MINNEAPOLIS — When Donald Trump was running for president two years ago, Americans' television screens were filled with images of migrant chaos. There were tent camps on both sides of the border, caravans of people trudging through Central America and concerns about newcomers overwhelming social services.
That turmoil faded as President Joe Biden tightened immigration enforcement after Trump clamped down even more. Now any chaos is on American streets, where violent and even deadly clashes have defined a deportation campaign that's designed to fulfill hardliners' goals of uprooting anyone in the country illegally.
The shift helps explain why Trump's effort to fulfill his promises has turned into a backlash, undermining one of the core issues that fueled his return to the White House. While Trump maintains some support for his handling of the border, polling shows voters disapprove of his approach to immigration, a striking turnaround that could undermine Republican attempts to maintain control of Congress in the midterms.
"The American people supported strong border security," said Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat who has become a prominent critic of the administration's policies. "What they got instead was shredding the Constitution, mass deportations and killing American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis."
Trump's allies say the president is the victim of his own success.
“The disaster at the border and the impunity of people just walking over and being released into the country was hard to ignore,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump dramatically reduced illegal border crossings, Krikorian said, “and that’s often politically bad."
Krikorian praised Trump for adopting low profile but highly effective sweeps that have achieved month after month of record arrests. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested almost 51,000 immigrants in the country illegally in August, according to the Department of Homeland Security, up from 49,000 in July and 43,000 in June. An estimated 660,000 people have been deported in the past fiscal year, according to the Migration Policy Institute, short of the administration's goal of 1 million annually.
Biden's immigration policies remain a regular target for Republicans this year. Trump said at a recent Florida rally that Democrats let migrants “pour across our borders from all over the world.”
“If they win in the midterms, they'll do it again,” he warned.
Trump returned to White House with deportation pledge
In 2024, Trump warned repeatedly of an immigrant "invasion." "They're poisoning the blood of our country," he said of people crossing the border illegally. He insisted, falsely, that immigrants were behind spikes in crime and eating household pets.
Even as Trump drew criticism for his rhetoric, his focus on the issue resonated with voters who had seen illegal immigration soar during the Biden administration, with border arrests from Mexico reaching a record 250,000 in December 2023.
Trump's victory seemed poised to reshape immigration politics. Forty-six Democrats in the House and a dozen in the Senate joined Republicans in voting for the Laken Riley Act, a bill named after a Georgia student killed by a man in the country illegally. The law requires detention without bond for noncitizens accused of murder and other violent crimes.
After Trump took office, he cranked deportations into higher gear. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, was one of the people caught up in that net. Despite a court order forbidding it, the administration sent him to his native El Salvador, where he was confined to that country's notorious central prison that was also used to house other Trump deportees.
The U.S. Supreme Court directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia's return, and Van Hollen flew to El Salvador to meet with him. Some Democrats questioned the wisdom of confronting Trump on an issue where the president was so popular, the senator recalled. Now his party is more emboldened on the issue.
“We’ve gone from some of that sniping on the sidelines to a clear vote among Democrats to defund ICE,” Van Hollen said.
Minneapolis crackdown leads to backlash
The early face of the Trump crackdown was top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who swaggered through raids in tactical gear and deployed forces to Los Angeles and Chicago, where he led a helicopter raid on an apartment building.
But Minneapolis was the turning point. More than 2,000 federal officers were sent to the city, and scenes of masked agents spilling from convoys of unmarked vehicles became commonplace. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets.
Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 — were killed during confrontations with agents. In the weeks that followed, the White House pushed aside Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Michael Pretti, Alex's father, said this week that the family is still troubled by the bystander videos of the shooting. He had a holstered gun that he was legally allowed to carry, and none of the footage shows him brandishing the weapon or attacking federal agents in the moments before he was killed.
“I think it haunts many Americans to see a U.S. citizen who was peaceful and in his community shot multiple times on the back, in the back, while on the ground,” he told reporters.
Arrests dropped after the killings, although they eventually returned to record numbers. But the politics became more complicated, and Republicans’ immigration message has fractured.
There are hardliners like U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who is vowing more deportations as she runs for governor. And there's Cuban-American Florida Rep. Maria-Elena Salazar, who criticized Trump’s migrant crackdown in a campaign advertisement filmed outside the White House.
Salazar has sponsored legislation that would allow immigrants who are in the country illegally to remain as long as they have otherwise followed the law. Among the sponsors is Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, who is trying to distinguish himself from Trump while running in a Colorado swing district.
In New Hampshire, former Sen. John Sununu, running for an open Senate seat, has been critical of ICE tactics and the agency's use of masks to conceal agents' identities.
Republicans often try to connect immigration to voters' concerns about high prices. Ohio Sen. Jon Husted blasts Democratic opponent Sherrod Brown as someone who "voted to raise your taxes repeatedly and give those tax dollars to illegals."
“Republicans are trying to turn voters against Democrats because of what Joe Biden did in failing to control the border effectively,” said Frank Sharry, a longtime immigrants' rights activist who consults with the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “So they’re trying to define Democrats as being for open borders and not serious about removing criminals.”
Democrats are changing their approach
But that comes as many Democratic candidates are shifting away from Biden-era messaging about immigration.
In Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico calls himself a "border security Democrat" who wants to hire more Border Patrol officers and increase the use of surveillance technology.
Talarico criticizes many of Trump’s immigration policies as wasteful, but doesn’t hold back when it comes to criticizing the last Democratic president.
“Joe Biden and his administration failed us on our southern border,” he said in a July press conference in a Texas county on the Mexico border.
Even some of the most liberal Democratic candidates, like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, are careful to note that they want strong borders.
“I don’t know of a candidate who’s in a swing race who’s saying anything other than ‘We’ve got to secure the border’ and ‘We’ve got to remove criminals,’” Sharry said.
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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writer Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
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