RINO extraordinaire Karl Rove went on C-SPAN this weekend to explain that Donald Trump has squandered his best issue. The president solved the border, Rove said, and then created a new problem — dissension in cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis over what he called an ill-informed ICE effort. Had Trump simply stayed focused on bad actors, it would have been fine.
There’s a word missing from that analysis, and the word is “ballot.”
Hey @KarlRove we didn't vote for @realDonaldTrump to simply "deport the bad actors." We voted for *mass deportations* of everyone who is in America illegally.
The fact that you're sitting at a Texas Tribune event says it all. #leftwinghacks #RINO pic.twitter.com/Cd3L4bNxaP
— USA Features Media (@USAFeatures) September 28, 2026
Trump did not run in 2024 on deporting only the convicted felons. He ran on the proposition that people who entered the country illegally have to go, and he said it constantly, in every state, for eighteen months. It was the central promise of the campaign, and voters knew exactly what they were endorsing when they made him the first Republican in twenty years to win the popular vote. Rove is not describing a policy that went too far. He is describing a policy that won, and wishing it had been a different one.
The complaint about Home Depot parking lots gives the game away, because it inverts cause and effect. ICE would vastly prefer to take custody of someone at a county jail — one transfer, no crowd, no confrontation. Sanctuary jurisdictions made that illegal. When a city refuses to honor a detainer and releases a removable alien out the back door, the arrest necessarily moves into the community. Then organized activists show up to obstruct it, cameras roll, and men like Rove appear on television to call the result ill-informed. The disorder is a feature of the policy his side declines to criticize, and he has assigned the blame to the agents who have to work around it.
Consider the source, too. This is the architect of the 2005 comprehensive reform push that collapsed, the man behind the 2013 autopsy instructing Republicans that amnesty was the price of survival, and, this month, a Republican strategist announcing he intends to vote for a Democrat for the Texas Railroad Commission. His record on this question is a decade of being told no by his own party’s voters and treating that as a diagnosis of their error rather than his.
And the timing matters. This is six weeks before a midterm where Republicans are fighting for the Senate. Rove’s remarks will run in Democratic ads. That is not incidental — it’s the function. The consultant class has a standing interest in Republicans losing narrowly with the wrong agenda, because that’s the scenario in which their advice becomes valuable again.
Enforcement is unpopular in exactly the places it’s most needed and popular nearly everywhere else. It also happens to be the law, passed by Congress, ignored for four years, and restored by a president who said he would restore it.
Voters knew what they were buying. The only people confused about the order are the Democrats and RINOs who spent a decade telling them not to do it.
