Trump and Miller have accomplished everything they promised on immigration. Ask yourself one question: is your life any better?
This is a guest post by Matt Hildreth, Executive Director of Rural Organizing.
Last week in Biddeford, Maine, a 25-year-old father named Johan Sebastián left his house to go to work. He had a work permit. He had a Social Security number. He had a three-year-old kid in his vehicle.
An ICE agent shot him dead in the street.
Johan Sebastián wasn’t even the person ICE was looking for. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin admitted as much to U.S. Senator Angus King (I-ME). The agents were staking out an address to serve a deportation order on someone else, and when Johan Sebastián drove away from his own home, they blocked his car and opened fire. A neighbor who watched it happen said he heard Johan Sebastián say, “I tried to stop.”
The agents weren’t wearing body cameras. The administration’s own budget request for ICE this year cut programs that would’ve increased transparency, while adding money for nearly everything else.
Biddeford is a town of 22,000 people. It’s the kind of place where the sound of gunfire on a summer morning brings neighbors out onto their porches. By that evening, hundreds of people were standing in Biddeford’s Mechanic Park while another vigil was underway in Portland’s Monument Square with Mainers holding flowers and candles for a man most of them had never met.
Six days earlier, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction business owner who had lived in this country for more than 30 years. He had no criminal record. He had applied for residency. He was driving his crew to a job site when unmarked vehicles started chasing him. His brother says it took 20 to 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.
And the hardest thing for most Americans to accept is that these killings are not outliers or fringe examples of the system breaking down. For Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and MAGA Republicans, this is exactly how their immigration system is designed to work.
In May 2025, Stephen Miller and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called ICE leadership into a meeting and demanded 3,000 arrests a day, triple what agents had been making. Miller said the number aloud on Fox News and later told CNN the quotas were “a floor, not a ceiling.”
There was a problem with that number. There are not 3,000 violent criminals a day to arrest, and there never were. So Miller directed ICE to stop focusing on people with criminal convictions and start staking out work sites, Home Depots, and city streets. Senior ICE officials emailed officers telling them to “turn the creative knob up to 11” and encouraged them to grab “collaterals,” meaning anyone they happen to encounter while looking for somebody else. A former ICE official summed up the new directive plainly: quantity over quality.
Johan Sebastián and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo are the people ICE is targeting with their quotas. A construction worker driving his crew to a job site is exactly who you catch when you stop hunting criminals and start staking out work vehicles in order to get your numbers up. Johan Sebastián was a “collateral.” He wasn’t the target. He was the man who drove away from an address agents were watching, and under the quota system, that was enough to end his life.
In other words, the system is operating exactly as it was designed. After the murder of Johan, Maine Senator Susan Collins (R), who voted to give ICE and CBP an additional $70 billion, issued a statement claiming she had convinced Secretary Mullin “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.” She then took credit, “I am encouraged that the Department has agreed to do so.” Semafor touted this as a “show of clout” by Collins.
That “clout” lasted less than a day because Trump blasted the idea in a Truth Social rant, claiming that “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important & effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. ICE…go back and do your very important job.”
Trump and Miller call the shots on immigration policy from the White House. They have gotten everything they wanted from Republicans in Congress. Every dollar. Every policy. Every authority. They wanted mass deportation, and they’re doing it. They wanted the border sealed, and they sealed it.
The White House brags that more than 605,000 people have been deported and that 2.5 million people have left the country in total. The United States had negative net migration in 2025, the first time that has happened in at least half a century. Detention hit a record 71,000 people in January. CBP has awarded contracts for 587 miles of new border wall.
DHS just announced thirteen straight months of zero releases at the border. Southwest border apprehensions are 94 percent below the Biden-era average, the lowest levels in more than three decades. This fiscal year opened with the fewest border encounters ever recorded.
And follow where the money went. Congress has handed DHS roughly a quarter trillion dollars for this project since last summer, more than the budgets of the FBI, the DEA, and the U.S. Marshals combined. That money is not sitting in a vault. It is flowing to private detention corporations converting warehouses into camps, to contractors building 587 miles of wall, and to county jails renting beds to ICE for per-diem revenue. Miller’s quota is not just a policy. It is a business model. Every arrest fills a billable bed, and somebody’s quarterly earnings call depends on keeping those beds full. This is the oldest trick in American politics: they want you afraid of your immigrant neighbor so you never ask who is cashing the check.
For ten years, Trump and MAGA Republicans promised that if they ever got to run immigration their way, with no judges getting in their way, no Congress holding back the money, no bureaucrats slowing them down, life would improve for the American people. And now that they’re running the entire show, only 14% of Americans say the economy is getting better.
The most extreme enforcement regime in modern American history is fully in place. America is no safer, and Americans are still struggling.
MAGANOMICS HAS FAILED BECAUSE ECONOMIC GROWTH IS BASED ON ADDITION, NOT SUBSTRACTION
In 2017, then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said that “MAGAnomics” would grow the US economy by three percent year after year. The theory was that tax cuts, deregulation, tariffs, and immigration restrictions would rebuild American prosperity from inside Trump’s border wall.
Nine years later, the number tells the story. Under Trump, economic growth peaked at 2.9 percent in 2018 and never reached 3 percent. It ran 2.8 percent in 2024, fell to 2.1 percent in 2025, and nearly stalled out at the end of last year. By the yardstick its own architects set, MAGAnomics has failed every single year it has been tried.
CNN’s Harry Enten added up the MAGAnomics bill for American families recently. Tariffs have cost Americans $231 billion. The war with Iran cost another $134 billion. The collapse in international tourism cost $8.4 billion more. Altogether, that is $373 billion since Trump took office, about $2,784 per household. Enten put that number in terms any family can measure: three to four months of food. And his estimate doesn’t even factor in the lost revenue from workers being deported or removed by Trump’s immigration agenda.
ENTEN: “I’VE RUN THE NUMBERS. HERE’S HOW MUCH TRUMP HAS COST AMERICA (SO FAR)”
The fact is, you cannot promise growth while removing the people who produce it. Mass deportation was always a key tenet of MAGAnomics. Trump and his team sold immigration restriction as a labor policy, the idea that fewer workers would mean higher wages for the rest of us. But an economy is not a fixed pie with too many forks in it. Workers are also consumers, taxpayers, business owners, and neighbors. When you deport the meatpacker, you don’t just lose the meatpacker. You lose the rent he paid, the groceries he bought, the school his kids kept open. Rural counties know this better than anyone, because we are the places where one closed plant or one lost family shows up in the school enrollment numbers the next fall.
MAGAnomics promised prosperity through subtraction. MAGA math said that fewer imports, fewer workers, and fewer neighbors would equal more money in the pockets of the American worker.
In small towns and rural communities, we know that bigger paychecks come from addition, not subtraction. We understand that our towns that are growing are growing because people moved in, including immigrants who came to work in the packing plants, the dairies, the orchards, and the nursing homes, who opened restaurants on main streets that had been dark for years, who enrolled their kids in schools that were one consolidation vote away from closing.
Most Rural Americans, like me, believe broad-based prosperity, strong labor unions, and a robust social safety net create a more stable, more productive, and more resilient society. We know that when our neighbor has a good year, the entire community benefits.
For the last several years, Trump and Miller have gotten everything they wanted. Every dollar, every policy, every quota. And what did it add up to?
The worst Rural Economy in a generation.
