Trump's heavy-handed tactics have deprived Republicans of a powerful wedge issue

Published October 30, 2026 6:00AM (EDT)

A U.S. Border Patrol agent monitors immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico on May 18, 2022 in Yuma, Arizona. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

This article was originally published on The Conversation .

In a 2025 investigation , The New York Times reported that officials in President Joe Biden’s administration, in the wake of Biden’s 2020 election win, had viewed rising immigration as “a distraction” best ignored so that the administration could concentrate political resources on more important economic matters.

Scott Shuchart, a Biden appointee who joined the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in 2022, told the newspaper that the White House was “wishing the problem would go away so that they could focus on the things they cared about.”

But two years after Donald Trump leveraged voter dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s management of the U.S.…