Trump ramps up deportation spectacle with new stunts and ICE funding

Axios

6 hours ago

The MAGA movement is reveling in the creativity, severity and accelerating force of President Trump's historic immigration crackdown.
Why it matters: Once-fringe tactics — an alligator-moated detention camp, deportations to war zones, denaturalization of immigrant citizens — are now being proudly embraced at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
It's an extraordinary shift from Trump's first term, when nationwide backlash and the appearance of cruelty forced the administration to abandon its family separation policy for unauthorized immigrants.
Six months into his second term — and with tens of billions of dollars in new funding soon flowing to ICE — Trump is only just beginning to scale up his mass deportation machine.
Driving the news: Trump on Tuesday toured a temporary ICE facility in the Florida Everglades dubbed " Alligator Alcatraz," where thousands of migrants will be detained in a remote, marshland environment teeming with predators.
MAGA influencers invited on the trip gleefully posted photos of the prison's cages and souvenir-style "merchandise," thrilling their followers and horrifying critics.
Pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer drew outrage after tweeting that "alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now" — widely interpreted as a reference to the Hispanic population of the United States.
The big picture: Citing the millions of unauthorized immigrants who crossed the border under President Biden, Trump and his MAGA allies have framed the second-term crackdown as a long-overdue purge.
The result is an increasingly draconian set of enforcement measures designed to deter, expel and make examples out of unauthorized immigrants.
Some newer members of the MAGA coalition, such as podcaster Joe Rogan, have expressed deep discomfort with the targeting of non-criminal undocumented immigrants.
Zoom in: Trump's deportation efforts exploded into a full-blown spectacle in March, when the U.S. flew hundreds of alleged gang members to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.
The operation was captured in glitzy promotional footage, distributed on official White House social media, that showed shaved and shackled migrants being marched off planes and busses at gunpoint.
Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador but brought back to face human trafficking charges in the U.S., claims he suffered "severe beatings" and was tortured in the prison.
Zoom out: Trump's immigration toolkit has expanded since March, as his aides push for a dramatically higher pace of arrests and deportations.
Trump federalized the National Guard in California and deployed troops in Los Angeles to protect federal ICE agents, giving the military a rare and highly contentious role in immigration raids.
The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants to non-origin countries — including war torn nations such as South Sudan and Libya.
Hundreds of migrants are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This week, Trump claimed that "conceptual work" is underway to reopen Alcatraz — the decrepit former island prison in San Francisco, now a tourist site.
The latest: On Thursday, ICE announced it had arrested and was preparing to deport Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr. — accusing him of cartel ties just days after he headlined an arena against influencer Jake Paul.
What to watch: Denaturalization of U.S. citizens — once a legal backwater — is gaining traction as Trump and his MAGA allies push the envelope on nativist rhetoric.
The Justice Department has begun prioritizing stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship when they're charged with crimes and "illegally procured or misrepresented facts in the naturalization process."
But some MAGA influencers are pushing to weaponize denaturalization more broadly — not just as a legal remedy for fraud, but as a tool to punish ideological opponents.
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) has called for the Justice Department to investigate the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.
Trump has echoed false claims about Mamdani being in the country "illegally," and threatened to arrest the democratic socialist if he impedes federal immigration operations in New York.
Between the lines: For MAGA influencers obsessed with the notion of protecting Western civilization, denaturalization is also about enforcing cultural loyalty.
Prominent voices on the right have argued that immigrants who haven't properly "assimilated" — by their definition — should be vulnerable to losing their citizenship.
"The MAGA movement is willing to make examples of the people who have failed to [assimilate] so that in the future, the bar is set higher," said Raheem Kassam, editor of The National Pulse.
The bottom line: MAGA is leveraging a precedent-busting president to set a new standard for immigration enforcement — one that could define Republican policy for years to come.