The Trump administration is signaling a shift in immigration enforcement toward more workplace arrests, as hard-liners in the president’s base push for a second, broader phase of promised mass deportations.
Some inside the White House have reportedly urged less talk of mass deportations ahead of the congressional midterms, after Americans showed dissatisfaction with high-profile immigration arrest tactics in the heartland. But a network of Trump allies argues the administration won’t meet its deportation goals unless it goes after a much larger pool of targets, not just the people already considered the most removable.
Following the confirmation of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last month, the coalition is pitching a reset away from a stated goal of deporting the “worst of the worst” to “populations that are easier to remove,” including immigrants with final orders of removal and those who have overstayed their visas. The group’s plan says worksite enforcement would be a key lever—one that could also raise the odds of public backlash seen after earlier workplace raids.
After the Mass Deportation Coalition published its recommendations last week, White House border czar Tom Homan told Fox News, “You’re going to see more worksite enforcement operations coming.”
President Donald Trump pledged the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. After record-high illegal border crossings under the Biden administration, the White House has launched a wide crackdown that has ended status even for immigrants lawfully living in the United States. While the government withholds key statistics, formal removals so far appear to number in the hundreds of thousands. The coalition is also calling for full transparency by the Trump administration about its enforcement numbers.
Enter the Mass Deportation Coalition, a collection of conservative groups ranging from Washington insiders to college Republicans. The group says it formed in February. One high-profile member is the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank behind Project 2025. The Trump administration has implemented about half of that blueprint for a complete overhaul of the federal government. Another key voice is Mark Morgan, a former Border Patrol chief during the Obama administration, who also served as acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection in Mr. Trump’s first term.
Amid concerns about aggressive immigration enforcement—and what public reaction could mean for the midterm elections—“there is a push within the administration, and among many conservatives, to back off,” Mr. Morgan says, adding that the president campaigned on a clear promise: historically high deportations. Expanding worksite enforcement could boost those numbers, while encouraging “self-deportations”—people who leave because they’re afraid federal government will apprehend them—and deterring illegal entries, says Mr. Morgan. He also says the administration shouldn’t focus only on unauthorized immigrants with criminal records.
The goal, according to Mr. Morgan, is at least 1 million deportations this year—“Everyone that’s here illegally should be removed,” he says. Asked about the coalition’s goals and the administration’s plans, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that no one is changing the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda. “President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities.”
Still, the GOP’s internal story isn’t clean. The party has largely stuck to the argument that illegal immigration strains public resources and creates public-safety risks, even as research contradicts assertions that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than Americans. But interior enforcement surges have shown cracks in the conservative base, from the Oklahoma governor questioning the president’s “endgame” to Florida sheriffs raising concerns about the scope of immigrant arrests. Public outcry has followed highly visible incidents, including the killings of two U.S. citizens by Department of Homeland Security law enforcement in Minneapolis.
To blunt that resistance, the White House in recent weeks has asked Republican lawmakers to de-emphasize mass deportations. Misryoum analysis also indicates messaging has shifted in official channels. Last year, federal raids at farms, factories, and other jobsites shook red and blue states alike. Arrests of workers at a Hyundai plant in Georgia even caused a diplomatic rift with South Korea. As outrage grew, the government ping-ponged between pausing and then promising more arrests. Trump himself acknowledged the toll on employers at the time, writing in a June post that “The farming and hospitality sectors report that ‘our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them,’” and that employers were feeling it.
Mr. Morgan says the coalition doesn’t support “random patrols in sanctuary cities,” and that immigration officers shouldn’t be “walking the parking lots of Home Depot or Target.” That approach isn’t efficient, he says, though enforcement still needs to expand in other ways. “If Congress doesn’t want the executive branch to enforce the laws that they passed, then Congress should change them,” Mr. Morgan says.
For immigrant advocates, the core dispute is legal process. They say DHS flouts legal standards that already exist. This year, the government has violated over 300 court orders related to immigrant detention, according to Lawfare. “We need some actual respect for the rule of law, for the laws that exist on the books,” says Sarah Mehta, deputy director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union. She rejects the government’s claims of targeting “the worst of the worst,” noting how children, military spouses, and lawfully present refugees have been swept up in arrests—along with U.S. citizens.
Secretary Mullin says he wants to keep DHS out of lead stories in the daily news. “But large-scale enforcement operations against people that are contributing to and sustaining our communities?” Ms. Mehta responds, “That does the exact opposite.”
Moving forward, some groups say worksite enforcement may become less visible. “But large-scale enforcement operations against people that are contributing to and sustaining our communities?” Ms. Mehta says—actually, that’s the point she keeps coming back to, that it’s not just optics. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, says it might take a less visible form, with fewer raids but more “briefcase enforcement,” such as audits. Still, targeting more workplaces could double deterrence, he says, not just by pushing unauthorized immigrants to leave, but by increasing the pressure on employers to insist, “Look, you know, I can’t keep you here.”
There’s also the reality check of what happens on the ground. Not at Glenn Valley Foods in red-state Nebraska, where federal agents targeted the facility last year. The Mass Deportation Coalition calls for moving the whole employee verification process online and mandating a system called E-Verify. The owner of the Omaha meatpacking plant says he does use E-Verify. But Homeland Security still detained more than 70 of his workers in a June raid.
In an interview, Gary Rohwer, owner of Glenn Valley Foods, said the moment still sticks—how the air in the facility can smell like metal and warm grease, the kind of everyday detail you don’t expect to matter until it does. “The government is the problem. It’s not the immigrants,” he says. He argues workers buy false IDs knowing the system to catch them fails, and he says the government’s widespread termination of work permits has jeopardized his workers’ employability. “They’re family-oriented. They pay taxes. They show up for work on time,” he says. “I can’t hire Americans. They won’t do the work.”
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