A seemingly innocuous moment in a heated political summer: last Wednesday, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, was walking outside the White House when someone among a clutch of reporters asked if he had a few minutes for questions. Theatrically, Homan, who wore a dark suit in the brutal D.C. heat, his bald dome shiny as a hard hat, looked at his watch. Sure, he said, with a nod. One reporter asked him what he thought of ICEBlock, an app that alerts its users to raids. “It’s only a matter of time before we’re ambushed,” Homan said. Another asked whether raids were escalating in D.C.; Homan said that raids were escalating everywhere—“a thousand teams out there every day.” Then Pablo Manriquez, of Migrant Insider, shrewdly asked, “On deportations, why were you able to achieve so much more for Obama than you have so far under Trump?”

This is, of course, true. For all the aggression and cruelty of the Trump campaign against migrants, the number of deportations is not especially high right now. Suddenly, there was a tiny crack in the veneer of authority. The Obama numbers had been inflated, Homan claimed; under Trump, “we got honest numbers.” Homan sounded defensive. “Despite what the media says,” he went on, “the vast majority of people we’re removing are criminals, and public-safety threats. I read every day that ICE is arresting non-criminals, that ICE got more non-criminals in detention than criminals. It’s a bunch of garbage.”

The exchange hinted at the phenomenal amount of pressure that has been accumulating this summer—on Homan, on the colossal apparatus of detention and deportation that he is guiding, and, most consequentially, on the people being targeted by the Trump Administration. In late May, according to reporting by the Washington Examiner, about fifty senior field officers from ICE and special agents from Homeland Security were brought to Washington and excoriated by Stephen Miller, the President’s close adviser, for what he perceived to be a low level of detentions—in the first hundred days of the second Trump Administration, ICE had made around sixty-six thousand arrests. Miller reportedly asked the officials, “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” According to the Examiner, a senior Enforcement and Removal Operations official stated that, based on public messaging from the Department of Homeland Security and the White House, ICE was focussing on criminals, not the general illegal-immigrant population. Miller responded, “What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” To which, the officials said, “That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV.”

The Department of Homeland Security later issued a statement to the Examiner, claiming that Miller “did not say many of the things you state.” But, since then, ICE detentions have roughly doubled—from an average of seventeen thousand per month between January and April to nearly thirty-five thousand in June. According to ICE statistics, as of July, more than seventy per cent of the detainees do not have criminal convictions. About a year into the first Trump term, the politics of immigration turned on the Administration’s extraordinary cruelty in its treatment of undocumented children, thousands of whom were separated from their parents while in detention. This time, the issue might hinge on the increasingly deep cuts that ICE operations are making in American communities—the way they’re drifting away from the worst of the worst, or even from people with criminal records, to meet their numbers.

The cuts are getting deeper. In July, according to the Associated Press, ICE agents in Maine arrested a local police officer, Jon Evans, who is originally from Jamaica. A couple months earlier, the Old Orchard Beach Police Department, where Evans served as a summer reserve officer, had confirmed his eligibility to work in the United States with the federal government’s own E-Verify system. This week, a recent high-school graduate in Scarsdale, New York, who had arrived in the U.S. from South Korea with her mother, whom NBC called a “beloved” Episcopal priest, in 2021, was arrested during a routine visa hearing. A Times report on the suddenly sprawling detention archipelago concentrated in Louisiana—which has sped some four hundred thousand people through the system since January, with aspirations of operating as smoothly as FedEx—included the account of Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen and visiting academic at Georgetown, whose father-in-law was a former government official in Gaza and whose wife has, according to the paper, “drawn the attention of pro-Israel activists for her sharp criticism of Israel.” “There is too much on the line right now in America,” Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, said on the Senate floor last week. “Secret police are running around the country, picking people up off the streets who have a legal right to be here—there’s too much going on in this country.”

Booker’s resistance matters less than that of far less famous people. In San Diego, the local Catholic bishop, Michael Pham—himself a former refugee, from Vietnam—has been accompanying immigrants to courthouse hearings to ward off masked ICE agents. In Los Angeles, a high-school teacher named Ron Gochez recently told the Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, “We have people patrolling all over the city starting at 5:30 in the morning,” using megaphones to warn the undocumented and summon the documented out to protest. Across the country, apps such as ICEBlock (“See something, tap something”) have spread, as have local hotlines and resistance networks. Last week, video circulated of citizens at a local restaurant in Kansas City, confronting a group of ICE agents. What is striking is how little apparent demographic distance there is between the agents and the citizens asking for their names and badge numbers: on both sides were flat-accented, slightly burly white men.

Immigration has long been President Trump’s political calling card, and often his greatest strength. But NBC News last week noted a clear decline in the portion of Americans who approve of Trump’s handling of the issue—from well above fifty per cent at the beginning of the year to around forty per cent in most recent public polls. (The outlet quoted a twenty-one-year-old respondent named Jorge, who had voted for Trump last year but turned against the President on the immigration issue: “It’s immoral. . . . He thinks he can just take everyone.”) Trump’s over-all approval rating has ticked down, too—it was just forty per cent in the latest Reuters survey this past week. At the same time, the public focus on the issue is abating: according to Gallup, last year, fifty-five per cent of Americans said they wanted immigration reduced; by July, the number was down to thirty per cent, and a record seventy-nine per cent of Americans said they thought immigration was, in principle, good for the country. Democrats have recently shied away from the issue, because, during the late Biden era, the public largely distrusted them to manage migration. But that was, in part, a product of a post-pandemic flood of migrants through the southern border, and the struggles of many cities to manage so many newcomers at once. The situation changes over time, and so, in a more muted way, do the politics.

Homan’s summer is, in other words, a fulcrum. Congress has already approved a budget that will triple the funding for ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations, promising an even more expansive enforcement arm, an extended network of private detention centers, and deeper confrontations with foreign-born people and their communities in the U.S. ICE seems unlikely to slow down. At the same time, resistance is growing and the politics are shifting. The country might see, within the next year, what Booker called the “secret police” made permanent—a meaningful step toward authoritarianism—or it might pull back from that brink. The senator from New Jersey is right; there is a lot on the line in America. ♦