What to Expect When Trump Tackles Immigration

How Trump played the long game on immigration, and what that means for the next four years

🚨🚨 Please welcome Kaylie Klausing, 24sight News’ very first intern! I’m very excited to have Kaylie on board, she’s a senior at Fisher College in Boston, studying journalism. She’s coming on at one of the wildest moments in modern American history and will be writing, researching and more here. Welcome, Kaylie, to the 24sight family! 🚨🚨

Programming notes: Catch 24sight News editor Tom LoBianco on LiveNow from Fox with Andrew Craft immediately following Trump’s inaugural speech, recapping the big themes and promises from the 47th president and what’s in store the next four years.

Then hop on over to the live video on the Substack App for live coverage of Trump’s inauguration, analysis and reaction with the 24sight crew: Patrick Pfingsten, Michael D. Cohen, Ph.D., Ian B. Walters and more.

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Tom gamely asked me if I wanted to look back at Biden this week or look forward toward Trump. Since I’m all up in my feelings about Old Man Biden and this is, after all, “The Level” I chose the latter. Let’s look ahead to the impending rollout of Donald J. Trump’s Empire Strikes Back moment — immigration.

Surely, this is the one issue not only he understands intuitively, but he understands how the base of the MAGA movement feels about it. Biden reversed many of Trump’s executive orders on the border only to have a late campaign conversion back to them too late to change the narrative before Biden glitched during the debate and the rest was history.

How We Got Here

But how did “the border” become such an animating issue during the COVID recovery period? The vaccine rollout was in full force in early 2021 thanks to a collective win by Trump (Operation Warp Speed) and Biden (100 Million Shots in 100 Days). Under the radar, the GOP was shifting gears back to its base and the border.

Here’s former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and current DC persona-non-grata, on the Ides of March 2021: "It's more than a crisis. This is a human heartbreak," McCarthy said at a press conference on Monday after a tour of the El Paso Processing Center. "This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration."

Biden hadn’t reached the 100 million shot mark yet and the GOP had already started to lay the groundwork back to immigration, a better issue for the party. It also helped that a wave of immigration was real. From the New York Times on December 11, 2024 (gift link), “The immigration surge since 2021 has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing even the levels of the late 1800s and early 1900s.”

Even though the border was becoming a major issue, it took a while for Republicans, then a majority of Americans, to catch up to the reality and the rhetoric.

A majority of Americans said in Feburary last year that illegal immigration is a “very serious problem” and they support building a border wall.

In one campaign year, from 2024 to 2025, Americans who said that immigration should be a top policy priority went from about a third to half.

McCarthy restarted the conversation Trump put on the map in 2015 and 10 years later, the incoming President of the United States has won the argument.

But remember, it took 10 years.

Where We Go From Here

Not only did Trump obliterate Biden in their only debate, he almost won a majority against Vice President Kamala Harris with 49.8% of the popular vote. That’s his best showing in his three races for the Oval Office. He has a skinny mandate to improve the economy and do something about the border. The easier one for him to tackle is the latter.

Trump was consistent about the problem and his proposed solutions. He wants to close the border and mass deport illegals at “light speed.” This will not catch anyone by surprise like the Muslim ban did after his relatively surprising win over Hillary Clinton.

Complicating factors for any counter-majority resistance, it was a long election cycle for Democrats where they got swept nationally, even after dislodging their elder statesman, and there appears to be little juice on the protest side and mass pessimism about the future of the party.

Winning the way they did, GOP optimism is way up.

Trump’s base has his back, the Democratic Party is in disarray on the issue, and a majority supports the concepts of Trump’s plan.

This provides a window of opportunity for the second Trump administration to push quickly on their illegal immigration and border efforts. The resistance simply won’t be there yet. It will take time and potentially a countermovement to push back on what’s coming.

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An Eventual Backlash?

Ten years in the making, the Democrats appear to have no answers for the very real problems at the border and, more importantly, how Americans feel about it. Will public sentiment change over time? Perhaps, but not quickly.

Here’s what to look for:

1. A change in how people experience immigration policy.

Will prices go up on products driven by a lack of undocumented workers? Will services become harder to get? Will people start seeing undocumented people they know “disappear” or kids separated from their parents?

The reason why inflation was such a potent issue is because everyone experiences it. The reason why it took ten years for this to become an issue was that everyone doesn’t experience it directly. That’ll need to change.

2. A change in how Americans see the changes in immigration policy.

This is an opportunity for the politics of this to flip from leadership to grassroots. A mass sharing of the consequences of the Trump policies, human stories that will no doubt be heartbreaking, will need to break through the noise.

It will likely begin online, like Black Lives Matter after Floyd’s murder. The social movement will take time to build and it is not guaranteed that it’ll line up with the midterm elections to force change or be undermined within the coalition itself.

3. The experiences may eventually push institutions to change.

We have seen the elite media pick up #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and other social movements over time. We saw politicians and political parties address them and construct countermeasures.

Who speaks up matters. Will we be hearing from Nancy Pelosi, AOC, or someone else like John Fetterman? Who takes up the mantle to push back on behalf of those affected by the new policies.

But there are no guarantees here.

In short, Donald Trump waged a decades-long campaign to put himself in the position to make the changes he is seeking. He moved his party and the country enough to open an early opportunity to push through any lingering resistance and is likely years ahead of any movement setting up a potential backlash.

What we will see soon is the culmination of a movement, way ahead of a counter-movement that has yet to have rationale, leaders, and a plan.

Michael Cohen, is the author of the book Modern Political Campaigns, president of Cohen Research Group and a 30-year veteran of the polling industry. He writes The Level regularly for 24sight News, analyzing polling and campaign trends with a keen eye and level-headed approach.