11 years later, Trump’s immigration promises still aren’t law



With House Republicans effectively out of legislating time before November, the postmortem can begin on Donald Trump’s second governing trifecta and its immigration record.

After 11 years of promises, what do we have to show for it?

Whatever happens in November, Republicans have already burned most of this governing window. The question for the next time the GOP controls Congress is brutally simple: What will change?

More than nothing but far less than promised.

Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, expanding mandatory detention for certain aliens charged with specified crimes. The 2025 reconciliation law also poured tens of billions of dollars into ICE, detention capacity, border infrastructure, and enforcement personnel.

Those are real victories. But funding the machinery is not the same thing as fixing the law.

Republicans did not enact a permanent reduction in legal immigration. They did not end the diversity visa lottery. They did not define birthright citizenship in statute. They did not permanently defund sanctuary jurisdictions. They did not overhaul the removal statutes or judicial review rules that have turned nearly every major enforcement initiative into litigation.

Trump’s executive record is stronger. A Center for Immigration Studies analysis of Census Bureau survey data estimates that the foreign-born population fell 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026. The Congressional Budget Office likewise estimates that net immigration in its “other foreign national” category turned negative in 2025 after the enormous Biden-era surge.

Good. But that is exactly the problem with governing almost entirely by executive action.

The CBO estimates total net immigration at more than 10 million from 2021 through 2024. Against that backdrop, stopping the new flow and reversing part of the increase is not enough if the underlying statutes remain untouched. The next administration can erase much of the executive policy on day one.

The legislative ledger remains embarrassingly thin.

Trump endorsed the RAISE Act during his first term, a bill that would have sharply reduced legal immigration, curtailed chain migration, and eliminated the diversity visa lottery. In his second term, there has been no comparable White House push for an immigration moratorium or a permanent rewrite of the legal-immigration system.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the PAUSE Act last year to freeze most immigration until Congress addressed the system’s underlying problems. Republicans never made it a governing priority.

RELATED: The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.

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Meanwhile, Trump himself has repeatedly muddied the restrictionist message. He has defended the idea of bringing 500,000 Chinese students to American universities, talked about the need for more foreign workers, pushed to expand the H-2A program, and floated protections for illegal workers in hotels and farms.

Congress could have settled these questions in statute. It did not.

The same failure appears on removals.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 was supposed to speed removal. Thirty years later, removal policy remains a litigation magnet, and Congress has done almost nothing to rewrite the law after years of adverse rulings and procedural fights.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the obvious example. The administration alleges that he is affiliated with MS-13. His lawyers deny it. What is beyond dispute is that more than a year after his deportation to El Salvador triggered one of the administration’s biggest immigration battles, his detention and removal remain tied up in federal court.

That is not an argument against executive enforcement. It’s an argument against pretending executive enforcement can substitute for legislation. More than that, it’s an argument against executive acquiescence to judicial supremacy.

Consider the current court docket.

A federal court struck down the administration’s 75-country immigrant visa pause in August. The $100,000 H-1B payment requirement was vacated by a Massachusetts federal court, and the First Circuit refused to stay that ruling while the government appeals. Another judge gave seven H-4 plaintiffs limited relief from the administration’s decision to end automatic work-permit extensions.

A federal judge also temporarily vacated administration policies pausing diversity visa processing and later ordered the State Department to report three times a week on its compliance through the end of the fiscal year.

DACA remains in place for existing recipients even though federal courts have repeatedly found the program unlawful. Congress still has not acted to exclude illegal aliens from the census.

And the administration’s attempt to apply the 1996 welfare reform law more broadly to programs such as Head Start and other federally funded services was permanently enjoined this month after a judge found the agencies violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

Republicans knew judges would attack nearly every major executive immigration move. That was not a surprise. It was the operating environment.

Lower courts have constrained warrantless immigration arrests in parts of the country and ordered bond hearings in individual detention cases. They also blocked the administration’s third-country-removal policy for months. On September 29, the Supreme Court stayed that order and agreed to hear the case in December.

Even when the administration ultimately gets relief, the clock keeps running.

That is why Republicans should have spent their trifecta doing two things simultaneously: enforcing the law with every lawful executive tool available and rewriting the law so that the next administration could not simply erase the policy.

They did plenty of the first. They barely attempted the second.

For example, Roy and other immigration hawks spent 2025 urging Republicans to limit judicial review in removal cases and use must-pass legislation to lock enforcement changes into statute. They got no support from the administration, and those proposals died on the vine.

RELATED: Kansas Republicans muddy the waters on ICE enforcement

Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

That failure is vastly more consequential than yet another White House press release announcing an executive initiative.

Executive orders expire. Agency rules get rescinded. Guidance memoranda disappear. Prosecutorial priorities flip. Lower courts can delay policies for months or years. A statute forces the next administration to confront an actual law rather than delete its predecessor’s memo.

That was supposed to be the point of winning Congress.

Eleven years after Trump descended the escalator and made immigration the defining issue of Republican politics, the United States has more enforcement resources and a much tighter border than it did two years ago. Those achievements are real — but temporary. The basic architecture that produced the Biden-era surge remains largely intact.

Whatever happens in November, Republicans have already burned most of this governing window. The question for the next time the GOP controls Congress is brutally simple: What will change?

If the answer is another collection of executive orders followed by another collection of injunctions, then we have truly learned nothing. Immigration policy will remain a leftward ratchet: Democrats expand migration, Republicans temporarily slow it, and almost none of the restrictions survive the next change of power.

What European Politicians & Immigrants Say Behind Closed Doors | Dominik Tarczyński
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What European Politicians & Immigrants Say Behind Closed Doors | Dominik Tarczyński

‘I Would Do It Again’: Rep. Chip Roy Reflects On Years Of Service And Previews What’s Next

'In many ways, I hope [to be] even more influential because I [will] not have the constraints of an election certificate,' Roy told The Federalist.

The mass-deportation promise is disappearing



At the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas last week, Vice President JD Vance said, “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we have seen the foreign-born share of our population drop by 3 million people. That’s illegal aliens that we sent back home.” That is not true, and I wish he hadn’t said it.

The first sentence appears to round a recent estimate that the total foreign-born population fell by 2.9 million. The second recasts that estimate as 3 million illegal aliens whom the administration sent home. That is not what the underlying study says. But Vance said what he said, and if we are going to be straight shooters with Americans, then we need to hold all our political leaders to the same standard. That is especially true when it comes to the base’s favorite candidate for the next Republican presidential nomination.

It’s one thing not to mention mass deportation, but quite another to throw out numbers that nobody believes and the government’s own public data does not support.

With all due respect to the vice president, who has earned a deep reservoir of trust and support, we still need to be clear-eyed if we are going to build momentum for a mass deportation campaign.

As the vice president himself has said, “We need people to be pushing back from inside the tent.” We cannot accept premature celebrations in place of action. There could be a million explanations for how that statistic made it into the speech instead of the term “mass deportation” itself. My read is that someone ordered them not to speak about mass deportation at the convention, so it may have been hard to come up with something to say in its place. I have drafted and edited my fair share of speeches over the years. Group projects can take on lives of their own, and things end up in speeches that should not.

I was on the ground in Dallas, and I heard no speaker use the term “mass deportation.” It was a noticeable departure from the term’s prominence at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where viewers and attendees saw signs calling for “mass deportation now” while President Trump promised the “largest" deportation operation in history.

The promised mass-deportation campaign has not come to pass, and the absence of any reference to it just two years later speaks volumes about the abandonment of the cause.

The only reference to mass deportation I caught at the convention came from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin during an offstage interview. “Our base wants mass deportation. We need mass deportation,” he said. Mullin, who receives the sharpest mix of criticism and encouragement, including from yours truly and the Mass Deportation Coalition, deserves credit for at least being willing to say it. Obviously, doing it is what matters, but it starts with saying it.

Instead of mass deportation, we have a growing scandal over basic deportation data. ICE has not released its fiscal year 2025 annual report, which congressional appropriators directed the agency to issue within 90 days of the fiscal year’s end. The ICE dashboard that was regularly updated, even during the Obama and Biden years, has not posted new removal data since November 2024.

RELATED: Trump’s mass-deportation promise needs receipts

Megan Varner/Getty Images

In place of numbers are far-fetched claims and surface-level figures tossed out on social media and suspiciously amplified by networks of influencers. I suspect the amplification is not organic. Many of the posts are not even logical on their own terms, including one I saw recently claiming that ICE achieved a monthly record of 50,000 arrests. It then multiplied that “record” by the 20 months President Trump has been in office and claimed that 3 million people had therefore been deported. But 50,000 multiplied by 20 is 1 million, not 3 million. And arrests are not deportations. Nonetheless, the 3 million claim made the rounds on social media.

Then came another 3-million claim, this time drawn from a study based on the Current Population Survey, a voluntary monthly household survey used to measure the labor force. The study estimated that the total foreign-born population fell by 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026. It also preliminarily estimated that the illegal immigrant population fell by 2.3 million, from 15.8 million to 13.5 million. Importantly, that is an estimated net change in population, not a count of people deported. The study says the change can reflect new arrivals, deportations, voluntary emigration, legalizations, and deaths.

Vance also said Americans had competed for jobs and homes against “25 million new illegal immigrants.” If you are confused, then you are in the right place. The new claim that 3 million illegal aliens were sent home rests not on administrative deportation records but on an extrapolation from the survey, which does not ask respondents about their immigration status. It is a stretch to turn that estimate into 3 million illegal aliens “sent back home,” especially after claiming moments earlier that 25 million new illegal immigrants had competed with Americans for jobs and homes.

RELATED: The conservative base will remember this betrayal

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images

None of this should even be part of the argument or public conversation. The Trump administration has administrative data on removals and returns; it is choosing not to release a detailed public accounting.

This should be among the easiest data to track and compile in all of government. Each formal removal or return generates case records and departure paperwork. Officials review those figures regularly. They know what I know: Actual interior deportations are far below the estimates being bandied about.

My estimate is that interior removals are probably closer to one-sixth of the 3 million the administration claims. I have sued the DHS with the Oversight Project to obtain this data, but the agency is still spending taxpayer money on lawyers to keep it hidden. It is a cover-up and a scandal, and there are unfortunately no better words for it.

It’s unfortunate that the ascendant vice president decided to jump headfirst into the deportation-data mess. It’s one thing not to mention mass deportation, but quite another to throw out numbers that nobody believes and the government’s own public data does not support.

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Trump Offers Every Adult $5,000 If Republicans Win Both Chambers | 9/10/26
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Trump Offers Every Adult $5,000 If Republicans Win Both Chambers | 9/10/26

Watch live: Night 1 of the GOP Midterm Convention



With midterm elections right around the corner, the first-ever Midterm Republican National Convention kicks off tonight in Dallas, where more than 50 speakers will highlight the administration’s legislative achievements and contrast them with Democrat policies.

Tonight’s session covers tax relief efforts, border security, mandatory voter ID through the SAVE America Act, GOP contenders in targeted congressional districts, public safety, and economic expansion. The night culminates with a keynote address from President Donald Trump.

WATCH LIVE: RNC Night 1 — Trump, Vance, Economic Relief & Midterm Contenders

Before Trump speaks, his administration is sending its heaviest hitters to Dallas. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will argue that the Trump economy is delivering lower taxes and a lower cost of living. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche closes out the 6 o'clock Central Time hour on government accountability, and Dr. Mehmet Oz opens the 7 o'clock hour with what the program calls a patient-first vision for American health care. Congressional leadership is stacked nearly back-to-back in the 4 o'clock hour: House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.).

The midterms are also a focus of the night. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton takes the stage in the 5 p.m. CT hour as a Senate candidate, preceded in the 4 p.m. CT hour by Michael Whatley, running for Senate in North Carolina, and followed later by Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), who is running for Senate.

Collins draws the most emotionally loaded segment of the evening, appearing after a five-minute video package on Laken Riley alongside Allyson Phillips and Riley's family.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), the Republican candidate for Florida governor, will highlight red-state success against blue-state failure. Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) will talk about Pennsylvania steel and the 11,000 jobs Republicans lead the fight to save. Filling out the House bench are Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), Brandon Gill (R-Texas), Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas), and Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.).

Pro-MAGA Mexican union head: America needs a richer Mexico



Mexico should be rich. It shares a 2,000-mile land border with the largest consumer market on earth, coastlines on two oceans, abundant natural resources, and a young workforce. Prosperity should have arrived decades ago.

The industrial boom did. Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner for the third consecutive year, selling the United States $534 billion in goods in 2025. It has become a major manufacturing power, and the nearshoring wave that followed the trade war with Beijing made it one of the world’s most sought-after industrial destinations.

‘We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor.’

But too little of that prosperity reached the people doing the work. For decades, Mexico’s biggest export was not cars or electronics. It was Mexicans: More than 12 million now live abroad, most of them in the United States. A thriving country does not export its own children by accident.

Alejandro Martínez Araiza, national general secretary of the National Trade Union for Food and Commerce, Mexico’s oldest private-sector union, has an explanation economists rarely say out loud.

“Cheap labor was never an accident. It was the design,” Martínez Araiza told me. “Investment came for the low wage, and the system was built to guarantee the wage stayed low. Protection unions were the lock on the door. Corruption was the guard. The worker was never meant to prosper, because his poverty was the product being sold.”

That diagnosis is relevant today because the old design now stands between North America and its goal of competing more effectively with China. Martínez Araiza is candid about the scale of the challenge: China still dwarfs Mexico in manufacturing output.

“Can Mexico replace China? In volume, never, and anyone who promises otherwise is selling you something,” Martínez Araiza said. “You do not defeat China by trying to be China. You defeat it by being the neighbor China can never be: next door, with shared interests, and rules you can actually verify. We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor."

That is why he treats labor enforcement as supply-chain security. A real factory with real workers, better wages, and an independent union able to walk the floor is harder to disguise as a front company. In his formulation, labor enforcement becomes a certificate of origin that paperwork alone cannot fake.

His proposals for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement review follow from there: automatic consequences for violations, enforcement covering warehouses and logistics as well as factories, a regional wage floor of $7.25 an hour, and a verification alliance of democratic worker organizations across all three countries.

RELATED: Meet the man making Mexico useful again

Daniel Cardenas/Anadolu/Getty Images

Martínez Araiza is equally candid about Mexico’s vulnerability. More than 80% of Mexican exports go to the United States.

“China can survive a trade war with America. Mexico cannot, and I will not pretend otherwise,” he told me. “That is exactly why Mexico’s only rational strategy is a USMCA so credible and so enforceable that no one ever needs a trade war. Certainty is the cheapest stimulus that exists."

Then comes the part Washington rarely considers. Mexico maintains trade agreements with about 50 countries. “Everyone talks about Mexico as somebody's back door,” Martínez Araiza said. “I want the opposite: Mexico as America’s front door. Build it together in North America, and sell it to the world through our agreements. Close the back door. Open the front door. Made in North America, sold to the world.”

When work pays, people stay. "Pay a real wage, and Mexico’s biggest export goes back to being products, not people," he says. Border security, in his telling, begins on the payroll.

American readers may be skeptical of a Mexican union leader offering trade advice. But the incentives line up. His program raises the cost of the labor arbitrage that moved American factories south while reducing one of the pressures that drives migration north. President Trump’s trade agenda seeks both outcomes.

Martínez Araiza proposes to pursue them with something the American taxpayer does not have to create: organized workers already inside the supply chain, using secret-ballot elections and replacing the old protection-union system workplace by workplace.

The design that kept Mexico poor is breaking. The question is whether North America can replace it with something that lets workers, manufacturers, and both countries prosper together.

“There is no fair trade on poverty wages,” Martínez Araiza said. “The best tariff is a good wage.”

NORTHERN EXPOSURE: Inside Canada’s illegal immigration pipeline to America



American independent journalist Tayler Hansen has created an internet stir with videos documenting a side of America's illegal immigration problem that received comparatively little attention during the Biden years.

Illegal immigrants are crossing into the United States from Canada.

'We spoke to multiple Indian nationals out there, and they all said the same thing: that they literally only view Canada as a stepping stone to the United States of America.'

What, you weren't aware of it?

The other border

Most people aren't. The southern border understandably dominated the immigration debate, with Americans accustomed to seeing images of migrants pouring across crossings in Texas and California. But while attention was focused south, illegal crossings along America's enormous northern border were soaring too.

U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions along the Canadian border rose from 6,618 in fiscal 2019 to 24,968 in fiscal 2024 — a 277% increase, according to the Government Accountability Office. The Swanton Sector, covering parts of New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, alone recorded more than 19,000 apprehensions in 2024, up from just 1,563 five years earlier.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials told the GAO that many foreign nationals without valid documents to enter the United States were first traveling to Canada and then attempting to cross illegally into America.

Hansen has set out to show how it happens.

Major export

He jokingly calls illegal immigrants Canada's newest major export to the U.S.

“Canada's largest export is no longer oil because that's kind of been getting tamped down for us over the years due to them being treated like a Crown colony. … The only business that Canada is actually doing with us — and you can't even call it business at this point — is they're sending all of their illegal immigrants here because they realize they screwed up with their visa system.”

Hansen previously reported extensively on the southern border during the Biden administration. This time he traveled through Canada, investigated smuggling networks, and eventually gained the trust of people offering to move migrants illegally across the border.

The geography makes enforcement extraordinarily difficult. The United States and Canada share nearly 4,000 miles of land and maritime border, much of it far removed from official ports of entry.

“There is no such thing as real border infrastructure in Canada,” Hansen told me. “It is literally you walk across and now you're you're American basically.”

Hansen said he spoke with multiple Indian nationals who regarded Canada not as their final destination but as a route to the United States.

“We spoke to multiple Indian nationals out there, and they all said the same thing: that they literally only view Canada as a stepping stone to the United States of America.”

Goin' south

That phenomenon isn't merely anecdotal. CBP officials told federal investigators that the dramatic increase in northern-border apprehensions in 2023 and 2024 was partly driven by foreign nationals who could legally travel to Canada but lacked the necessary documents to enter the United States.

Hansen argues that the human-smuggling networks operating along the northern border have borrowed techniques from the cartels he observed while reporting in the south.

“They basically just copy and paste the cartels' tactics that they use on the southern border,” Hansen said. “And now they're using it on our northern border.”

Border Patrol apprehensions fell substantially after their 2024 peak and remained at reduced levels through April 2026, according to the GAO.

That doesn't make what Hansen documented any less disturbing.

In his documentary, Hansen made contact with a human smuggler and eventually learned how the operation worked. He describes a decentralized, three-country network involving fixers in India, smugglers in Canada, and accomplices in the United States who receive migrants after they cross.

“It's a three-step operation,” Hansen said. “You have a guy in India, and then you have multiple smugglers on the ground in Canada, and then you have smugglers in the United States of America that then take you to the safe house or take you to the place that you're going to live temporarily and provide the vehicles, provide everything.”

Hansen said one smuggler quoted him $10,000 for the crossing.

When he later confronted people involved in the operation, one offered an extraordinary defense.

“We are not smuggling,” the man told Hansen. “We are helping persons who want to, like, go over there and, like, who have problems here in Canada. So we are just only helping them.”

Hansen wasn't convinced.

“They know exactly what they're doing,” he said.

RELATED: Trump is right about the Smithsonian. Canada shows what happens when woke history wins.

Anadolu/Getty Images

Operating with impunity

He says that even after members of one smuggling network became aware someone was leaking their routes, one of its administrators assured him that the routes remained active.

“They are operating with impunity,” Hansen said.

Hansen says Sikhs predominate among the smugglers he encountered, although the migrants being moved include both Sikhs and Hindus.

“They really don't discriminate. As long as you're Indian, they want to bring you across. So you have Hindus, you have Sikhs.”

Canada's enormous temporary-resident population creates another potential problem.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says more than 2.1 million temporary visas and permits expired in 2025 and almost 1.9 million more are due to expire in 2026. Those figures cover temporary residents of all nationalities, not only Indians, although Indian nationals compose a large share of Canada's temporary workers and students.

An expired permit does not automatically mean its holder is illegally remaining in Canada; temporary residents can extend or change their status, obtain permanent residency or leave the country. But Ottawa is actively trying to reduce Canada's temporary-resident population after years of explosive growth.

Stop the madness

Hansen believes tougher Canadian enforcement could give those without legal status another incentive to head south rather than return home.

“What do you think is going to happen if Canada actually starts to enforce expired visas and do deportations?” he asked. “These people aren't going to want to go back to India.”

Northern-border apprehensions have fallen dramatically from their Biden-era peak. But the smuggling infrastructure Hansen documented — fixers openly advertising routes, drivers moving migrants to the border, and accomplices waiting on the American side — raises an obvious question.

If Washington succeeded in making illegal entry across the southern border much harder, how much attention is being paid to the much longer border to the north?

Hansen thinks not nearly enough.

“It's madness that's taking place.”

The conservative base will remember this betrayal



I am an American whose family was here before there were these United States. I grew up believing that citizenship carried obligations, borders meant something, and elected leaders were supposed to defend the country we birthed. In 2024, the Republican National Convention sounded as if the party remembered that duty. Signs reading “Mass Deportations Now!” filled the hall. Tom Homan told illegal immigrants to start packing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott led chants of “Send them back!” Donald Trump promised the largest deportation operation in American history. For a brief moment, the party spoke with unusual clarity about enforcement

Two years later, parts of the same Washington establishment elite are drifting back toward the old language of “dignity,” “modernization,” and “compassion.” Bipartisan proposals promise legal status or pathways to citizenship for millions of foreigners who entered or remained in the country unlawfully.

The base has heard the promises before. It should measure Republicans by removals, enforcement, and legislation — not rhetoric.

Republican names appear on the co-sponsor lists. The same party that campaigned on deportation is again entertaining versions of the “comprehensive immigration reform” voters have heard for decades.

That is the betrayal. Republicans asked voters for power on an enforcement mandate. They should not now pretend that mandate was merely a campaign-season flourish.

Calvin Coolidge understood that immigration policy had to serve the national interest. “America must be kept American,” he told Congress, arguing that new arrivals had to be limited to the country’s capacity to absorb them “into the ranks of good citizenship.”

Theodore Roosevelt likewise demanded assimilation and undivided civic loyalty. He demanded that every immigrant become “in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.” No divided allegiance. No polyglot boarding house. Room for only one flag, one language, one loyalty.

Whatever one thinks of every policy those men supported, the underlying principle was once unremarkable: Immigration exists for the benefit of the nation receiving immigrants, and citizenship carries duties as well as rights.

RELATED: Birth tourism is only the beginning

ULISES RUIZ/AFP/Getty Images

Today, even that proposition is smeared as “far right.” Washington lectures us endlessly about “our values” while avoiding the more basic questions: How many people should the country admit? On what terms? How quickly can newcomers be assimilated? What happens when immigration policy outruns the government’s ability to enforce the law or sustain public confidence in the system?

Those are not abstract concerns. Voters sent Republicans to Washington after 2024 expecting them to act on the mandate they claimed. I feel this betrayal in my gut.

Too many Republican elected officials have returned to the donor-class language of labor shortages, “workforce needs,” and legalization. They treat the voters who carried them as people who can be placated with border-wall rhetoric while the harder work of interior enforcement is postponed or diluted. Every time a Republican co-sponsors another legalization scheme, the message becomes harder to miss: The base is indispensable at election time and negotiable afterward.

That is managed decline sold as pragmatism. A country that cannot control its borders, enforce its immigration laws, and decide who may remain within its territory is surrendering one of the most basic functions of sovereignty. The argument for restriction does not require hostility toward immigrants. It requires the far simpler proposition that the American government has a first duty to American citizens and that immigration policy should be made with their security, wages, communities, and future in mind.

RELATED: DHS is naming names, and the media is melting down

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The fight does not end with one election cycle. Voters should keep pressure on officials at every level of government. City councils, state legislatures, Congress, and the White House should all be held to the promises made during campaigns. Officials who drift toward amnesty should be named, challenged, and, when necessary, replaced.

Elected officials must never forget that citizenship is a privilege. Assimilation should be expected of those we choose to admit. Enforcement should not disappear the moment an election is over.

To every speaker preparing remarks for the 2026 Republican National Convention in Dallas next month: You must address mass deportation — not as a slogan to be discarded after the balloons drop, but as the concrete policy Republicans promised to pursue. If the policy was necessary in 2024, it did not become unnecessary because the election was won.

The base has heard the promises before. It should measure Republicans by removals, enforcement, and legislation — not rhetoric.

If elected officials believe the country needs a different immigration policy, they should say so plainly and defend it. What they should not do is campaign on enforcement and govern toward amnesty. That is not compromise. It is bait-and-switch.