National Review, June 4, 2026
There are two ways to get illegal immigrants out of the United States: ICE deportations and self-deportations. Elsewhere I have described these two approaches as “body-armor” vs. “briefcase” enforcement.
In the first, agents take deportable aliens into custody and send them home. In the second, a variety of policies are implemented that make it untenable for illegal aliens to remain here, causing them to go home on their own — what more than two decades ago I outlined as “attrition through enforcement”.
While the first method is essential, and must be stepped up, DHS under disgraced former Secretary Kristi Noem mishandled it, causing the president political harm and setting back the cause of immigration control. Democrats are still using the fiasco in Minneapolis as an excuse for their push to abolish immigration enforcement altogether through complete defunding of both ICE and the Border Patrol, forcing Republicans to try to pass another reconciliation bill to fund those agencies through the rest of President Trump’s term.
But the Left doesn’t want attrition of the illegal population via “briefcase enforcement” either. Its official organ, the New York Times, ran a front-page story this week with the hard-copy headline: “Trump Cuts Off Life Necessities For Immigrants” and the web headline “Trump Squeezes Immigrants by Cutting Them Off From Jobs, Health Care and Housing”.
The six (!) Times reporters given bylines breathlessly reported that:
For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.
Yes, exactly — a whole-of-government approach to making illegal aliens realize that the party’s over and it’s time to leave.
(The “documented” they’re talking about here are illegal aliens given a temporary reprieve from deportation — and work permits — by making bogus asylum claims or via programs like Temporary Protected Status and parole.)
If you don’t want ICE agents rounding up illegals on the street, this kind of passive or indirect enforcement is the only alternative — unless your goal is to let all the illegals stay.
A couple of colleagues and I discussed briefcase enforcement and self-deportation on a recent podcast, focusing on two elements recently in the news: debanking illegals (by repealing the Bush-era rule allowing banks to open accounts for illegal aliens) and levying civil fines against the hundreds of thousands of illegals who have ignored deportation orders, to induce them to skedaddle before their cars are repo’ed.
But the White House has been reluctant to pull the most important “bureaucratic lever” of all — employment-related enforcement. This would include some direct action like worksite raids but more importantly, audits of payroll records, IRS enforcement of tax fraud, Social Security “no-match” letters notifying employers of workers using false or stolen information, and more, fining crooked companies and incentivizing compliance on the part of the majority of honest employers.
You can’t have a whole-of-government strategy to push illegals out of the country unless your top agenda item is rendering them unemployable.
Border Czar Tom Homan has said more work-related enforcement is coming, and I’ve been told that ICE is developing an across-the-board strategy that goes beyond raiding the Denny’s and arresting all the dishwashers, to bringing in the IRS, state regulators, etc., and making work-related enforcement something more than just a cost of doing business in many industries.
Of course, Homan said the same thing a year ago.
The problem is neither Homan nor ICE — it’s the president, who is clearly skeptical of work-related enforcement. But whether it’s a desire to keep his fellow businessmen happy or a sincerely held but misinformed belief that there are “jobs Americans won’t do”, President Trump is undermining his administration’s ability to achieve his marquee promise — to get illegal aliens out of the United States.
The Times story acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have already left. But to scale that up to millions, the administration has to go after illegals’ ability to work.
Then the left’s wailing and gnashing of teeth will be epic.