During Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation Now, John Sandweg, former acting ICE Director under President Obama, said the Trump administration’s immigration policies are effectively encouraging self-deportation. He noted that the administration’s aggressive enforcement stance has led some undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the United States while they still can.
“Look, I think we’re going to find here is that the outcomes, maybe this year are not so dramatically different, certainly, let’s say, you compare it to the Obama years,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to the Biden years, because, until the last six months of the Biden administration, we had a completely different border, we had hundreds of thousands of people come across and making asylum claims, that bogs down ICE and their internal operations.”
He added that the major difference between Trump and Obama is Trump is “trying to do, really, not just a mass deportation, but a self-deportation. I think you’ve seen that in the rhetoric. They’ve really shifted to overtly discussing that, and they’re not — what they’re trying to do is by taking part of the guardrails off, is create a climate of fear where more people are going to self-deport.”
Sandweg concluded: “What we don’t know yet is what impact this has had on the population that lived here. They’re now looking at this saying, hey, I’m scared now living in the U.S. I might end up in an El Salvadoran prison. I might be detained or deported. I’m just going to leave voluntarily while I can.”
Nearly two-thirds of American voters back President Trump’s policy of deporting illegal immigrants, according to a recent Fox News poll. The survey, released Thursday just two months into Trump’s second term, gauged public opinion on a wide range of the administration’s priorities—including tax policy, foreign affairs, and cultural issues.
Trump’s most widely supported policy was banning transgender-identified athletes from competing in women’s sports, with 68% of respondents in favor and just 30% opposed—a margin of more than 2 to 1. Other policies earning strong majorities included making English the official language (66%–32%), deporting illegal migrants (63%–35%), recognizing only two genders (54%–44%), and boosting fossil fuel production (53%–44%).
