{"id":296574,"date":"2026-05-02T13:01:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T13:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/296574\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T13:01:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T13:01:17","slug":"after-major-enforcement-operations-the-trump-administration-recalibrates-its-immigration-crackdown-long-beach-post-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/296574\/","title":{"rendered":"After major enforcement operations, the Trump administration recalibrates its immigration crackdown \u2022 Long Beach Post News"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Homeland Security Secretary\u00a0Markwayne Mullin<\/a>\u00a0was questioned by senators during his confirmation hearing about his vision for implementing President Donald Trump\u2019s mass deportation agenda, he said his goal was to keep his department off the front pages of the news.<\/p>\n

To some degree, he has. Gone are the social media video clips of now-retired\u00a0Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino<\/a>\u00a0clashing with protesters. Mullin\u2019s predecessor,\u00a0Kristi Noem<\/a>, made her first trip as secretary to New York City to make arrests with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In contrast,\u00a0Mullin went to North Carolina<\/a>\u00a0to review hurricane recovery efforts.<\/p>\n

The Republican administration appears to be recalibrating its approach to a centerpiece policy that helped bring Trump back to the White House, moving in many ways away from aggressive, public-facing tactics toward a quieter approach to enforcement. Despite that shift, the administration insists it is not backing down from its lofty deportation goals.<\/p>\n

\u201cClearly they\u2019ve stepped back from the, for want of a better word, the Bovinoist tactics of before,\u201d said Mark Krikorian, the president of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions. \u201cBut it\u2019s not clear this means they\u2019re actually stepping back from immigration.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trump administration launched a series of immigration enforcement operations last year in\u00a0mostly Democratic-led cities<\/a>, which drove up arrests in large-scale sweeps. The crackdown sparked clashes between protesters and enforcement officers and led to\u00a0the shooting deaths in Minneapolis<\/a>\u00a0of two U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

Since then, the president\u2019s hard-line anti-immigration agenda has\u00a0lost popularity with voters<\/a>\u00a0and there have been no new high-profile city-based operations launched, raising questions about the administration\u2019s strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re still enforcing immigration laws. We\u2019re still deporting illegals that shouldn\u2019t be here. We\u2019re still going after the worst of the worst \u2014 but we\u2019re doing it in a more quiet way,\u201d Mullin said in an interview April 16 with CNBC.<\/p>\n

Immigration arrests have dropped, but deportation goals remain<\/p>\n

ICE arrests have fallen<\/a>\u00a0in recent months, and the number of people in immigration detention has dropped from\u00a0a high of roughly 72,000<\/a>\u00a0in January to 58,000 this week, according to\u00a0data obtained by The Associated Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But in a sign of its continued determination, ICE in budget documents says it plans to remove 1 million people this fiscal year and the next compared with roughly 442,000 people last year. The agency also has plenty of money to carry out its mission, with Congress granting the Department of Homeland Security more than $170 billion for Trump\u2019s immigration agenda last year.<\/p>\n

The administration aims to have enough space to detain roughly 100,000 people this fiscal year, which would more than double the average daily number held in ICE detention last year. The administration has already\u00a0expanded its detention capacity<\/a>\u00a0with the purchase of 11 warehouses across the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are working on really building a juggernaut of a system,\u201d said Doris Meissner, who headed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, a predecessor to ICE, during President Bill Clinton\u2019s Democratic administration and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.<\/p>\n

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said there had been no change to Trump\u2019s strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump\u2019s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities,\u201d Jackson said.<\/p>\n

ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Stripping away legal protections to ramp up deportations<\/p>\n

Advocates for immigrants are bracing for the Trump administration to turn its attention more intently to stripping away protections for migrants with temporary legal status to remain in the U.S. while their cases are being adjudicated.<\/p>\n

In one example of this, the number of green cards approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services dropped by half over the course of a year under the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, which supports immigration into the U.S. Humanitarian visas for refugees or people who qualified for asylum saw the biggest declines.<\/p>\n

USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said the drop was due to increased vetting of applicants by the administration.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has also pushed to strip Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of people, with\u00a0a key case<\/a>\u00a0weighing whether it\u2019s overstepped its power to do so being heard at\u00a0the Supreme Court<\/a>\u00a0this week.<\/p>\n

Advocates see it as a way to send a chilling message to immigrant communities and make more people vulnerable to deportation. It also enables the department to operate without the public spectacle of workplace raids or home arrests.<\/p>\n

ICE has also focused over the past year on\u00a0creating agreements with jurisdictions<\/a>\u00a0around the country that allow local and state law enforcement to carry out an expanding array of immigration enforcement tasks, ranging from checking the immigration status of people in their jails to incorporating immigration checks during routine traffic stops.<\/p>\n

These agreements, known as 287g, have\u00a0grown from 135 in 20 states<\/a>\u00a0before Trump took office to more than 1,400 in 41 states and territories now.<\/p>\n

Some states,\u00a0most noticeably Florida<\/a>\u00a0and Texas, have mandated various forms of cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE.<\/p>\n

Meissner, from MPI, said Trump\u2019s border czar, Tom Homan, is likely to prioritize further discussions about how cities and states can cooperate with ICE.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, some of this may very well succeed in increasing the numbers,\u201d Meissner said.<\/p>\n

Calls to enforce work restrictions<\/p>\n

Conservatives who want more deportations say the only way to truly crack down on illegal immigration is to make it so difficult for the migrants to work that they\u2019ll leave on their own.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has already taken steps to make life harder for people in the country illegally including\u00a0limiting who can live in public housing<\/a>\u00a0by immigration status,\u00a0sharing Medicaid information with ICE<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0requiring people in the country illegally<\/a>\u00a0to register with the federal government.<\/p>\n

Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Social Security Administration could send out letters alerting employers when an employee\u2019s name doesn\u2019t match their Social Security number. Authorities could repeatedly and consistently carry out audits of I-9 forms, which companies are supposed to fill out and submit to the federal government showing that new hires are legally able to work. And they could require banks to collect citizenship information on customers.<\/p>\n

Whatever the strategy going forward, the administration is facing heavy pressure not to back away from its goals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe numbers are too low,\u201d said Mike Howell, part of the Mass Deportation Coalition, which launched a playbook for\u00a0how the administration<\/a>\u00a0can actually get to a million deportations a year by using tactics such as worksite enforcement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe deportation numbers are just too low,\u201d Howell said, \u201cand they need to be much higher, and they can be much higher.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Homeland Security Secretary\u00a0Markwayne Mullin\u00a0was questioned by senators during his confirmation hearing about his vision for implementing President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":["post-296574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}