What ICE has very little to do with reducing immigration.
Pretty much, yes.
Immigration is a bit like a force of nature. People are going to come. If people want better opportunities than they're getting, then they're going to move to a better place. If their country collapses into or is turned into a hellscape (Syria, Venezuela, etc.) they're going to leave in droves. And if your country offers prospects, jobs etc. and can reasonably be travelled to, then a fair chunk are going to come to your country.
So if your country is a remotely attractive place to be, immigrants are coming. And by attractive, we mean that someone's going to slap a wad of notes good enough for them to live on at the end of a working week. You're not going to stop them coming with shitty welfare, shitty health and brutal policing. That was what their home country was like, you're not going to match the awfulness of the place they came from.
And that's really the essence of it. If you want to stop immigrants, what you need is a genuinely horrible country. But you don't want to live in a horrible country, do you? If you did, you'd... emigrate!
* * *
The US immigration surge 2020-2023 was... an anomaly? Covid happened. It fucked everyone's economy and made things worse in a load of South and Central American countries so inspired people to migrate. At the same time, as Covid eased, the US economy kicked back into action and caused a huge demand for labour... including immigrant labour. Internet access massively improved in the 2010 in Latin America, which meant lots of people could look up how to get to the USA. And finally, criminal gangs spent time around this period preparing routes and logistics to transport people to USA. Plus, you also need to bear in mind that Trump made it all but impossible for people from many countries to come to the USA legally:
that increases illegal immigration. Add all this together, immigration surge.
So at this point, basically you can try to deal with them as normal, or you can man the border with troops and shoot everyone who tries to cross illegally. I don't mean that literally, I mean all the processes we have to deal with illegal immigrants assume typical standards of humane and lawful treatment, and you can instead just use inhumane processes without legal rights. When people criticise Biden for his weakness on the southern border, what it means is that Biden tried to expand the existing systems to deal with illegal immigration, plus some other measures again mostly within those principle. These mostly functioned: they expanded to cope with the numbers and at a proportional level, did about as well as before. But of course lots more illegals arrived: you keep the proportion of illegals who get in the same, then the more illegals arrive, the more get through in absolute numbers.
So the Trump-Republican narrative is that the Democrats lost control of the southern border. But how do you propose to deal with this, if you think Biden failed?
Firstly, you can spend staggering, eye-watering sums of money and bleed your people in taxes to pay for masses more personnel, systems, etc to manage it. Secondly, just start shooting immigrants (not necessarily literally, as above). However, the USA wouldn't tolerate either (although Trump is working as much of the latter as he can get away with). Therefore, once you've made a load of noise that immigration is out of control, but the government has already used pretty much all reasonable levers available to it, what's left? And what's left are stupid, cruel and pointless show policies.
In Trump 1, it was the border wall, which Congress rightfully sort of neglected into defeat. In Trump 2, it's ICE. It's not really doing anything about illegal immigration or stopping people coming (that already dropped whilst Biden was in charge, just because circumstances became much less favourable for immigration). It's just about victimising immigrants. For instance as we are seeing, a lot of this isn't about removing illegals, it's about stripping legal immigrants of their right to stay and kicking them out.
This may be legal, but on a human level, it is cruel. People travelled to the USA often in good faith, were allowed to stay, and now Trump's just going to forcibly uproot them and their families (again!), with all those losses and disruption. ICE are storming through Democrat cities shooting US citizens mostly to satisfy the bloodlust of authoritarian right-wingers. They tend to have a hard-on for law and order and heavy enforcement, xenophobia, and sticking it to the libs. This is performative cruelty and strong-arming,
and they love it. Plenty of Republicans also aren't xenophobic, right-wing authoritarians, and I suspect quite a few are regretting their choices.
