Enough With Immigration

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” These immortal words from William Blake’s 1790 prose poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” offer a rueful perspective on the turn in Donald Trump’s fortunes in 2026. It appears his administration did “what is more than enough” in implementing its policies related to illegal aliens inside the United States and, in so doing, turned an unalloyed political and policy triumph into a possible defeat.

 

What was “enough” was stemming the tide at the border in 2025. Last year, the net number of illegal crossings into the United States was zero. All in all, according to the Brookings Institution, “net migration to the U.S. was negative in 2025, a sharp reversal from net inflows exceeding three million in 2023 and two million in 2024.” This came about due to better patrolling, increased apprehensions of those attempting to cross and their subsequent return south of the border, and the general sense among those outside of the United States that the effort to enter under this new administration would be a fool’s errand.

 

That change demonstrates just how out of control the border had become during the feckless Biden years, when the administration adopted a triumphally petulant “whatever the Trump people did, we’re going to do the opposite” attitude. It arguably got Trump elected to his second term as a result. Trump promised to put an end to the Biden approach. And he fulfilled that campaign promise.

 

Polls suggested the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the results. And then Trump did “more than enough.”

 

Throughout 2025, even as the work at the border was uncontroversial in the eyes of the public, the decision to use ICE and the Border Patrol to go in active pursuit of illegals inside the United States proved to be a controversial policy. Closing the border was essentially an act of defense. But conducting raids across the United States to capture and deport illegals—some of them criminal actors but others simply people gathered in one place to seek temporary day jobs in parking lots—was more akin to a war of choice. It did not come in response to an immediate existential threat—unless, that is, you are single-mindedly focused on the idea that the presence of illegals among us constitutes a fast-acting social poison that we must flush out of our system without delay.

 

It’s true that Trump promised to conduct “mass deportations” in his second term, but he never offered a clear definition of what that meant or how it would be done. And while 6 in 10 Americans said they were in favor of deportations in 2024, the visible effort to pursue them in 2025 seemed to make Americans queasy. Nate Silver’s poll average calculates that overall public support for Trump on immigration turned negative in June 2025 and has stayed that way since. The news coverage of ICE’s actions in cities, showing masked agents moving aggressively on what appeared to be unthreatening people, surely played a significant role in the shift.

 

Then things took a particularly bad turn for Trump when he made the decision to “surge” forces into Minneapolis in December. This was not a direct reaction to any specific change on the streets there but a naked effort to shine a national light on an important story dating back to 2018: the channeling of public dollars into fraudulent and nonexistent relief organizations run by members of the Somali community in the Twin Cities. The details were so egregious that the state’s sitting governor, 2024 Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, found it necessary to announce he would not run for another term.

 

The Walz humiliation could have been a Dayenu moment—that’s the word Jews sing on Passover that means “it should have been enough.” The Somali fraud scandal was a slow-acting agent that turned suddenly lethal at the end of 2025 when it came to Walz’s career and offered the promise that all kinds of blue-state coziness between leftist politicians and not-for-profit groups might be exposed and more fraud uncovered. The Somali scandal didn’t need ICE. It was going to ice liberals all on its own.

 

That was not good enough for Trump. No, in the Blakean marriage of heaven and hell that is his administration, Trump evidently needed to learn what was more than enough. He surged ICE. He added Border Patrol agents. The city’s (and the country’s) highly organized network of leftist activists was there and ready for it. They instantly redirected the national spotlight away from Walz and Co. and toward the immigration-enforcement officers. They sought to provoke confrontations and they succeeded. Two activist citizens, both personally imprudent but politically more useful than they could ever have known, were killed by ICE and Border Patrol agents during chaotic scrums lasting fewer than 10 seconds. One was minimally defensible, the other in no way defensible. The whole business of the Minneapolis surge became at best tragically unnecessary—a war of choice gone wrong—and at worst either a sign of an armed agency out of control or of a brilliantly manipulated PR campaign that was turning Trump’s greatest strength into a liability.

 

American attitudes on immigration are incredibly confused and incredibly confusing. We believe immigration is a benefit to the country. At the same time, we do not support illegal immigration and say in large numbers that it should be prevented and that illegal aliens should be deported. There’s something irreconcilable there. And matters become even more knotted due to the influence of a radical vanguard led by White House deputy Stephen Miller that opposes all immigration, illegal and legal, and is actively working to eliminate it. The vanguard is also seeking to end birthright citizenship, which has been accepted as a constitutional right since the passage of the 14th Amendment (and which was implicitly seen as such in the nine decades that followed the inception of the United States in 1776).

 

Miller and others define what is “more than enough.” Trump has largely been walking along the path they laid for him. He is showing signs of stepping off because he sees that the American people do not like how it feels to live in a country whose government acts in the way it has. Mere self-preservation suggests it’s time for him to say enough.