't aware, we wasn't aware the child was in the car, I can tell you that. But do you know who was? Oscar. The public outcry should be also towards this criminal, this thug, this gangbanger, this possible murderer. So, Mark. This claimant, what happened today was an outrage. New York City will not stand by while ICE agents shoot New Yorkers. And we will not back down from the demand that so many, including myself, have put forward time and again. This is an agency that must be abolished. So, I don't want to get too much into the specifics of this particular case, but in that case, these officers were plainclothes. In other cases, you know, the officers have had their faces covered. And I wonder if you think that Trump voters imagine that this is what enforcement would look like and if they're okay with this. Well, I mean, first of all, I challenge the premise. I just don't think immigration is going to be a salient issue in the election. In other words, the discomfort with a lot of ICE tactics is real because the public wants immigration laws enforced, but they don't want to see it. They don't want to hear about it. It's gas prices in Iran or we're going to drive the election. But in this particular case, the illegal immigrant criminal is the one who had his kid in the car, and he's the one who chose to put the life of law enforcement agents in danger. He is the author of that problem, not the ICE agents. Well, look, I certainly agree. The Republicans are losing this election on every issue, not just immigration. But in this case, this case builds on the shootings of Rene Good and the shooting of Alex Petty, the other shootings of sometimes the wrong target of an operation. ICE has essentially doubled the number of officers while for much of the last two years cutting the length of time of training. And what we've seen time and again is officers noncompliant with the basic rules of engagement, the basic rules about use of force. So without getting too far into this one, it's not any particular case. There's a general understanding that we have these masked, generally non-uniformed, under-trained, dangerous people in our cities. I think people who live far away from cities might be fine with that. But I think for most Americans, it's threatening. I mean, there's a point to make here, though. And that is that we don't have 16 months of uninterrupted same policy on ICE. Until January, they had the high-profile, almost theatrical enforcement efforts led by then-DHS Secretary Noem and Greg Bovino, who was the Border Patrol guy in charge of it. And people were, I think, rightly uncomfortable with a lot of that stuff, which is exactly why, after the shooting of two U.S. citizens, who may or may not have had it coming, quite frankly, because they were engaged in arguably illegal activity, But President Trump understood this is not a good idea. They changed tactics. They're doing it much more quietly, much more professionally, and more effectively. They're arresting more illegal immigrants now than they were back in January when all of the hullabaloo happened. Scott, you got something to say about this? Well, I mean, they've taken some attention off the front end of these spectacular homicidal arrests. But then on the back end, they've sent 25,000 people to countries they have no connection to, to South Sudan, to Equatorial Guinea, to the Central African Republic, in violation of our treaty obligations not to return asylum seekers to places that they're going to be persecuted. And so they have been able to turn the volume and the temperature down to do some truly awful things that I don't think they're going to be selling in the election, but they're not popular. I guess I just wonder what the Democrat policy is and whether there is one. Because you heard the New York City mayor there, Zohran Mamdani, saying he wants to abolish ICE. You also heard in Phil's piece there another local official from the Democratic Party saying they would like to see ICE abolished. I mean, is that the policy? I mean, what would you replace it with? I think a month from now we're going to have a presidential primary start, and that is going to be a big theme in it. But for the midterms, though, is there a policy? I mean, I'm not sure what it is, and I do this for a living. It's not really clear to me what the Democratic policy is. Well, there doesn't need to be one, because you break it, you bought it with the executive branch, right? President Trump has tried to rule as a dictator. He's gotten the Supreme Court to say that he can, so he bears sole responsibility for what his thugs are doing. Democrats don't have to have an alternative. They just have to point out he's screwing up. They will have to have an alternative eventually. Eventually, but that's two years. There isn't one, and there isn't even kind of the inchoate sort of startings or beginning of what a Democratic policy would look like. that wouldn't just lead to the same thing we saw during four years under Biden. I just wonder, you know, we heard a little bit of this under the Biden administration became a huge issue in the election. But this whole idea of defunding the police kind of caught on for a little while. And then people realized, hold on, you can't just defund the police. You're going to get anarchy. I mean, does that sort of sound similar to what's happening now? Not at all, because I mean, look, the McSharry version of defunding the police was an awful lot of what police do with guns. social workers could do better. A lot of what ICE does, caseworkers could do better. A lot of what ICE does is check people in in an office building and make sure they're compliant with their deadlines. There's no reason to have or to pay a guy to carry a gun around to do that job. So in that sense, reforming law enforcement to be more effective, more cost effective, and to engage with people on a human level, that pays dividends in any law enforcement context. But I think the question of whether to abolish ICE is going to be something that the primary is very much going to be about. Do you think that if Democrats get in, though, we're going to see a return to what, again, Republicans would call catch and release, where somebody crosses the border illegally, they are detained briefly, and then they are released into the interior of the country? I think it depends on who the president is in 2029. But in the next two years, that's going to be the president's job, not Congress's. There's just no question that if the Democrats, as currently constituted, are faced with having to carry out immigration policy, you're going to, you know, it's entirely possible I would be pining for the good old days of the Biden administration, because if you think Biden let go lots of illegal aliens into the United States, again, six million people in custody let go into the country. Imagine what President AOC or somebody else would do. If I could just briefly, I would say the conversations that Democrats are having out of power right now are very much not of that tenor. They are about how to avoid making the same mistakes. I just want to bring bring if I can, Mark, I'll bring in a second. I just want to get a little public opinion into the discussion. So between Americans who lean Democrat and those who lean Republican, there is a sharp divide on approval of Trump's immigration enforcement action. So a poll in July found that 81% of Republican respondents approved of Trump's handling of immigration, whereas just 7% of Democrats did, for independents It was 29%. So Mark, my question is for you. How is it that the Trump administration has managed to turn what should be, you'd think, a winning issue into what now looks like a losing one? couple ones first, a couple issues first of all the decline hasn't been all that significant, I mean you just showed the graph and it's a little bit down from where it was a year and a half ago but not that much and the other issue is what one of the people in that opening segment said, we fix the border now, it's the harder part of trying to unravel the problems that were created by Biden's immigration policies and that's not pretty sometimes, what I would frankly, the thing I would like to see from the administration that they're not doing is more work-related enforcement, we're going to get to this in a second but I just want to play one other thing and that is what we ask people in Washington DC about the issue and by and large they say that the way that immigration has been handled by the current administration is a problem, listen, we should open the gates open the borders let people and that's how America was built, they need to stop all the ICE raids, there are people on both sides of the aisle who are sick and tired, at the end of the day this is a country that is built off of immigrants. People are now getting paranoia. Like, when they try stepping out of the house, I'm like, dang, you can't even do that? And I can do that because I'm white? That's crazy. They had a lot of hard rhetoric about immigration. Sometimes I feel like people didn't actually, people voted for rhetoric, and then they saw how it actually played out. And then they didn't quite like that, actually. I should just clarify one thing that's not obvious to our overseas viewers, and that is that Washington, D.C. is extremely liberal. In the last many presidential elections, it routinely votes more than 90% for the Democrats, so it's a slightly biased sample there. But the thing that the last guy said, Scott, I wonder if this summed it up, that, you know, people voted for this rhetoric, but maybe they didn't realize what it would actually look like in practice. I mean, is that a good summary of where we're at? I think that's part of it. I saw a poll that said that among rural voters, a third were supportive of the president's enforcement posture, a third were opposed and a third were undecided. I think people, and you know, you're talking about Washington, D.C., rural areas, much more Trump supporting. I think people are startled by what it looks like to get what they voted for. I think that's right. Mark, I think there's something to that, honestly, because people want the immigration law enforced. But as I said before, they don't really want to see it and they're not wild about hearing about it, which is why we need more work related enforcement, because what that does is not necessarily arrest people. There's some of that. You may raid a work site. But even if you just do audits of payrolls and most illegal immigrants work on the books. So audits by, you know, just looking at the payroll records would dramatically increase the rate of self-deportation, which is the best kind of deportation. It seems to me, sorry to interrupt, but it seems to me like there is a sort of unspoken policy in this country, which is the reason why we don't have mandatory e-verify where employers have to go and check social security numbers and make sure that someone has legal work authorization. Because in some sectors of the economy, not all, but some, like farm work, things like that, it's almost like they are so dependent on illegal migration that no administration could go too far without replacing those migrants with other people. Well, there have certainly been disagreements between the Agriculture Department and Homeland Security about how to do farm enforcement. But it is also worth pointing out that this administration has created millions of undocumented people by taking people who had temporary work permits from the Biden administration and ensuring those expire, ending temporary protected status for so many nationality groups. And so there are people who were working legally for years or in some cases for decades who are now having to go into the shadows. Before we move on to legal immigration, I just want to get a bit of your perspective from your time at working for ICE. How much does a policy change at the top, or how does a policy change made at the top trickle down to the officers, you know, on the ground level? Well, Mark was pointing this out earlier. There really has been a shift since Secretary Noem and her little cabal left and Secretary Mullen came in. I think that there are bright lines that get communicated from the top that absolutely get understood in the field. I think there's the problem that a lot of these new officers aren't very well trained and so they may not have the tools they need to implement even good policy but when it comes to something like there was a disastrous arrest a couple of months ago where they tried to tackle somebody in the las vegas airport he resisted and they gave up and walked away right there's not a policy solution to that there's a training problem there mark um well there's no question that um directives from the top can change behavior. I mean, there's no issue about that. That's absolutely true. The training issue is potentially a problem in the sense that when you staff up any agency, you do have to make sure you're not rushing people through the training process. That happened here in Washington before your time. You may have been in elementary school. I remember they increased the size of the Metropolitan Police Department, the Washington police, and they cut corners. And they ended up with all kinds of people who should not have been given a badge and a gun. That's occasionally happened with regard to ICE. It's more of a problem of kind of the thoroughness and depth of training, but I think they're addressing that. So that's a real issue. It's not a reason to stop enforcing the law. Okay, so we've been talking largely about illegal immigration. I want to talk about legal migration now. So since the start of Trump's second term, his administration has taken measures that have impacted people attempting to come to the United States legally. So from day one, the president moved to reverse or terminate admissions granted through temporary protected status. That's for people immigrating to the U.S. from countries considered to be dangerous. In June of last year, a promised travel ban took effect, suspending visas for nationals from 19 countries. Then a $100,000 visa bond payment was introduced for people applying for an H-1B visa. It's generally used by skilled workers in the tech sector. A federal court struck this down, though, in June of this year. And this January, the State Department began pausing immigrant visa processing for applicants from a further 75 countries. And in August, migrant visa applications from all countries were temporarily paused to retrain consular officials. Mark, do you think that this is what people want? Less legal immigration? Oh, absolutely. And the thing is, this isn't even really a change in the number of people who are allowed into the country. That's generally in statute. What we're seeing is a reduction in the actual number of people coming in because the laws are being enforced. Temporary protected status, for instance. It's not for people coming in. That's for illegal immigrants who are already here. And some disaster happens at home, and they're given work permits and Social Security numbers temporarily. That's what the T in TPS means. People have been here for years, decades even, because administration, Republican and Democrat, have just renewed this temporary status because they don't want to enforce the law. The administration, the Trump administration, saying, look, we're putting the T back in TPS, and that's long overdue. Fair point, Scott? Well, I think with TPS, there is a point to be made there, though there also, I think, in this case, was an attitude of cutting off all of the designations of temporary protected status, some of which were very hard to justify cutting off. But with respect to legal immigration, the H-1B fee, they've also tried to bounce some companies like Microsoft from legal immigration entirely, which just looks like extortion of a company whose artificial intelligence assets they're trying to make. But I should just clarify, so the vice president talked about this, J.D. Vance, just a couple of days ago, and he says that, look, last year there were 6,000 American citizens who were laid off at Microsoft. That same year there were more than 6,000 people who were given these H-1B visas, 3,000 people moved to green cards. Now, Microsoft disputes some of this, saying that a lot of these people were people who were already here. They say only 1% of their U.S. workforce is foreigners. But look, the Democrats seem to be split on this issue. Should they be? Shouldn't Democrats be favoring jobs for Americans over, you know, people from India coming in to work for these tech companies? Look, the research is indisputable that high-skilled immigration is good for native-born Americans. It is what has allowed the economy. It is what has allowed Silicon Valley to boom the way that it has. But in this case where you have 6,000 people laid off and then, you know, Microsoft giving 6,000 H-1B visas, I mean, that seems egregious, doesn't it? That may well be apples and oranges. They may have laid off 6,000 janitors and hired 6,000 engineers. I have no idea. But what this is, is the administration trying to pick winners and losers in the economy, which it's done since day one with its immigration tools and everything else. It is trying to meddle in the private economy rather than let employers decide who would be good for the job. But you don't think that there's been any abuse of the visa system, the H-1B system in the United States? Oh, there has absolutely been abuse. There was a ridiculous fraud that the Biden administration caught and ended where people would file the same application through a dozen different employers, some of which didn't even really exist, in order to get more lottery tickets into H-1B. We solved that in the Biden administration, but fundamentally demand so outstrips supply that there's always going to be pressure because the employers want those high-skilled workers. The medical industry wants more doctors and nurses. But is it, I mean, is it that they want them or they just don't want to pay them the salaries that maybe an American citizen would demand? We've capped medical school admissions. We don't train enough doctors. So if you want a doctor, you've got to import some. The fact is that H-1Bs earn significantly less than comparable Americans. That's the entire point. And in fact, the law is structured such that the H-1B visas can be used literally to replace American workers. This became very notable a number of years ago when the Disney company, the New York Times, did a story on Walt Disney Company firing its entire IT staff, replacing them all with H-1Bs, whom the Americans had to train before they were fired. So the H-1B program, yes, there's fraud. The Biden administration has addressed some of the fraud. The Trump administration is addressing some of the fraud. But it is systemically a problem, and it has to be fixed. Really, Congress ultimately has to fix it, because the system is created in order to enable tech companies, especially, to import cheap white-collar labor. That's the point. Scott? Well, the other piece of this is how it relates to student visas. One of the things the Trump administration has been trying to do is to destroy the American university system that has so many high-level graduate programs. And a lot of what we have done traditionally is train people in our Ph.D. programs, our engineering programs, and then they would go on to do work for American employers. The Trump administration is trying to end that pipeline by cutting off student visas, limiting the ability of people to do what's called OPT training after their Ph.D. programs. And so the entire pipeline that has allowed for successful legal skilled immigration is being cut at multiple points. But is it a fair question to say, look, is a student visa a student visa or is this just sort of a backdoor way for people to immigrate into the United States? We don't have a front door for those people. So of course the back doors have become the front doors. We need a comprehensive reform. We have a front door for genuinely best and brightest on the planet. If you're Einstein, I will drive to your house and give you your green card because we have a mechanism for that. That's not what the H-1B program is. And as Scott mentioned, there is a kind of pipeline, foreign students, then this OPT program, which is basically illegal because you're pretending to be a student, but you're working, and then H-1B and then a green card. And the administration is, in fact, trying to interrupt and break up that pipeline and more power to them. Well, if the front door works so well, I don't know why Elon Musk had to come here illegally and work illegally, right? I mean, the system hasn't worked for a long time for a lot of people. I guess, I mean, Democrats are the party of the working man, at least they have been traditionally. Shouldn't this be an issue for Democrats to say, look, we do need to crack down on some of this fraud, I think I think we should crack down on fraud all over the system with employers who abuse their employees as well as with people who abuse the immigration system. Absolutely. The problem is, like I said, it's not just fraud. There's always going to be fraud. There's marriage fraud and immigration. There's all kinds of fraud. And frankly, administrations on both sides often have not been tough enough. The system of H-1Bs is the problem, even without fraud. Gentlemen, I wish we had more time. It's been a fascinating discussion. Scott Shukart, the former policy head at ICE, and Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Thank you both for being here, gentlemen. And that's all from the team here in Washington. Handing back now to Phil Lavelle and Al Jazeera's global headquarters in Doha. Don't forget, you can catch This Is America every weekday, Monday to Friday, 18.30 GMT, or if you're here in the United States, that is 2.30pm on the East Coast. That is it for this edition. We'll see you on the next one when our special midterms coverage continues. Bye for now.