Trump’s California Crackdown Is a Sign of Weakness

Perhaps the most curious thing about the memorandum is what it isn’t: an invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807. Trump officials have salivated at the prospect of invoking the act since he left office, typically with an eye toward quelling anti-Trump protests. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s draconian immigration policies, also proposed invoking the act when discussing his second-term agenda in 2023 to supplement existing federal personnel when carrying out his ambitious mass-deportation plans.

What do those plans entail? The White House reportedly hopes to deport about one million people during Trump’s first year in office. Trump administration officials claimed that they had deported roughly 139,000 people by the end of his first 100 days in office in April. But, as USA Today reported at the time, those numbers are hard to square with the ones disclosed by Customs and Border Protection over that same time period, which only counted about 57,000 removals.

It is possible that the administration is counting a mixture of voluntary removals, apprehensions at the border, and pending departures to inflate the numbers. Whatever the source, even the administration appears to recognize behind closed doors that it is not meeting its already extraordinary goals. Axios reported last month that Miller, who currently serves as the White House’s domestic policy chief, yelled at ICE officials in a mid-May meeting for not arresting enough people, leaving some participants with the impression that their jobs were in danger.