US President Donald Trump is preparing a more aggressive immigration crackdown in 2026 with billions in new funding, including raiding more workplaces, even as backlash builds ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Already, Trump has surged immigration agents into major US cities, where they’ve swept through neighbourhoods and clashed with residents. Federal agents this year conducted some high-profile raids on businesses. Still, they largely avoided targeting farms, factories, and other businesses that are economically important but known to employ immigrants without legal status.
ICE and Border Patrol stand to receive $170 billion in new funding through September 2029, a massive boost above their current annual budgets of roughly $19 billion, after the Republican-run Congress forced through a huge spending package in July.
Plans to Hire Thousands More Agents
The administration officials claim that they are going to hire thousands more agents, open new detention centres, pick up more immigrants in local jails and partner with outside companies to track down people without a legal status. The expanded deportation plans come despite growing signs of political backlash ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Miami, among cities hardest hit by Trump’s crackdown because of its large immigrant population, elected its first Democratic mayor in nearly three decades last week in what the mayor-elect said was, in part, a reaction to the president. Other local elections and polling have suggested rising concern among voters wary of aggressive immigration tactics.
Trump’s overall approval rating on immigration policy fell from 50% in March, before he launched crackdowns in several major US cities, to 41% in mid-December, for what had been his strongest issue Growing public outrage has centred on masked federal agents using aggressive tactics such as deploying tear gas in residential neighbourhoods and detaining US citizens.
‘Numbers Will Explode’ Next Year
Besides ramping up enforcement actions, Trump has revoked temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian, Venezuelan and Afghan immigrants, swelling the ranks of people who could face deportation as he vows to remove 1 million immigrants each year, a goal he almost certainly will miss this year. To date, some 622,000 immigrants have been deported since Trump took office in January.
White House border czar Tom Homan told Reuters that Trump had made good on his promise of a historic deportation operation, removing criminals while shutting down illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border. Homan said the arrest numbers will increase sharply as ICE hires more officers and expands detention capacity with the new funding. Homan said the plans “absolutely” include more enforcement actions at workplaces.
Sarah Pierce, director of social policy at the cent group Third Way, said US businesses have been reluctant to push back on Trump’s immigration crackdown in the past year but could be prompted to speak up if the focus turns to employers. Pierce said it is going to be interesting to see “whether or not businesses finally stand up to this administration.”
More Arrests of People Without Criminal Records
Trump, a Republican, regained the White House on promises of record deportations, adding that it was necessary after years of high levels of illegal immigration under his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden. He launched a campaign that sent federal agents into US cities in search of suspected immigration violators, prompting protests and lawsuits over racial profiling and violent tactics.
Some businesses shut down to avoid raids or due to a lack of customers. Parents vulnerable to arrest kept their children home from school or had neighbours walk them. Some US citizens started carrying passports.
Though the Trump administration has framed the effort as a crime crackdown, new government data demonstrates that it is arresting record numbers of people who don’t have criminal charges beyond their alleged immigration violations, compared to previous administrations.
Of the approximately 54,000 people arrested by ICE and detained by late November, some 41 per cent did not have a criminal record beyond a suspected immigration violation, according to agency figures. During the first few weeks in January, before Trump took office, just 6 per cent of those arrested and detained by ICE were not facing charges for other crimes or were previously convicted.
The Trump administration has also targeted legal immigrants. Agents have arrested spouses of US citizens as they attended their green card interviews, yanked people from certain countries out of their naturalisation ceremonies, moments before they were to become citizens, and revoked thousands of student visas.
Workplace Raids Could Hurt Economy
The administration’s planned actions on job sites in the coming year, though, could significantly raise those arrest numbers and impact the US economy, as well as Republican-leaning business owners.
Replacing immigrants arrested during workplace raids could lead to higher labour costs, undermining Trump’s fight against inflation, which analysts expect to be a major issue in the closely watched November elections that will determine control of Congress.
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