Image Credit: Tamir Kalifa / Stringer / Getty Images 
When President Trump promised the “largest mass deportation operation in American history,” it should have been obvious that extraordinary measures would be needed; an effort of a kind genuinely never seen before.
President Trump—then just plain old Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump—said 20 million illegals would need to be removed, or five million illegals a year for every year of a full four-year term. By contrast, Eisenhower’s charmingly named Operation Wetback removed about a million people in a single year, albeit without the benefits of the technology used by agents today—computers, mobile phones, facial-recognition cameras, and all those weird, wonderful and frankly rather sinister gizmos made by Palantir. Some say the number was more like 300,000, since many of Ike’s hapless victims were counted more than once as they anointed their posteriors for a second time crossing the Rio Grande.
Whatever the figure, it was obviously a lot less.
Since Trump returned to office on the wings of his immigration promise, Herculean efforts have indeed been made to deport hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegals.
We’ve seen high-profile, high-stakes raids deep into “enemy” territory—Los Angeles, Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area, Chicago. The worst foreign criminals and gang members were sent to the grimmest, darkest prison in South America: CECOT, the Centre for Terrorist Confinement, in El Salvador. The President has used Executive Orders to overturn birthright citizenship and remove special protected status from hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti, Venezuela and other shithole countries. Courtesy of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” ICE received a budget larger than that of many First World militaries—$180 billion—and now it’s furiously recruiting tens of thousands of new agents and buying enormous warehouses to turn into detention centers and luxury ball pits.
At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security has attempted to convince illegals to leave the country of their own volition, before they end up in the meaty clutches of Tom “Headcrusher” Homan. A Biden-era app that allowed illegals to book a nice leisurely entry into the US was repurposed as “CBP Home.” Illegals can notify the DHS of their intention to leave and claim a free plane ticket.
Adios!
According to official calculations, this multipronged approach has resulted in more than two million people leaving the US over the last year, the vast majority—around 1.5 million—of their own accord.
And, I mean, it stands to sense: If you can make illegals leave without sending Greg Bovino and his stormtroopers flying through their front door, why wouldn’t you?
Work hard, but also work smart. (Someone told me that once, but I forget who…)
In Texas, where there are an estimated 1.7 million illegals, the Republican leadership is working smart. Just how smart is revealed in a new report from The Texas Tribune.
Quietly, without fanfare, and mostly without passing new laws, the Texas state government has introduced a raft of changes designed to make illegals’ lives harder and give them little choice but to leave, long before they’re ever deported.
Eligibility requirements for work licences have been tightened; access to commercial drivers’ licenses has been restricted; state benefits for university tuition have been withdrawn.
“Benefits, licenses, and taxpayer-funded services should not be used to incentivize unlawful presence at the expense of hardworking Texans,” a spokesperson for Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement.
“These steps ensure compliance with federal law, protect the integrity of our systems, and prioritize jobs and resources for legal residents and citizens.”
The effects have been immediate.
Says The Tribune, “The complicated patchwork of new rules has led to widespread fear and uncertainty.”
Corinne Kentor, an immigration advocate, told the paper, “These [measures] all represent a broader and more coordinated shift… to create a pipeline of exclusion that stretches from limiting access to K-12 education, all the way into participation in the workforce and basic mobility through the state.”
There’s more to come too. Some state officials are now considering a challenge to the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, which requires public schools to educate illegal aliens.
Beyond the question of why illegal immigrants were ever allowed to drive freight trucks, work as poodle pamperers or claim state education benefits—seriously: Why was this ever allowed?—the real question is when other red states are going to start following suit.
Governor Greg Abbott comes in for plenty of justified criticism for his fawning praise of Texas’s expanding Indian community—I saw a video on X in which he promised a group of Indians that Texas would “always be a land for the Indian community,” as if it were some far-flung outpost of Gujarat or the Punjab and not the home of Davy Crockett, Alex Jones and smoked brisket—but on the basis of what The Texas Tribune describes, I’d have to give Governor Abbott full marks.
Ten out of ten.
A hostile environment is exactly what’s needed: one in which illegals can take nothing for granted; where they enjoy none of the benefits of being an American citizen, and face risks every single day that make them reconsider their decision to enter the United States illegally.
America needs a vast pipeline of exclusion, joining red state to red state, from sea to shining sea.
