Trump Says Deportation Policy Was ‘Too Tough.’ Paris, Illinois, Already Knew.

The Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) union welcomed the broader election results. In a November 4 statement, General President Michael Coleman declared that members and working Americans were “done with business as usual,” citing rising prices, wars and policies he said favored corporate interests over workers. Coleman pointed to SMART-backed victories across several states, including candidates who were themselves union members, and emphasized that the organization’s work would continue beyond Election Day.

Even Trump seems to recognize the distinction between support for his immigration agenda and support for every enforcement decision made in its name.

During his November 8 interview on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, the president acknowledged that his deportation policy may have been too tough on some immigrants who had established productive lives in the United States.

“I think it might be too tough, yeah,” Trump said, discussing the removal of people who worked in landscaping, hospitality and other industries.

That’s a fairly important concession from a president whose political identity has been so closely tied to immigration enforcement. CBS reported that exit polling found 58% of voters believed the administration’s immigration actions had gone too far, a finding that doesn’t prove why Fitzpatrick lost, but certainly complicates the insistence that deportations had nothing to do with the Republican Party’s troubles.

For me, this stopped being an abstract political argument months ago, when immigration enforcement reached a restaurant owner about half an hour from my home in Mattoon, Illinois.

When It Happened to Jose

Jose Fiscal Belli, 32, is the co-owner of Main Street Cafe in Paris, Illinois, and a partner in another restaurant across the Indiana state line. He’s also a husband, father of four and Little League coach who, by the accounts of people who know him, has spent years making himself useful to the community.

On July 21, Indiana State Police stopped Jose outside a government building in Indianapolis over a parking violation and turned him over to immigration authorities. According to an October investigation by Gregory Royal Pratt of the Chicago Tribune, Jose was subsequently held at the Oldham County Jail in Kentucky, facing deportation.

Jose came to the United States as a teenager and married his American wife, Courtney, in 2021. The couple had been pursuing legal immigration status when they discovered an outstanding removal order dating to 2011, which his family says he hadn’t known about. Federal authorities confirmed the order, and the Tribune reported that Jose had no criminal record but had nevertheless been denied bond.

Police officers, educators, business owners and Republican officials wrote letters supporting Jose. A school PTO leader credited him with providing more than 400 free meals to students, and residents organized a golf tournament to help pay his legal expenses.

My family’s business sponsored a hole at that outing and made a donation.

I mention that because this isn’t some distant immigration controversy I’ve discovered while scrolling through national headlines. Paris is practically next door, and the people defending Jose aren’t necessarily opponents of Trump’s immigration agenda. Many are Republicans who believe in border security but also know the man whose family and businesses have been upended.

That ought to tell Washington something.

There’s an enormous difference between asking voters whether people who entered the country illegally should be deported and asking a community whether its restaurant owner, Little League coach and neighbor should be taken away from his family, all of whom are U.S. citizens.

The legal questions don’t disappear because someone is well-liked, but neither is the law blind to the human consequences of its enforcement.

Who Goes to Bat for Them?

I’ve covered another case that readers of The ACHR NEWS and SNIPS NEWS will recognize: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the sheet metal worker whose deportation became a national controversy and whose union helped bring attention to his circumstances.

Unions have the resources, relationships and organizational strength to make sure their members aren’t easily forgotten, something the sheet metal industry understands better than most.

It’s worth remembering that the independent voters who helped return Trump to the White House in 2024 weren’t necessarily voting to become Republicans. They had different reasons for supporting him, and it’s entirely possible to favor a secure border while objecting to how immigration enforcement has been carried out.

Fitzpatrick’s defeat alone doesn’t settle that argument, and neither does Jose’s case. But Trump’s acknowledgment that his deportation policy may have been too tough for some longtime immigrants suggests this isn’t merely a complaint coming from his political opponents.

Whether that acknowledgment amounts to anything is another question. Hours after recording the interview in which he conceded his deportation policy might have been too tough, Trump promoted Stephen Miller, one of the architects of that very policy, to White House chief of staff. Whatever openness the president expressed to changing course, his personnel decision sent a considerably different signal.

Trump has repeatedly invoked Dwight Eisenhower’s 1954 immigration crackdown as a model, although the historical record is considerably less flattering than the numbers often cited. Operation Wetback relied heavily on publicity and intimidation to encourage departures, alongside actual deportations that sometimes involved appalling conditions. Historians have also challenged the administration’s claims about the scale and effectiveness of the operation.

Today’s enforcement campaign is confronting a similar question: whether public displays of enforcement generate deterrence or backlash. The killing of Renee Good, and the administration’s response to it, has focused that question in a way statistics and press releases cannot. Whatever the differences between the two eras, enforcement becomes politically riskier when those caught up in it cease to be abstractions and become people their communities know.

Whatever the political consequences for Trump, the stakes are considerably higher for people like Jose, whose family and livelihood have been caught up in an enforcement campaign that has reached well beyond the dangerous criminals the president so often invokes when defending it. Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a union to go to bat for him. Jose Fiscal Belli doesn’t, but he has a network of people fighting for him in Paris, Illinois – where the consequences of immigration enforcement have become impossible to ignore.