Illegal immigrants arrested in high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Minneapolis and elsewhere, criminals or not, have no right to be here and no grounds for complaint.
Responsibility for the violence in Minnesota is widely shared. First, former President Joe Biden’s administration, which lawlessly let in 8 million to 10 million illegal immigrants, who now constitute the majority of the illegal population. Next, the seditious networks organizing the criminal acts against Department of Homeland Security officers. And finally, politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions who have refused to hand over criminal illegal immigrants to ICE, incited violence against immigration officers, and even prohibited police from providing crowd control.
But the Trump administration has been losing the information war with the radical, anti-borders Left. The soft middle of the electorate supports deportation of illegal immigrants, criminals or not, but has recoiled from the disorder and over-the-top rhetoric by some in DHS leadership.
This is why President Donald Trump sent border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis this week to de-escalate the situation. Homan has made clear that immigration laws will continue to be enforced but that tactics will change.
At its base, the problem has been that the DHS has conflated two kinds of enforcement, properly directed at two different, broad groups of illegal immigrants. The first kind you might call “body-armor enforcement” — the “targeted, strategic enforcement operations” Homan spoke about during his press conference on Thursday. It is targeted at “justice-involved” illegal immigrants: criminals arrested by local police, plus fugitives from deportation orders.
But, as Homan also said, “prioritization of criminal aliens doesn’t mean we forget about everybody else.” The “everybody else” are the ordinary people who make up the bulk of the illegal population, people who aren’t raping or murdering or dealing drugs but who have no right to be here and must not be allowed to remain.
This is where “briefcase enforcement” comes in.
Most of the decline in the illegal population over the past year has come from self-deportation. Some of those who have gone home voluntarily are certainly criminals, but most are ordinary working stiffs who’ve realized that the Biden party is over.
It’s true that even most ordinary illegal immigrants are guilty of multiple federal crimes in addition to jumping the border — ID theft, tax fraud, perjury, etc. — but they don’t represent immediate threats to public safety or national security and are much more numerous than the criminals, thus they need to be addressed differently. No matter how many ICE officers there are, they’re just not going to be able to arrest 15 million illegal immigrants.
The answer is employment-related, “worksite” ICE enforcement.
The key to encouraging this larger, nonviolent portion of the illegal population to leave is to make them unemployable. Illegal immigrants, like everyone else, need to work to support themselves, and most work on the books, with fake documents or stolen identities. The more difficult it becomes to get and hold a job, the more of them will pack up and go home.
While this would indeed involve some raids at worksites, much of it would be paper-based — hence the “briefcase” moniker.
A vital first step would be for the Social Security Administration to resume sending out “no-match letters.” They inform employers that the payroll information submitted to the IRS doesn’t match government records, usually because the workers are illegal immigrants.
But no-match letters don’t require employers to actually do anything. That’s why, late in former President George W. Bush’s administration, ICE added instructions spelling out how employers should try to resolve the discrepancies, because some no-matches could be the result of transcription errors or other innocent mistakes. If the employers failed to take those basic steps and kept the employees on the payroll anyway, and ICE happened to show up to conduct an audit, officers would assume those employers were knowingly employing illegal immigrants, which is the threshold requirement for the most serious legal penalties.
Former President Barack Obama ended that ICE practice. And Biden just stopped sending no-match letters altogether.
Once Social Security resumes sending no-match letters with ICE instructions, ICE should use some of the extra personnel funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to dramatically step up audits of employer personnel records in industries with lots of illegal immigrants — and keep it up consistently. Ideally, it should do this in combination with the IRS, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and state regulators, because companies employing lots of illegal immigrants usually are violating other laws as well.
Maximum civil fines should be levied against employers found to be knowingly employing illegal immigrants, and those fines should not be negotiated down, as has often been the case. And large-scale known employment of illegal immigrants can give rise to criminal penalties and even RICO prosecution.
SIXTY YEARS OF MASS IMMIGRATION IS ENOUGH
This would deter crooked employers and assist legitimate ones attempting to maintain a legal workforce. The resulting wave of self-deportations would reduce the illegal population at modest cost to the taxpayer and open up jobs for legal workers.
Briefcase enforcement may not be as sexy as body-armor enforcement, but each has its place, and the former is much more orderly. By doing both together, Trump can sustain broad public support for his immigration policies and keep his promise to unwind his predecessors’ immigration messes.