White House official James Blair telling House Republicans to stop talking about mass deportations was the noise. Senate Republicans cowing to Democrats and putting Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding in serious jeopardy was the signal. No one should be surprised that weak-kneed Republicans took their cue from the White House’s wishy-washy stances on the topic.
Too many elected Republicans actually want the opposite of mass deportation, and the White House gave them the political space to do just that.
There is no massive corporate or mega-donor coalition rallying behind the cause of national sovereignty, but there most certainly is one bankrolling the cause of cheap labor.
What the Senate did in the dead of night last week was a grievous mask-dropping moment — equally objectionable in both its form and substance. Senators thought they had cover from the White House to cave to Democrat demands to split off ICE and Customs and Border Protection funding from the larger Department of Homeland Security funding bill.
Whether Republican Senators actually had that blessing from the White House, or whether they were simply reading the tea leaves from months of creeping separation from the mass deportation promise, remains unclear. Nevertheless, in the dead of the night, Republicans threw ICE and CBP under the bus by sending the House a funding bill covering all of DHS except those two agencies.
Senate Democrats immediately declared victory — as they should have — and Senate Republicans headed to the airport. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) would be spotted at Disney World shortly after.
What happened next is when things started getting good. The Trump base, for lack of a better term, freaked out on the internet. By the time House Republicans woke up, they realized they had a massive problem on their hands. The White House saw the writing on the wall as well, abandoned any implicit or explicit support for the Senate bill, and pulled the proverbial rug out from under Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and his colleagues.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced and secured opposition to the package and had the House return a 60-day continuing resolution to the Senate that restored funding levels across the entire Department — including ICE and CBP.
Now we wait. The Senate is on a two-week vacation and has given no indication it will return early to deal with the bill, or that it would even support the House version. The clock ticks, the agencies hang in limbo, and the people who engineered this mess have retreated to their beach houses and theme parks.
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Trump voters who sent the president back to the White House based on his signature promise to “carry out the largest mass deportation in American history” can enjoy a temporary victory. The retreat on the cause had seemed to be in full swing. For a brief moment, the tide appears to have reversed, but a single funding skirmish won is by no means the end of the war.
How can a president who sailed back into the White House on the promise of mass deportations — a cause still supported by the majority of Americans — and armed with a legislative package investing more than $40 billion in that cause, now find himself in a situation where ICE funding is placed in jeopardy?
Mind you, mass deportations haven’t even meaningfully begun, with only some 350,000 deportations occurring in 2025 against a backdrop of over 10 million illegal crossings during the Biden years. There are two main reasons for this gap between mandate and execution.
First, a great many elected Republicans are wildly out of step with their own voters. Elections aren’t always about winning votes, they’re often about winning donations to fund the grift and graft attendant to a system where arguably the most important thing in politics is the size of a war chest.
There is no massive corporate or mega-donor coalition rallying behind the cause of national sovereignty, but there most certainly is one bankrolling the cause of cheap labor. The sensibilities of many elite donors are offended by the very topic of enforcement. They are far more comfortable debating marginal tax rates or trading in lofty foreign policy abstractions than confronting the basic question of who gets to live in this country and on whose terms.
Second, the president, either by perception or by reality, has distanced himself from the campaign promise of mass deportation. That distance has issued a permission slip to those who want to buck the cause. It has given cover to the opportunists, the corporate-minded, and the quietly resistant.
President Trump could clear up that confusion in an instant if he so wished with a single unambiguous statement, a sustained public push, an explicit demand that Congress fall in line.
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In the aftermath of the anti-ICE riots in Minneapolis, a senior elected Republican told me that Democrats were going to be unable to resist the temptation to reignite their “defund ICE” plank, just as they overstepped post-BLM with “defund the police.” I smiled and nodded and resisted the urge to point out the obvious: that while that was correct, they would have more than a few Republicans along for the ride.
That is the uncomfortable reality that too many Trump supporters have been slow to fully reckon with. The opposition to this agenda does not live only on the left side of the aisle: it lives in Senate Republican conference rooms and in the calculated silences of members who have perfected the art of sounding like conservatives while voting like Democrats. The mask slipped last week, and it is worth keeping it off.
It is important to sustain the momentum and public expectations that this funding fight has dragged to the forefront of the national political conversation. Trump supporters saw the opposition drop its mask, and it had an (R) next to its name.
Many in Thune’s caucus have long benefited from only privately opposing key aspects of President Trump’s mandate, speaking in the right accent on the right issues just long enough to evade detection. That racket depends entirely on operating in the dark. Keeping the spotlight on is the path forward.
They do not have a viable political option in openly opposing mass deportation, and the moment the base makes that cost explicit, the calculus changes. Make it explicit.
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