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In the face of deep public opposition, the notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surges that culminated in the siege of Minneapolis have been deep-sixed, at least for now. Yet that doesn’t mean that the most anti-immigrant administration in modern U.S. history isn’t still looking for less dramatic (but at least as effective) methods to pursue its war against immigrants. In fact, on a near-daily basis it becomes clear that the Trump team’s strategy is now cooler, calmer, and perhaps more ruthlessly effective than were the spectacularly violent city surges of 2025 and early 2026.

Last week, the federal government released data showing that there have been three times as many ICE arrests in Texas since Donald Trump’s January 2025 inauguration as there have been in California — which was home to the first large-scale indiscriminate ICE siege in Los Angeles just months into his presidency.

Unlike California, which has strong sanctuary laws on the books, Texas mandates that local law enforcement cooperate with immigration enforcement. Consequently, below-the-radar cities such as Dallas and Houston — which have not witnessed surges of the sort that hit Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis — have become epicenters of MAGA’s deportation machine. In November, The Texas Tribune reported that a startling one in four ICE arrests nationally in 2025 occurred in Texas, with daily arrests up more than 30 percent in Houston and in Dallas, and with an increasing percentage of arrestees being immigrants with no criminal records.

In the face of recent attempts by Dallas, Houstin, Austin, and El Paso city councils to limit local law enforcement cooperation with ICE, Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to yank tens of millions of dollars in public safety funds. This week, in the face of those threats, the Houston City Council caved, amending its ordinance to allow local law enforcement to hold immigrants wanted by ICE for longer periods of time, thus allowing ICE easier access to the detainees.

Where Texas goes, GOP states tend to follow — in much the same way as blue states take policy cues from California. Wary of losing much of their workforce and of resulting shortages and price spikes, local business coalitions have successfully pushed back against many proposed state anti-immigrant laws, but Republican legislators continue to coordinate with the federal administration in beefing up anti-immigrant measures. In Florida, state university police, as well as city police, are mandated to cooperate with ICE in rooting out undocumented students; in Tennessee it is now a state-level felony to live in the state with undocumented status after the immigrant has received a federal deportation order (although that law is likely to face immediate legal challenges).

With New Policy, DHS Sets Its Sights on Incarcerating Up to 100,000 Refugees

The federal-state anti-immigrant axis is coordinated by Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigrant-hounding Svengali, who has been fine-tuning a strategy over the past several months that relies more on the deployment of targeted bureaucratic weapons than on high-profile and indiscriminate ICE surges.

Miller has brought a stark vision of white nationalism to the heart of U.S. governance, and earlier this year, he reshaped the Department of Homeland Security’s approach to refugees who have been in the country for only a year and lack green cards. The new rules, which immigrant rights groups have denounced for their break with decades of past practice, permit the arrest and indefinite detention of refugees while their status is re-vetted and their green card applications wend their way through a system that has been deliberately slowed to a crawl, making it time-consuming, difficult, and expensive for refugees to secure their required green cards. The ultimate goal appears to be to drive large numbers of refugees — who have already been vetted and already have legal status — out of the country; and, even without mass arrests, to terrorize entire refugee communities by having this Damocletian sword hanging over them.

Trump’s anti-immigration enforcer has also pushed for the most restrictive interpretation possible of public charge rules, making it all but impossible for immigrants to access any public benefits, and making it more likely that immigrants’ green card application or permanent residency status will be put at risk if they use public benefits. This is a reworked version of policies pushed under Trump 1.0 that faced significant pushback from the courts before ultimately being abandoned by the incoming Biden administration.

Recently, Miller’s team has been in conversation with Texas legislators, and political figures in other states, to encourage them to pass state-level legislation that would ban undocumented children from public schools. If and when states go down this route, which would have the effect of creating an unschooled, unlettered, and permanent underclass in the U.S., it would set up a Supreme Court confrontation, since more than 40 years ago the court barred Texas from doing precisely this. With the hard-right turn of the Supreme Court over the past decade, and with three of the justices being Trump appointees, Miller’s strategy seems aimed at getting the court to overturn its earlier ruling, thus opening the floodgates to state-level rules that would further target undocumented children and their families.

For the past few months, rumors have swirled in D.C. that Miller is also pushing banks, mortgage lenders, and credit card companies to bar undocumented immigrants from using their services, thus placing a financial stranglehold on these residents. Miller appears to want to make life in the U.S. so difficult for immigrants that growing numbers of them will choose to self-deport. In the Senate, Tom Cotton, taking his cues from the administration on this, has introduced just such legislation.

In recent days, those rumors appear to be moving closer to realization. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has floated this option, saying that an executive order will be unveiled soon through which banks will be required to collect citizenship data from present and potential customers. Not surprisingly, despite deep unease from financial institutions, which fear alienating customers by demanding such data, right-wing state legislators in Arizona and other states have now jumped on this bandwagon, pushing their own state-level versions of this financial-exclusion legislation.

Should this be realized, undocumented workers will be entirely excluded from the legal/financial ecosystem, pushing them toward underground lenders and loan sharks, and making them ever more vulnerable to financial predation. Again, however, the impact will be felt far more broadly — for without access to accredited financial institutions, undocumented workers will find it that much harder to pay their state and federal taxes, thus draining large sums of money from treasury coffers.

Not content with cajoling red states into becoming willing partners in the immigrant crackdown, for the past few weeks, under the new leadership of Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Homeland Security has been talking up the possibility of yanking Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from airports in cities and states with sanctuary policies, making it impossible for these airports to cater to international flights, since they would no longer have agents checking passengers’ passports. Their stated goal is to produce enough economic pain that they pressure Democratic localities into abandoning their laws protecting immigrant communities.

Were the administration to follow through on this, the impact would be calamitous — and not just for blue state economies but for the country as a whole: After all, with the exception of a handful of international airports in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas, the overwhelming majority of major international hubs are in sanctuary cities such as New York, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. End CBP presence at these airports, and in addition to tens of thousands of people losing their jobs, international travel in and out of the United States would slow to a crawl. It would be, for the travel sector, as destructive as has been the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for the energy industry. New York area airports process more than 50 million international travelers a year; San Francisco area airports roughly 8 million. LAX processes more than 23 million international travelers annually; Chicago’s O’Hare, roughly 15 million.

At least before the midterms, it appears unlikely that the administration will resurrect the strategy of surging masked and hyper-violent ICE agents into urban communities. But Miller’s and Trump’s goals — ending mass migration into the United States and pressuring millions of undocumented residents to leave the country — remain undimmed. Countering these new bureaucratic weapons poses a distinct set of challenges to the networks of lawyers and activists that have worked so tirelessly to protect millions of immigrants, with varying statuses and protections, from the administration’s actions these past 15 months.

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Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Abramsky’s latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order now and will be released in January. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.

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