By Chris Chmielenski is the president and co-founder of the Immigration Accountability Project.

For those tracking the Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up immigration enforcement, the last several months have been an unprecedented whirlwind of activity. From Day One, the President has deployed a maximum pressure strategy to militarize the border and activate all levers of federal law enforcement to contribute to immigration enforcement. Trump has made significantly more progress—in record time—on securing the border than his predecessors. But delivering the scale of deportations of illegal immigrants already here will take even more. To ramp up removal numbers consistent with the desires of the American voter will require a coordinated effort targeting the black market in labor that drives much of the illegal immigration demand.

Months in and President Trump has already transformed the immigration enforcement landscape, root and stem. For those not following every detail, in the last four months:

The President directed the Department of Defense to prioritize the protection of the U.S. border. This has led to the United States military declaring some parts of the border national defense areas, which can mean additional criminal penalties for illegal entrants. Courts are sorting out the parameters of these criminal charges, but this offers promising potential to seal the border from fraudulent asylum seekers.
The Securing Our Borders executive order directed an effort to expand cooperation with State and local law enforcement to remove criminal aliens. This is accomplished through the 287(g) program, which allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to delegate enforcement authority to local law enforcement. Since Trump took office, ICE has signed 603 Memoranda of Agreement for programs covering 40 states. While the 287(g) program was created by Congress in 1996, there were only a combined 35 agreements in 2017 when Trump first took office. No other president has ever leveraged local police power for removal purposes at this scale (not even Trump 1.0).
The President kicked off the process for designating slaver cartels (people mistakenly think only of narcotics, but the cartels sell people as well) as foreign terrorist organizations (FTO), which has led to the designation of Tren de Aragua, among others.
A joint Justice/Homeland Security Task Force was created to dismantle the human-slavery and narcotics-poisoning cartel operations in the interior. Coordination with the Department of Justice (DOJ) is greatly assisting with new, innovative methods to circumvent intransigence from sanctuary jurisdictions seeking to protect criminal aliens.
For the first time, aliens are required to comply with their duty to register with the government under section 262 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The message has been received worldwide. Nationwide encounters by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of inadmissible aliens have fallen to record lows. Just last month, CBP encountered only 29,238 illegal aliens at ports of entry and in between. This marks a nearly ten-fold decrease from the 247,929 encounters last April and from 370,883 at the peak of the border crisis in December of 2023.

It cannot be overstated how revolutionary these efforts are compared to prior administrations. For decades, Americans have been told that securing the border and removing illegal aliens en masse would require more resources than the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could possibly marshal. That lie has been exposed as the President quickly leveraged pre-existing force multipliers: areas where other executive authority could be brought to bear. He has deftly maneuvered the military to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) while mobilizing the DOJ and cooperative state and local law enforcement for arrest and removal support in the interior.

The results at the border have been undeniable, as Trump turned chaos into calm with some of the lowest border numbers ever recorded in his first few months. However, there are already rumblings of discontent and worries abound that the mass deportation effort is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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ICE has already changed leadership twice. It is not difficult to understand why given the vast number of illegal aliens and the slow pace of removals. We’ve breezed by the first 100 days with less than 100,000 removals, despite over one million illegal aliens residing in the country after receiving a final order of removal. If ICE cannot remove those that have already been through the process, then how can we expect mass removals of aliens that have yet to even be arrested? The media covers the drama of individual alien students and their visas, but ICE and Trump have already lost valuable time.

One of the most unforgiving facts of Trump’s bold campaign promise of mass deportations is that success comes down to one statistic: removals.

There has always been some statistical fuzziness around removals. Some may recall the Obama administration’s fake “Deporter-in-Chief” moniker, built by changing the meaning of the word deportation, to make the former president appear tough on immigration during a doomed amnesty push. While there is some wiggle room on how broadly to count a removal, Trump is not going to be able to use accounting tricks or semantics to keep his campaign promise.

Instead, delivering will require continuing to think expansively about ways to coordinate federal power for immigration enforcement purposes. Even assuming Congress will help meet staffing and resource needs in a timely fashion, DHS cannot hope to identify, hire, and train sufficient people within Trump’s four years: there is no process for doing so that is straightforward, or expedient. Assuming Congress votes to appropriate funds by August, the actual recruiting efforts would likely not begin until the new fiscal year. Border Patrol has fitness standards, medical exams, and a polygraph test as part of the application process. Even after being officially hired, individuals will still require more training and probationary periods in the field before being ready. Thus, the focus must remain on leveraging existing authorities and personnel that have either been long dormant or never imagined.

Given the severe constraints, the President cannot afford to waste resources, and there is no room for error with the clock ticking. That means the Trump administration must expend resources where they are most likely to have the greatest impact. Each policy the President considers should be evaluated on three grounds:

Force Multiplication: Since DHS personnel shortages are the most significant and persistent challenge to the mass deportation goal, policies that credibly multiply the existing available force demand priority. Policies that bring more federal partners into the solution allows for an expansion of immigration enforcement capacity. In addition, other agencies like the Department of Labor have expertise and intel to share that DHS otherwise wouldn’t.
Target-Rich Environment: Ideally, resources would be devoted to efforts likely to yield high numbers of arrests and removals. One does not travel to the desert for the ocean view, and one would not seek narrowly targeted populations of illegal aliens when you have limited resources and big removal goals.
America First: It seems to go without saying that any policy should, at minimum, cohere with the broader themes of making immigration policy that benefits Americans.

Using these three guidelines, the most obvious policy avenue for mass deportations is a focus on worksite enforcement. First, it capitalizes on existing resources within Labor. The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) already works the same beat, investigating the same employers at the same worksites as ICE. DOL and ICE even have a current memorandum of understanding (MOU) regarding how to coordinate investigations.

Worksite raids also allow for controlled environments where illegal aliens are regularly scheduled to be for set time periods. This reduces intelligence resources expended seeking aliens individually in their communities and instead provides reasonably safe locations where removable targets gather. In addition to preserving valuable resources for maximum arrests, worksite enforcement signals that illegal employment is under threat. Since most illegal aliens are here for employment, worksite enforcement is likely to inspire more self-deportations than another deportation strategy.

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Unsurprisingly, the current MOU requires ICE to defer to DOL in most cases. This must change to require close coordination between the two, with ICE enforcement operations given priority. Importantly, DOL should also help by punishing the unscrupulous employers violating the law in their labor practices.

DOJ has similar overlapping authorities with human trafficking investigations. Under the current administration’s policy posture, the DOJ should prioritize investigations of labor exploitation and trafficking. Coordination with DOL and DHS could help bring down the entire black market in labor by bringing maximum pressure to employers and cartels while also ending their supply of desperate illegal aliens to exploit.

There also needs to be a focus on target-rich environments. Illegal aliens, in large numbers, come to the United States to seek employment. To use one industry as an example, 40% of the agricultural industry’s workforce is illegal, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Center for Immigration Studies reviewed Census data and found illegal immigrants concentrated in four industries: construction, maintenance, food service, and agriculture. In construction, the University of Michigan reported that half of the Texas construction workforce is illegal, and 40% of New York’s foreign-born construction workforce is illegal. These industries, which the DOL regularly names in its Low Wage/High Violation list, are the definition of a target-rich environment for worksite enforcement.

Finally, there is no other deportation strategy that speaks to the broader America First movement more than worksite enforcement. For American workers, the ever-present waves of illegal immigration in industries like construction and agriculture have corresponded with rising labor violations and plummeting wages and opportunities for American workers. Employers are leveraging the desperation of illegal aliens to undercut Americans and ultimately render us as desperate as our replacements. In tandem with E-Verify, which allows employers to verify each new hire’s employment authorization, worksite enforcement is the commitment from the U.S. government to American workers to protect them from illegal and unfair foreign labor competition.

Additionally, beyond the labor impact, it is a tragic truth that worksite enforcement stands as likely the best hope for locating the lost children of the Biden Administration. Exact numbers are unknown, but thanks to the New York Times, we know many of those child slaves are on worksites. On May 20, ICE conducted a worksite raid in Mobile, Alabama, that found two unaccompanied alien children. Notably, finding the lost children is a priority for ICE.

The President set a huge task for himself with limited resources and even less time. The first 100 Days laid out a bold vision and shifted the tectonic plates of immigration policy. These next 100 demand similar boldness.

The President has recently floated trial balloons regarding allowing some illegal aliens to stay and work on farms and in other jobs. Certainly, there is a great deal of pressure from Republican Party big-business donors to protect their cheap, illegal labor force. But the President’s place in history will not be determined by what the Chamber of Commerce thinks about him. Much of this second term may come down to that one pesky statistic. It will be up to the President to make his voters happy or his donors.

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The One Immigration Number That Matters