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A big factor is that Trump actually got rid of the prioritization scheme in deportation courts that processes violent criminals (and similar) more quickly than people caught with a broken taillight.

He had the net effect of increasing the amount of time a dangerous immigrant would be inside the country while the system got clogged with all sorts of cases that the American public broadly agrees hardly matter.

It's like a cartoon version of a shitty manager.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/07/16/trump-tried-to...

The Tories in the UK messed up processes around immigration in a similar way.

Break the process and it looks like you have a bigger problem, so it's a political win - if you don't care about actually doing the thing you say you care about.

The guy has no capacity nor will to think in second order effects.

> guy has no capacity nor will to think in second order effects

Maybe we're looking for the wrong effects. Most crime in America is not committed by illegal immigants. Getting rid of violent criminals through immigration courts faster isn't going to result in any crime drop a voter would notice.

The part people will notice is wage inflation. And that's, simply, a numbers game. Furthermore, it's not violent criminals who are competing with Americans for jobs, it's the law-abiding hard-working ones. The ones whose worst offence since crossing the border was having a taillight out.

If you're being Machiavellian, the target is those honest migrants. The ones on dole or committing crimes aren't creating enough problems. Their role is rhetorical. (And honestly, if they get worse, it isn't like people will vote for Democrats. Perverse incentive.)

I tend to default to Hanlon's razor [1]. But it's difficult to call a guy who has won the Presidency twice, in remarkably different situations, an idiot.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Eh, “blame the minorities to get elected, fail to solve actual problems” is the easiest political play in the book.

It doesn’t take a genius to come up with that one.

Says more about voters and our information environment than it does about Trump.

Actual solutions to complex problems tend to be complex. Fake solutions can get away with being 3 word slogans. The latter has a huge structural advantage in politics, especially in our current information environment where people can’t focus on a single problem for more than 5 seconds at a time.

Yep. MAGA is the party of ineffective virtue signalers.

He does not care and does not have to care. It is about looking good to his supporters, getting admiration and being able to hurt who he dislikes.

It is not about actually achieving something.

Or a blatant saboteur.

Are you an ex-wife trans immigrant f us all over?

> I was extremely surprised to find out that based on ICE’s annual reports, which are still up, Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s

There were also more deportations the year before Trump's first term than the year of his first term.

Consider the chart of border encounters. This one shows the past through 2023 [0] and in 2024 we had 2.1 million encounters at the southern border [1]. It appears that deportations are a function of border encounters, and border encounters increased substantially during Biden's administration.

0. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/29/us/illegal-bo...

1. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/fy2024-us-border-encoun....

Seems to be working for me: https://www.ice.gov/spotlight/statistics

From what I could gather here, the largest "deportment" are the rejected ones at southern border entry points. That number is increasing year over year, regardless of administration: same foreigner trying over and over again.

Ive constructed a Sankey diagram of all the flow of visa-less immigration.

Direct citations included.

https://github.com/egberts/immigration

> Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s did

It seems like Trump’s biggest problem is, like himself, the people he put in charge are C-players, so getting anything complex done is hard.

Yes and: Infighting.

I once reported to a guy that set all us minions (product managers) against each other. It was awful.

First Trump administration had a very strong pattern of talk and maybe a few actions… and then they seem to forget what they were doing and the result is little to no action.

Trump loves to talk about trade but when it came to China he put up some token tariffs and announced “I didn’t say it would be easy” and then did nothing the rest of his term.

and they weren't token tariffs.

they were mostly ineffective tariffs, in the "tried so hard and got so far but in the end it doesn't even matter" sense, but he wasn't all talk

If you do a thing and it doesn’t work and don’t even try to fix it… still all talk.

Trump killed the Trans Pacific Partnership.

(This was a surprise to me. I'm grateful that I'm not at risk of being extradited to rot in a chinese prison for reverse engineering some IoT POS.)

How would TPP have put you at risk for Chinese prison?

Because of the copyright enforcement section of the TPP?

> Because of the copyright enforcement section of the TPP

The point of TPP was containing China. China wasn't invited. Trump blew it up resulting in a trade bloc designed to exclude China turning into one that excludes us [1].

Trump's voters don't like trade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_and_Progressive_...

You are aware that the TPP excluded China BY DESIGN, right?

The TPP was meant to economically counterbalance China by working closely with their neighbors.

Without it their incentive was to cut deals to work closer economically with China…

Trump’s isolationist inclinations empowers America’s enemies.

It's upsetting to the progressives but Biden and Obama both deported far more than Trump did.

Thankfully we have archives and youtube, entirely searchable, where from 2008-2012 the democrats were strongly for sending people back home.

I agree it's good we have archives of all the sensible takes on deporting criminals with due process and not mass rounding up people based on skin color or last name at a very high expense to the taxpayers with poor results.

I think this is one of those times where two people agree on the evidence but not the resulting position.

It's very easy to fight straw men like all progressives are against all deportation and border enforcement.

> It's upsetting to the progressives but Biden and Obama both deported far more than Trump did.

Is it ? Outside of the extreme progressive ideologies , what about the progressive platform would be against deportations?

Well, if you categorize everything you disagree with as extreme, none.

> I was extremely surprised to find out that based on ICE’s annual reports, which are still up, Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s did

Really? It was very widely reported. Just wait until you see how many people Obama deported

"I was extremely surprised to find out that based on ICE’s annual reports, which are still up, Biden’s administration deported far more people than Trump’s did..."

I think this is an essentially meaningless number until you also include the total number of illegals that were let in during the same period for each administration.

The more important number is how many people attempted crossing, which jumped significantly during Biden. This probably has something to do with their phenomenally cratered economies during COVID, multiple destabilized governments in LatAm, and severe climate migration.

That's a big part of why the Biden administration (on day one) proposed a bill that created a large economic development grant for LatAm while also modernizing border security.