Trump's Immigration Policy Is 100 Years Old

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/magazine/trump-miller-immigration-ice.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/H7Zjt

The American public is now finding out what Donald Trump and his team really meant when they promised mass deportations — the upending of communities in a ferocious effort to ferret out every last undocumented person in the country, terrifying people of legal status along the way.

This audacious agenda is proving less popular by the day. When asked about Trump’s handling of immigration in a recent poll by The New York Times/Siena, he received a net negative approval rating on what used to be one of his strongest issues. Sixty-one percent said they thought the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had “gone too far” with its tactics. This was before federal agents shot and killed a second U.S. citizen in the streets of Minneapolis.

Chastened briefly, Trump promised to “de-escalate” in Minnesota. On Wednesday, his border czar, recently dispatched to take control of the operation in Minneapolis, announced that 700 agents would be pulled from the city, though some 2,000 will remain. But however ICE changes its operations, the Trump administration, led by the president’s most influential policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is in pursuit of a radical vision for America. They want the country’s immigration policy blasted back in time — and not just to before the Biden era.

They are channeling an immigration regime instituted in 1924, when strict racial quotas — driven by fears of foreigners and a rise in eugenic thinking — led to a bottoming-out of foreign-born Americans that lasted for decades. The quotas signed into law in 1924 were not about securing the border as we understand it today, but about protecting a white, Christian character for the country.

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