Donald Trump promised a “mass deportation” during his campaign. Now, Republicans are grappling with what that will look like — and whether it could hurt them politically.
It was easy to present a united front during campaign season. But faced with executing Trump’s vision — and high expectations for success given their control of Congress — Republicans disagree about what immigration policy should look like, from deportations to worker visas (which has caused recent spats online between right-wing pundits and incoming Trump advisers).
Discord is already causing some to doubt the conference can stay united long enough to carry out mass deportations. Political operatives told NOTUS that navigating the tension between the president and their voters back home as immigration policies unfold could become a difficult tightrope to walk.
Rep. Eli Crane said “of course” he’s worried about the resolve of the Republican caucus.
“A lot’s gonna depend on the spine of this body up here and what the administration wants to do,” he said. “This group is pretty spineless.”
Many Republicans acknowledged that, as photos of children in makeshift cells and audio of children sobbing flooded the media, the public quickly turned against some of Trump’s hard-line policies last time. Democrats rallied voters around the issue and Republicans took a hammering in the midterms.
And it could happen again.
“If Trump goes way too aggressively, way too fast, and you start seeing families separate, and kids torn from their mother’s arms, I think he runs the risk of losing in the court of public opinion,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who has worked for years on immigration issues. “It’s really hard to know who the winner is going to be because we don’t know what the policy is going to be, but I can tell you that the loser will be the one that overreaches first.”
Multiple operatives said it matters how deportations are messaged and how they’re carried out — making it a public relations issue along with a policy one.
“It’s a very risky issue to separate yourself from Trump on, if you’re a Republican up on Capitol Hill. It’s probably his strongest issue, and the public really wants to see him deliver on it,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas- and D.C.-based political consultant. “We’ll have to see what the public response is to the policy as it gets announced and as it starts getting carried out. What do the pictures look like? What are the consequences?”
Republicans from Texas — which is considered ground zero for immigration efforts due to its long border and Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to combat crossings — are divided on what to do.
Border Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales said soon after Trump’s election that deportations would have to focus on those who commit more serious crimes.
“If we’re going after the guy that’s picking tomatoes or the nurse at the local hospital and we’re not going after the convicted criminal, then our government has failed us,” Gonzales told ABC News.
That’s in stark contrast to the hard-line members of the Texas delegation, like Rep. Chip Roy, who have railed against the number of undocumented people in the country, suggesting a broader approach.
“Our starting place [for deportation] should be for any individuals who came here illegally or were released into the U.S. illegally, illegitimately, by the Harris-Biden-Mayorkas regime. They need to be removed. They need to be deported. That is the starting place,” Roy’s press office posted to X.
Gonzales clearly has a different political calculus than someone like Roy. The border lawmaker — who has been censured by the Texas Republican Party and narrowly won his primary last year — has consolidated support for the general election partly by growing a base among conservative Democrats along the border and Latino voters won over by Trump.
Madrid said Gonzales’ district will be one of the most important to watch as Trump’s immigration policies unfold.
“That district really represents sort of the emergent Republican base in that it has a mix of people who are border security hawks because of where it’s geographically located, but the shift that’s happening is largely economic,” Madrid said. “He’s a bellwether beyond himself. That district really is going to be a good gauge of what’s going to work and what doesn’t.”
But Gonzales will also face increasing pressure from the conservatives who almost toppled him in his primary last year to stay in lockstep with Trump and any deportation efforts he tackles.
“I do think that the Tony Gonzaleses of the world, in Congress, are going to find themselves in a peculiar situation,” Victor Avila, a former ICE special agent who ran against Gonzales in the primary but didn’t qualify for the runoff, said. “They will be singled out. There will be a spotlight on them if they don’t quote, unquote, vote in the way that people want them to vote.”
Others warn that even mega-conservatives could face political consequences if the Trump administration doesn’t align with his base or can’t carry out all of its promises.
“Even Trump is no longer in control of what the base wants,” Rick Wilson, a Florida-based consultant and Lincoln Project co-founder, said of the recent divide on H-1B worker visas.
“Trump is siding with Elon Musk on the H-1B visa issue, and the base hates that,” he continued. “You end up with a scenario where … the Republican base gets angry because you’re not sufficiently aggressive enough on immigration.”
Others argued that immigration hard-liners will be happy with progress toward their goals.
“The bluster of the campaign soon gives way to the actual carrying out of policy, and we oftentimes find that campaigning and governing are two different things,” Barrett Marson, an Arizona Republican consultant, said. “Progress is something, right? Doing something, making some progress sometimes is good enough.”
Rob Stutzman, a political consultant in California, pointed to Trump’s effort to build a border wall.
“Go back to the wall. That’s what’s instructive about all this, is the base never revolted for not building the wall in its entirety, or for having Mexico pay for it, which obviously they never did,” Stutzman said. “As long as he doesn’t do anything to disrupt people’s cost of living and employment, I think he’s got a lot of latitude to fudge the lines on his rhetoric versus policy.”
Plus, the politics of immigration have shifted since Trump’s first term. Tension over immigration is higher than many can remember in recent years. It’s possible that the American people are ready for mass deportations in a way they weren’t before.
“Before the November election, I would have told you definitely no,” Democratic Texas state Rep. Eddie Morales said when asked whether his district — which overlaps with Gonzales’ — would support the hard-line policies that many didn’t during Trump’s first term.
“I think after the election, you saw a clear message being sent by everyone along the border that they wanted this addressed. At what cost, or how extensive, it is yet to be seen, and how they react,” he said. “But it is evident that they thought the last two and a half years, that the White House hadn’t done enough.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.