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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........

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