Why Trump's immigration crackdown could boomerang in the midterms

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 fulfil hardliners' goals of uprooting anyone in the country illegally.

The shift helps explain why Trump's effort to fulfil 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 Centre 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. US 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 a deportation pledge