Feb. 12, 2026, 4:05 a.m. ET
This is the second in a series of three columns about immigration enforcement and reform. Click here for Part 1.
Barack Obama had a plan for comprehensive immigration reform, a legislative goal that eluded his predecessor as president, George W. Bush. He would first persuade Republicans to trust him by aggressively enforcing America’s immigration laws.
It was a trade: enforcement for reform.
It didn’t work. And the conservative backlash became part of a populist base, setting the stage for President Donald Trump‘s emphasis now only on aggressive enforcement through secret police-style paramilitary invading forces in American cities.
Now, Trump faces the backlash and the potential for a partial government shutdown, as public opinion in America has swung hard against his immigration overreach. That abusive approach could revive efforts at reforming how immigration laws are enforced.
This series of columns explores how America enforces immigration laws, and what happens when Congress tries to reform the process.
Bush called for reform in 2004 while campaigning for a second term, seeking to enhance border security but also bringing “illegal aliens out of the shadows” and creating a temporary worker program. He made that pitch during his 2007 State of the Union address to Congress, which never agreed on a package.
Doris Meissner, appointed as commissioner for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service by President Bill Clinton in 1993, told me the failures at reform during Bush’s second term were driven by an “enforcement first” attitude and skepticism about prioritizing the upholding of immigration laws. That carried over with Obama.
Obama deported more than 3 million people. But real reform never came.
“There was a broadly held view among lawmakers, and particularly skeptics, that the executive branch would never, and especially under a Democratic administration, be intensely enforcing immigration laws,” said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “They needed to see enforcement first before people would agree to legalization and some of the other measures that were part of comprehensive immigration reform.”
Obama, using immigration programs set up during Bush’s second term, methodically deported more than 3 million people during his two terms as president. That drew praise from some Republicans and rebukes from progressive allies.
It also made for an awkward 2016 presidential election at times between the eventual nominees for both parties, with Hillary Clinton denouncing Obama-era deportation raids as “divisive” while Trump repeatedly drew attention to Obama’s immigration enforcement, praising it.
Immigration reform has been elusive for American presidents from both parties. Ronald Reagan was the last president to successfully push reform through Congress and into law. That was 40 years ago.
The so-called Gang of Eight, four Democrats and four Republicans in the U.S. Senate, took their shot at reform in 2013. One of them, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, is now the Senate minority leader. Another, Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, is now Trump’s secretary of State.
The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 passed in the Senate by a vote of 68-32, with 14 Republicans, 52 Democrats and two independent senators in support.
But then the bill, which tried to balance immigration enforcement with pathways to citizenship, stalled and died in the House in 2014 when then-Speaker John Boehner refused to call it up for a vote.
Boehner stuck to a House Republican rule that barred voting on legislation not backed by a majority of the members in his party, even if it could pass with a mix of Republican and Democratic support.
Boehner resigned a year after killing the bill, as some right-wing members of his caucus were threatening to oust him. In 2016, he called the failure of that immigration reform bill “one of my greatest disappointments.”
Rubio, gearing up in 2015 for the 2016 Republican presidential primary, backed all the way off comprehensive immigration reform, reverting to the emphasis on enforcement first to build trust for more piecemeal reforms, which never arrived.
After the bill failed in 2014, the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Latino advocacy group (now known as UnidosUS), publicly denounced Obama as the “deporter in chief,” a moniker that followed him in his two terms.
“That was a really difficult break from a key constituent group within the Democratic Party,” Meissner said. “Looking back on it now, what Obama was doing was mild in comparison to what we’re seeing ICE doing today.”
Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy and communications at The Center for Migration Studies, a Catholic-based think tank, said Obama “catered too much to the Republicans during that period” and paid for it.
“It’s like feeding red meat to an alligator,” Appleby told me. “You’re going to lose your arm eventually.”
The center has shifted in Trump’s direction on immigration reform
Immigration reform has long been politically treacherous because members of Congress on the far left and far right can draw plenty of attention from supporters by staking out unwinnable positions.
But it feels, in this moment, with what we’re seeing around the country, like an opportunity could rise from the center of the political spectrum, a reaction to the revulsion of it all.
Appleby doesn’t see immigration reform on the horizon, despite some legislative attempts in the works in the House. And he feels that Trump has made this “a different ball game” than the one played in 2013 and 2014.
“I think those days are gone,” Appleby said, adding that the center has shifted in Trump’s direction and that any compromise would reflect the president’s hardened ideology about immigration. “That’s why I sometimes say we need to stop saying ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ because ‒ be careful what you ask for.”
Jeremy Beck, copresident of NumbersUSA, a think tank that seeks restrictions on immigration, said Obama sounded very different about immigration in 2008 than he did in his second term, using a different, more welcoming message that backfired into the 2016 presidential election.
“I think it helped propel President Trump to prominence and to the nomination and then to victory,” Beck told me. “He’s now won twice on this issue. And I think you could look back at the Obama years and say it was a real missed opportunity to put some things in place. And this is where we are now. There’s a lot of mistrust, and the rhetoric is ratcheted up on all sides as well.”
It’s true that Trump made immigration a winning issue. But that support is rapidly evaporating in recent public opinion polling, as Americans watch the chaos he has unleashed and start to reject it. If that continues, an appetite for immigration reform could be on the rise.
Up next: Could ICE accidentally revive reform? Check back Friday, Feb. 13, for Part 3.
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