Los Angeles Riots May Encourage Illegal Immigrants to Self-Deport

“How’m I doin’?” the late New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask constituents on his travels through the city. President Donald Trump, in the opinion of most Americans, is doin’ pretty well.

His job approval, which jutted downward after he announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, has recovered and hovers just below 50%. That’s just about the level of Barack Obama’s and George W. Bush’s approval at this point in their second terms and above his own approval at any point in his first term.

Many continue to regard some top appointments as eccentric. His style of discourse, OFTEN IN ALL CAPS, is eccentric by any past presidential standard. But in a political system that remains democratic and is increasingly demotic, that which sounds coarse to you (and me) is apparently acceptable to most people.

As for his, um, unusual appointments, they may make sense for a president who is less interested in fine-tuning organizations than in affecting the behaviors of mass publics.

Candidate Trump in 2024 promised that he would eliminate shortfalls in military recruitment, which he attributed to the Biden Pentagon’s “woke” policies. He pointed out accurately that the Army and Navy fell short of recruitment goals by as much as 25% in fiscal years 2022 and 2023.

He named Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, saying he’d promote a warfighting ethos that would attract un-woke young men and women to join up. The Army raised its recruiting goal from 55,000 to 61,000 and reached it in May, four months early.

Maybe that’s a coincidence or a response to other factors. But it looks like Trump’s rhetoric made a big difference.

Or look at trade. Trump has made no secret of his love for tariffs and his desire to reduce trade with China. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that China’s exports to the U.S. in May were the lowest since COVID-19-wracked February 2020. It looks like thousands of American and Chinese market participants have made new decisions in response to Trump’s rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the May job numbers in the U.S. increased by a more-than-expected 139,000, despite a 60,000 reduction in federal jobs since January. And despite a drop of foreign-born workers in the labor market estimated between 773,000 and 1 million since March.

Three-quarters of a million to a million – those numbers dwarf the number of annual deportations from the interior of the U.S. as compiled by my Washington Examiner colleague Conn Carroll.

Those range from 65,000 in the last year of the Obama administration and from 28,000 to 47,000 in the four Biden years. They were higher – 81,000 to 95,000 – in the first three years of Trump I and then fell to 62,000 in COVID-19 year 2020.

These numbers put in perspective the drama that has been playing out in Los Angeles this past week. The Trump administration cannot expect that it can, logistically, remove all the untold millions of illegal immigrants that whoever was running the Biden administration (no one, including the authors of “Original Sin,” has disclosed just who that was) allowed into the U.S. But splashy raids and deportations can get hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of illegal immigrants thinking about what Mitt Romney in 2012 called “self-deportation.”

Which is probably happening thanks to what has been happening in Los Angeles these past five days. Demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation activity resulted in the arrest of the head of the Service Employees International Union. When “sanctuary city” Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) let the rioting go on, Trump nationalized the California National Guard and dispatched Marines.

He plainly had the authority to do so when federal law enforcement is blocked, and as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York recounts. And the Supreme Court in 2012 made it clear that federal immigration law prevails over countervailing state law.

There’s no question whose side the public is on. A pre-riot CBS poll showed 54% approving of Trump’s deportation program, and two polls taken this week showed approval: Insider Advantage by 59% to 39%, and the Napolitan News poll by 58% to 36%.

After eight years of stark contrast between Trump and Democrats’ policies, as CNN poll analyst Harry Enten points out, most voters give Trump high marks and “believe that Democrats don’t have a clue on the issue of immigration.”

Similarly, voters who remember Democrats’ insistence and journalists’ assurances that Joe Biden was fully functional are skeptical that the L.A. rioters were “overwhelmingly peaceful” (Kamala Harris) or “largely peaceful” (The New York Times).

There’s ample historic precedent for Trump’s action as well. Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 and Lyndon Johnson in 1965 sent in federal troops to uphold federal law over the opposition of Democratic governors in Arkansas and Alabama.

Those governors were defying federal law for a cause – preservation of racial segregation – that the vast majority of voters, after a decade of reflection, were determined to reject. Today’s California Democrats are defying federal law for a cause – permanent amnesty for illegal immigrants – which it appears that voters, after a decade of reflection, are bent on rejecting as well.

As for the illegal immigrants themselves, I’m not aware that anyone has conducted a poll of them, or could, since people in their situation are wary of being interviewed. But as the workforce numbers suggest, for many, self-deportation, together perhaps with the Department of Homeland Security’s $1,000 travel stipend, is looking like a good option. One that may be taken up by many more than are legally deported.

So how’s Trump doin’? Better, perhaps, than his critics think.

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” is now available.

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