On 60 Minutes (the interview aired Sunday, November 8), President Trump said his deportation policy "might be too tough." He said, "I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs," and floated a deal for people who have been here "10 and 15 years."
By Monday afternoon, at the White House, the message had changed: "We have a very strong deportation policy... there's no amnesty," he said, and "we focus on the worst of the worst." DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the same day that the administration remains opposed to amnesty and hasn't discussed changing its enforcement policy.
So, what does the data say?
ICE's own numbers tell a different story as far as who is being detained... As of July 11, 2026, ICE was holding 65,765 people in detention, and 46,436 of them, 70.6%, had no criminal conviction, according to TRAC's analysis of ICE data. About 20,000 of those had charges pending, which means they haven't been convicted of anything, which is now accepted due to the passing of the Laken Riley Act. However, many of the people who were convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations. Since last fall, the growth has been driven mostly by people with no criminal record at all: Austin Kocher's analysis of ICE data found that only 8% of detention growth in the first months of fiscal year 2026 came from people with criminal convictions.
Who are they?
Our healthcare and agricultural systems run on immigration. More than 1 million noncitizen immigrants work in U.S. health care, in fact, immigrants account for 17%, or about 3.3 million, of the health care workforce overall, including about three in ten (or 28%) being physicians and surgeons.
On farms, roughly 40% of hired crop workers are undocumented, according to USDA figures cited by agricultural economists.
Overwhelmingly, the people being detained are those guilty of caring for us and growing our food. That's not the "worst of the worst".
We are all feeling the economic impact
The cost of this crackdown is already showing up. Economists estimate net migration in 2025 fell to somewhere between negative 295,000 and negative 10,000, and that lower immigration will cut consumer spending by $60 to $110 billion over 2025 and 2026. The Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey (analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy) noted that the foreign-born labor force is down about 1 million workers from its March 2025 peak.
Fewer workers means fewer people paying taxes, buying homes and filling jobs that are already hard to fill. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s own nonpartisan scorekeeper, estimates lower immigration will add about $0.5 trillion to federal deficits over the next decade, and that’s because the people being pushed out were paying in: undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022, including $25.7 billion into Social Security (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy). One economic model estimates families could pay about $2,150 more a year by 2028 as food and construction get more expensive.
“Worst of the worst” doesn’t describe the nurse’s aide, the farmworker or the taxpayer, but those are the people this policy is reaching, and we’re all paying for it.
TLDR
Trump said "too tough" on Sunday and "very strong, no amnesty" on Monday.
Nothing about enforcement has changed.
ICE's own data shows that most people in detention, about 7 in 10 as of July, have no criminal conviction.
The people being swept up include health care workers and farmworkers.
The economic cost is landing on everyone.
Headlines like these change by the day. Connect by InHouse Core flags the news that actually affects your status and your family’s, so you get the facts without the noise.
This post is for general information only and is not legal advice. For guidance on your specific situation, please consult a licensed immigration attorney.
