The Biggest Loser on Election Day: Stephen Miller
Nov 10, 20265:50 AM
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President Donald Trump has plenty of lessons he could take from the results of the 2026 midterm elections, but one might top the list: Stop mass deportations, now. Two years ago, the president ran on tightening up America’s immigration system, and voters overwhelmingly bought the message he was selling, so much so that he won over key voting blocs like young men and Hispanic people in margins the GOP had never experienced before. But in the two years since, voters have been watching Trump’s immigration promises turn into a cruel law-enforcement scheme that has killed U.S. citizens and set off a violent detention and deportation operation. Last week, millions of Americans indicated they had seen enough and chose Democrats over Republicans to represent them in what can only be interpreted as a full-scale repudiation of Trump’s—and his newly promoted chief of staff Stephen Miller’s—mass deportation agenda.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump proudly announced while campaigning for president two years ago, against the backdrop of his Los Angeles golf club. “And we’re going to start with Springfield [Ohio] and Aurora [Colorado].” It was around this time that he also unleashed a bizarre and racist attack on Haitian immigrants, many of whom live in Springfield, Ohio, who he claimed were “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats.” He also exaggerated claims that Aurora was suffering from Venezuelan gangs whose members were “destroying our country.”
The sentiment behind these at times grotesque claims resonated with many voters who said they were tired of watching the Biden administration simply give in to the mass migration hitting the U.S. southern border. Trump’s hard-on-immigration stance led to massive swings from a more racially and ethnically diverse coalition of voters than Trump had earned in 2016 and 2020. Among Hispanic voters, 48 percent voted for Trump in 2024, compared to only 36 percent in 2020. Similar gains were seen among Black voters, as 15 percent voted for Trump in 2024, compared to only 8 percent in 2020. Asian voters also increased their support for Trump, with 40 percent backing him in 2024, compared to 30 percent in 2020.
The president and his anti-immigrant “hatemonger” sidekick Miller wasted no time taking these electoral wins—boosted in large part by the sons and daughters of immigrants—and using them to justify a full-throated assault on America’s immigrant communities. The day of Trump’s inauguration, Customs and Border Patrol shut down its CBP One mobile app, shutting out thousands of people who had been waiting to apply for asylum through the only legal mechanism allowed. Hours later, Trump went on to sign an obscene number of executive orders, including one attempting to strike down birthright citizenship. From there, things would only get exponentially worse—and deadly.
Shortly after the inauguration, the Trump administration would begin what can only be described as a national manhunt for Black and brown immigrants. In one of its most egregious acts of cruelty, the administration targeted over 200 Hispanic men with tattoos, claiming they were gang members, then went on to expel them to the world’s largest prison camp in El Salvador—violating a federal judge’s order. “We lived through hell,” one prisoner said to describe his four month stay at CECOT. Further showcasing the administration’s cruel intentions, when a Department of Justice lawyer admitted they had mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia on one of those El Salvador flights, they fought tooth and nail for over a year to keep him locked up, taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court and filing a dubious indictment against him.
Soon, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended upon Democrat-led cities, followed by National Guard troops, leading to mass arrests and protests. In California, ICE agents targeted farmworkers, many of whom had been living in the U.S. for decades and had no criminal records. During one raid of a local car wash, federal agents tackled the 79-year-old owner, breaking several of his ribs, injuring his elbows, and causing a traumatic brain injury. It turned out that he was a U.S. citizen.
In Chicago, a raid was executed on an apartment building where adults and children were yanked from their beds in a military-style attack in the middle of the night. Tenants said agents were arresting everyone, regardless of their citizenship status. “Federal agents reporting to [now former] Secretary Noem have spent weeks snatching up families, scaring law-abiding residents, violating due-process rights, and even detaining U.S. citizens. They fail to focus on violent criminals and instead create panic in our communities,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said at the time. Soon it was public knowledge that Miller had tasked federal agents with arresting 3,000 immigrants a day, leading to pure lawlessness, including bogus indictments and near-deadly shootings.
No one will ever forget what ICE then did to Minneapolis. Agents killed not one, but two U.S. citizens in the span of a month while terrorizing the entire community. To this day, the Trump administration has refused to accept accountability for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, instead taking part in more killings, like those in Texas and Maine this past summer. This behavior created a systemic culture of fear among America’s immigrant communities, many of whom were keeping their children home from school in fear of ICE targeting them during school dropoff or pickup. Others simply stopped showing up to work after ICE began conducting workplace raids, upending industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor.
The list of the Trump administration’s lawless immigration policies goes on and on. Not only has it been weaponizing federal agents, its Justice Department has been finding novel ways to undermine America’s immigration laws. If they could not forcibly remove Black and brown immigrants who had been here lawfully and peacefully for decades, they were happy to eliminate legal protections allowing them to live and work here through ending temporary protected status and enforcing mandatory detention.
The very voters who in 2024 swung decisively toward Trump have spent the last year and half with targets on their backs. A UCLA analysis found that Latinos accounted for 9 out of 10 ICE arrests during the first six months of 2025, and the number of arrests rose drastically after Miller announced his arrest quota. Texas, Florida, California, Georgia, and Virginia experienced the highest volume of immigration enforcement in the country, and on Election Day, voters in all of these states pushed back.
In Florida, Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar tried to warn the president, filming a campaign ad that called Trump out directly. “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” she said. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” Last week, Salazar held on to her seat by less than a percentage point.
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Texas was not as kind to the president. In Webb and Hidalgo counties, which hold Hispanic majorities, voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Democrat James Talarico for Senate—by roughly 50 points. And in a closely watched race down in the Rio Grande Valley, Democrat Bobby Pulido pulled off a decisive win with 62 percent of the vote over incumbent Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, in a district that Trump carried by 18 percentage points in 2024. Not to mention that Texas voters elected the state’s first-ever Latina governor, ousting Republican Greg Abbott, who has served in that role since 2015 and has been happily having Texas law enforcement cooperate with Trump’s ICE crackdowns.
Similar scenes played out in California, where roughly three-quarters of Latino voters voted for Democrats in the House, a 29-percentage-point shift from 2024. That includes California’s 22nd Congressional District, where Latinos make up 64 percent of the population. Here, progressive Democrat Randy Villegas ousted six-term incumbent Republican Rep. David Valadao. In Kansas, Hispanic-majority counties Finney and Seward shifted roughly 50 percentage points to Democrats, while Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania also saw sizable shifts toward Democrats in their Latino populations that in 2024 had swung to Republicans.
These results should not be shocking to anyone, as the writing was on the wall heading into Election Day. Poll after poll indicated Republicans were beginning to lose support on immigration while Democrats were beginning to gain ground on the issue. ICE has been ramping up its immigration enforcement so aggressively, with upward of 40,000 people arrested per month, that at this point there are plenty of Americans who personally know someone impacted by the president’s deportation agenda. And even those who don’t watched the clips of immigrants being violently thrown to the ground, shot in their cars at point-blank range, and having children torn from their family members—horrifying images no voter would want their elected officials to be associated with.
And yet, President Trump doesn’t seem to get it—or simply doesn’t care. Less than one week after Republicans suffered debilitating losses at the polls, he announced Miller would be promoted to being his new chief of staff. The man whose rise in politics was largely fueled by racist, xenophobic beliefs is now being given the green light to not just continue his punitive immigration policies, but to lean into his anti-immigrant fervor even more.
Meanwhile, Democrats, with their newly minted majorities in the House and Senate, have a mandate to make serious changes to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. They can seek to use Congress’ power of the purse to defund ICE and force guardrails on agents, including penalties for those who recklessly violate federal law. They can also initiate investigations, ensuring Americans get to see exactly how Miller’s inhumane policies are hurting people.
Voters did their part; now we wait and see if the newly elected members of Congress will do theirs.