As clashes with ICE heat up, Trump’s cold war against immigration rages on

Clashes between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and members of targeted communities continue to intensify as the Trump administration gleefully condones a dangerous mix of heavy-handed enforcement tactics and zero accountability.

Recent examples of intimidation, harassment, and excessive use of force by ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have been piling up, ranging from a praying minister being shot in the head with a pepper ball to a woman allegedly taunted to “do something” before an officer opened fire.

Americans who care about the rule of law — whether they support mass deportations or not — must speak out against the inhumane theater of cruelty put on by Donald Trump’s secret police.

Yet, beyond the daily outrage of immigrants being disappeared off the street, or citizens detained without reason by jeering masked thugs, there is another insidious level to the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts.

From the moment Trump came into office, he has shut down or obstructed the country’s legal immigration pathways. No shots have been fired in this cold war, but the long-term economic damage will leave most Americans worse off.

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Starting in January, the administration froze the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, leaving more than 100,000 highly vetted immigrants who had already been approved for resettlement stuck in limbo.

According to reports, the program will restart in 2026, but the cap will be lowered from the 125,000 set under President Joe Biden to 7,500. Not only that, but many of those limited slots will be reserved for white South Africans.

You have to give it to white supremacists in the administration; they are not subtle.

The refugee freeze may not be the largest cut to legal immigration, but it is the most significant, said David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“All these people who would have been here with a path to permanent residence and citizenship — it’s just gone,” he told me. “Over the next four years, it’s basically the equivalent of half a million people who are going to be lost as a result of that decision.”

Refugees are fleeing from persecution, have gone through extensive background checks, and likely waited for years for a chance to come to the U.S. — all of which is meaningless to an administration for whom a foreigner is just an “illegal” who hasn’t overstayed their visa yet.

And, if and when Trump leaves office, the system itself will be damaged, atrophied after years of disuse and partner agencies that have moved on.

The administration has also ended all humanitarian parole initiatives launched during the Biden years, which allowed some immigrants who had a sponsor in the U.S. and who passed a background check to come to America for a period of two years to live and work lawfully.

International students, long a wellspring for high-skilled workers in the U.S. and a major revenue driver for colleges and universities, have also been targeted by the administration. As the new academic year began in August, the number of international students declined by almost 20% from 2024. Difficulties getting visas, fears of getting caught up in the wider immigration crackdown, or ending up in jail for saying the wrong thing played a part in the drop, according to reports.

These are no idle concerns. The best and brightest around the world can quickly find validation for their worries in what happened to Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained after leading pro-Palestinian protests, or Tufts doctoral candidate Rumeysa Öztürk, who spent six weeks in custody over an op-ed she wrote for her student newspaper.

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There are also travel bans targeting 19 countries and a proposal to charge a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas for skilled workers. Meanwhile, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the agency tasked with overseeing legal immigration, including legal permanent residence and citizenship applications — is being weaponized against the people it’s meant to serve.

The agency will now have armed special agents engaged in immigration enforcement, even as its backlog hits an all-time high and fee-paying applicants face worsening delays for USCIS services.

It’s going to be some time before the full economic effects of mass deportation, plus legal immigration being throttled so aggressively, manifest themselves, but the math is clear. The consequences of Trump’s legal immigration crackdown will not play out in the streets, but around people’s kitchen tables.

“It’s going to mean less economic growth for the United States,” the Cato Institute’s Bier said. “You’re reducing business creation and entrepreneurship and innovation, which drives improvements in economic growth over the long term.”

With less economic growth, it means lower living standards for the U.S. population, Bier added. “It’s a bleak picture.”

Much as the reality of who’s being targeted for deportation puts the lie to the administration’s claims that they are focusing on “criminal” immigrants and “the worst of the worst.” So the gutting of legal immigration removes all doubt over what this is really about, or for whom it’s really for.

As I said, these folks are not subtle.