The standard line from the White House about Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda is simple: Officials are rounding up dangerous foreign criminals, fulfilling one of the president’s core campaign promises, in the name of public safety and law and order.
The entire policy, the argument goes, is popular, effective and generating great results for the American public.
The problem with the pitch is that it’s demonstrably wrong. Far from apprehending the “worst of the worst,” many of the immigrants the Trump administration is taking into custody have no criminal record. What’s more, radical tactics from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have led to public unrest in some areas, while recent polling suggests most Americans are not on board with the president’s policy.
Making matters worse, Trump’s mass deportation agenda isn’t doing American businesses any favors — as the president himself acknowledged in a rare concession. NBC News reported:
In a post on TruthSocial this morning, Trump said that he’s heard from business leaders that his mass deportation agenda ‘is taking very good, long time workers away from them.’ … ‘Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,’ the president wrote.
In the same online message, the Republican added that he wants to “protect our Farmers,” while getting “criminals” out of the country. “Changes are coming!” he concluded.
To be sure, whether “changes” will ever materialize is unclear. He also didn’t say which farmers or people in the hospitality industry he’s been speaking to.
But Trump’s online statement stood out because it represented an unusual admission of sorts: His mass deportation agenda, one of the central elements of his domestic policy vision, is undermining many of the people his party refers to as “job creators.”
Indeed, the president’s written comments appear to be sharply at odds with everything we’ve heard lately from “border czar” Tom Homan and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The usual rules still apply, of course, and it’s important to prioritize what Trump does, not what he says. Those feeling cautious optimism about his “Changes are coming!” conclusion should probably keep their expectations in check. But the bottom line remains the same: If Trump were winning the larger political fight over immigration and deportation policy, he wouldn’t publicly acknowledge that his policies are hurting some key American businesses. The concession did not go unnoticed in California’s gubernatorial office. “Turns out, chasing hard working people through ranches and farms and snatching women and children off the streets is not good policy,” Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote via social media, in response to the president’s message.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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