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.
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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.
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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.
Deportation flights are cleared for takeoff.
The Supreme Court of the United States on Tuesday issued an emergency ruling allowing the Trump administration to resume deporting migrants to "third countries," or those other than their nation of origin. The administration has deported Cubans and Venezuelans to African nations like Liberia and Eswatini.
'A bad day for criminal illegals and open borders activists alike.'
Though the one-page stay did not include a vote count, the three liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson noted they would not have granted the Trump administration's request.
The Department of Homeland Security wasted no time taking a victory lap on social media.
"In our second Supreme Court victory in less than a week, DHS’s third country removal policy is back in effect," DHS General Counsel James Percival said on X after the ruling. "A bad day for criminal illegals and open borders activists alike. It’s not too late to get $3,000 and a flight home."
The practice became a practical necessity for removing illegal aliens after several countries, including Cuba and Vietnam, refused to accept the return of their deported nationals.
Though third-country deportations to African nations have generated prominent media attention, Mexico remains the leading destination for said removals. Of the roughly 25,000 third-country deportees since the policy took effect, 20,000 have been sent to Mexico.
Department of Justice Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the successful application to stay Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy's February judgment.
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"The United States relies on third countries in part to facilitate the removal of criminal aliens who are otherwise difficult to remove because their home countries and other countries refuse to take them," Sauer wrote in the filing. "Absent an effective third-country removal policy, the United States is forced to retain (and often release into the interior) vicious criminals who have already harmed our communities."
Tuesday's emergency ruling is a temporary stay, not a final decision. The justices also granted the administration review and set oral argument for December.
SCOTUS will evaluate in December whether Murphy had jurisdiction to issue a nationwide pause and whether the third-country policy is lawful on its merits. The emergency ruling allowed the Trump administration to resume third-country deportations without the lengthy notice-and-hearing process previously imposed by Murphy.
"The Left wants you to believe that removing aliens to countries other than their home country is cruel," Percival said. "What is cruel is allowing criminal illegals who can’t be sent home to stay in our communities and victimize anew."
Tuesday's order marks the third time that the Supreme Court has granted the federal government third-country deportation powers pending a final hearing and decision.
The DHS and DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.
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Jack Smith, the Biden regime’s former special counsel, is back in the news with his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. The Oversight Project has uncovered new records that don’t focus on the settled question of why Smith used federal power to target political enemies, but instead on how he was able to do it.
Understanding the “how” is more important at this stage. We all know why the weaponization of the Biden years happened. It happened because they wanted to extinguish a political movement so that people from around the country could never truly shake up Washington, D.C., again.
For those who believe Smith’s investigation crossed the line from legitimate law enforcement into political targeting, that broader reach is the central issue.
We also know why it can happen again if Democrats take back power.
In Democrats’ minds, they have unfinished business. They regard Donald Trump and his supporters as too great a threat to stop short the next time. That makes it essential to understand how the weaponization of government happened, how it could happen again, and what reforms are needed now to prevent a repeat.
Instead, systemic reform has largely fallen by the wayside, replaced by political declarations that government weaponization has been solved once and for all.
With few signs of meaningful accountability, the need for concrete action is urgent.
January 6 gave Democrats the justification they needed to discard restraint and use the powers of federal law enforcement against their political opponents. That effort did not stop with President Trump. It extended to his supporters, especially those who challenged the conduct of the 2020 election or became prominent figures in the broader America First movement.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith in November 2022 to investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his actions surrounding January 6. Smith became the central figure in the federal effort to prosecute the former president.
Smith took over the FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation, a sweeping inquiry that gathered records involving Republican politicians, Trump allies, and organizations.
The investigation grew out of an inspector general inquiry that was later folded into Arctic Frost. Smith has cited that earlier investigation in denying knowledge of actions taken before his involvement, including those associated with former FBI agent Timothy R. Thibault.
According to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Smith’s team issued hundreds of subpoenas involving more than 400 Republican individuals and organizations. It also obtained phone records connected to 20 current or former Republican members of Congress.
Newly released records provide more detail about how Smith’s office conducted the investigation.
The scale is worth considering. Investigators collected cellphone records, audio, video, and other digital data involving elected officials as well as private citizens engaged in political activity.
Understanding exactly what was collected, from whom, and under what authority is essential to judging whether the investigation stayed within legitimate law enforcement bounds.
Smith’s office then faced the tough task of sorting through a vast trove of information and building a case for trial.
The investigation also gave prosecutors an unusually detailed picture of Trump’s political network. If the argument is that this information could be used for purposes beyond prosecution, the piece should show that rather than assume it.
Venue mattered too. Washington, D.C., offered prosecutors a jury pool markedly less favorable to Trump than many other jurisdictions.
Through Freedom of Information Act litigation, the Oversight Project obtained 844 pages of records from Smith’s office.
Those documents show that in July 2023, just weeks before Trump was indicted over his actions surrounding January 6, Smith’s team said it was in “desperate need” of forensic video software from Axon, a major law enforcement vendor best known for Tasers and police body cameras.
Axon has since drawn attention as cities across the country consider the company’s expanding surveillance technology.
The urgency inside Smith’s office was enough to override normal purchasing procedures, despite initial objections from a member of his own staff.
On July 13, 2023, the office’s executive officer wrote that Smith “supports more strict requirements than DOJ’s standard policies.” Even so, she authorized the purchase “prior to creating the UFMS obligation” — before the expense had been entered into the Justice Department’s financial system — because “the purchase is urgent.”
The order was placed July 14. Axon shipped the software licenses the next day.
Eighteen days later, on August 1, Smith indicted Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and events surrounding January 6.
The records leave key questions unanswered.
The Justice Department withheld the purchase price. It also has not disclosed what video or audio Smith’s team needed to process so urgently. Given the timing, the material may have been related to the January 6 case, but the records do not establish that.
Axon’s proposal also included language allowing the government to share “de-identified segments of Agency Content with Axon to develop new products.”
The Justice Department released only an unsigned copy of the agreement. As a result, it remains unclear whether Smith’s office agreed to let a private vendor use investigative material in product development.
Smith’s investigation likely cost taxpayers more than $50 million, according to a Fox News analysis of Justice Department spending reports. How much of that money went to outside vendors such as Axon remains unclear. Some expenses may have been recorded through the Antitrust Division or U.S. attorneys' offices, making the full cost difficult to trace.
But we do know that when Smith needed help targeting President Trump, he called Axon in a rush, and the company was more than happy to answer. The grand jury indictment over January 6 that quickly followed appears to be a natural consequence of Smith finally being able to dig through the results of his dragnet.
Smith’s office was far less careful with its own records. When it moved its files at the start of the investigation, Justice Department e-discovery staff warned the transfer “will change the metadata on those files (create and modify dates).”
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The office replied, “The team has no issue with the changes to metadata.” Its records officer decided the team’s Microsoft Teams chats were “not necessary to be moved.” Phones and an iPad used by Smith’s lawyers were returned to other Justice Department offices, with nothing in the records showing their contents were preserved first.
In the end, Smith did not secure a conviction.
The classified documents case was dismissed after a federal judge ruled that Smith’s appointment was unlawful. The election case was narrowed by the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, then dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election and Justice Department policy barred continued prosecution of an incoming president.
Smith resigned 10 days before Trump returned to office.
For many Americans, the arguments and passions of that period have faded. For those who were investigated, subpoenaed, or otherwise drawn into the government’s scrutiny, they have not.
Smith remains one of the central figures associated with that period. His return to the news is a reminder that the powers of federal prosecution remain in place regardless of which party controls the executive branch.
The damage was not limited to the final disposition of the cases.
Years of litigation brought legal bills, damaging headlines, invasive discovery, and scrutiny of people beyond Trump himself. The investigation placed an entire political network under examination by the federal government.
Trump was the central defendant. But the investigation reached far beyond him, touching elected officials, activists, and others associated with the America First movement.
For those who believe the investigation crossed the line from legitimate law enforcement into political targeting, that broader reach is the central issue.
Understanding how Jack Smith almost pulled it off, and who he worked with, would go a long way toward understanding how lawfare works. The senators questioning Smith this week have a chance to start. Republicans would be wise to take the leads developed by the Oversight Project and get to the bottom of it.
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