It's all about theater
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Fareed's take regarding the immigration theater. And that the public isn't liking the show.
You have seen the blizzard of scary images — immigration agents taking parents away in front of their kids, masked officers raiding neighborhoods, men detained in remote centers — but here is the surprising fact behind the mayhem: Donald Trump has deported fewer people per month than Barack Obama did, and barely more than Joe Biden during a similar span last year, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by NBC News.
Trump signals that his administration is fearlessly executing mass deportations. But the numbers reveal a different reality. Since February, his administration has deported 14,700 people per month on average, according to NBC News. That’s far below Obama’s peak in 2013, when he deported 36,000 per month. And it’s not even close to the Trump administration’s reported goal of deporting 1 million people in a year.
Trump’s deportation dragnet is less effective than those of his predecessors because it is chaotic, theatrical and detached from the systems that work. Rather than effectively coordinating with local law enforcement, following rules, laws and norms, or expanding and expediting legal processing, Trump has prioritized optics over outcomes. What his administration lacks in strategy, it tries to compensate for with spectacle — sweeping up schoolchildren, targeting families, broadcasting raids on social media.
The rest of his WaPo column:
https://archive.is/UvrrJ#selection-391.0-447.23
Same thing on video:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/20/politics/video/gps0720-immigration-trump-deportations-democrats
