A group of President Donald Trump’s MAGA allies released a playbook Wednesday for carrying out the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. This could divide Trump’s coalition to a great extent.
The plan from the Mass Deportation Coalition — an organization led by some prominent Trumpworld veterans, immigration restrictionist groups and hard-line policy experts — rests on a key pillar: a major immigration enforcement crackdown on workplaces, modeling the strategy that former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration used to carry out the nation’s largest deportation initiative in history.
“There is no chance of a mass deportation program if workplace enforcement is not the focus,” the playbook states. First shared with POLITICOReads. “Large-scale enforcement means focusing on the physical areas where illegal aliens are concentrated: the workplace.”
The strategy almost certainly promises to alienate some of the Trump administration’s allies in the agriculture, construction and hospitality industries, all of which rely heavily on undocumented labor. Farm groups in particular have significant influence in Trump’s Washington and have already shown skill in steering the administration away from workplace enforcement when those efforts disrupt the industry.
Workplace raids could also prove extremely unpopular among voters, whose views have turned increasingly negative toward Trump on immigration and appear to have forced the administration to scale back its deportations.
The release of the group’s playbook — which also offers recommendations ranging from digitalizing the employment verification process to preventing unauthorized immigrants from accessing credit — comes as the Trump administration enters a new phase of interior immigration enforcement.
In the months since an immigration surge in Minneapolis left two U.S. citizens dead, the administration focused its message on mass deportations while overhauling its leadership at the Department of Homeland Security. Border czar Tom Homan replaced Customs and Border Protection chief Greg Bovino in Minneapolis and reduced the immigration enforcement presence in the city; The president fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and appointed then-Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to replace him; And a POLITICO review of official administration social media accounts found that references to “mass deportations” declined sharply in March.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson denied that the White House had changed its deportation approach.
“No one is changing the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” he said in a statement. “President Trump’s top priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who threaten American communities. As the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said, nearly 70 percent of deportations to date have been illegal aliens with criminal records.”
Still, the Mass Deportation Coalition is trying to push the White House back toward a more aggressive immigration approach. Its members include Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of CBP under Trump; Eric Prince, a Trump ally and former CEO of Blackwater, who has lobbied the White House on privatization of immigration detention operations; and several conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation.
The group commissioned a poll last month by McLaughlin & Associates, one of Trump’s pollsters, which found that a majority of likely American voters support deporting all immigrants who enter the country illegally. The survey also found that 70 percent of likely voters support “strengthening workplace immigration enforcement to help raise wages for American workers.”
However, those results differ sharply from other recent polling on immigration, such as a Politico poll conducted in January amid the surge in Minneapolis that found nearly half of American adults say Trump’s mass deportation campaign was too aggressive, including 1 in 5 of his 2024 voters.
“Special interests and industries are able to operate in the shadows and depend on lawmakers and administration officials,” said Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project and a member of the Mass Deportation Coalition. “We’re taking that fight public, and we don’t think they’re in a good position to win that fight, because their arguments are not popular with the American people.”
The group’s stated goal of 1 million deportations by 2026 reflects a personal goal among White House officials, The Washington Post reported last year. This would mark a significant increase in apprehensions: The Department of Homeland Security said it planned to deport more than 600,000 individuals in 2025, though independent analysis has put the number lower.
Industry groups are warning that workplace enforcement would disrupt supply chains. Last June, the agriculture industry was rocked by immigration raids on farms and meatpacking plants made negative headlinesAgriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and others successfully lobbied the President to focus on blue cities – a move that ultimately culminated with the troubled operation in Minneapolis.
“The President made clear where he stood on this issue, and he made clear how he wanted to see the policy implemented,” said John Hooley, president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers. “If (immigration raids) happen again on farm operations, it’s going to disrupt the food supply chain, and we’ve made that very clear. We know the President is committed to making sure that our food supply chain is not disrupted and that prices at the grocery store are not raised unnecessarily.”
