White House Vows No Retreat After Midterm Wipeout as ICE Is Ordered to Raise Daily Arrest Target From 2,000 to 2,700 Immigrants, DHS Says "ICE Is NOT Backing Away"
Monday, November 9, 2026
The White House said on Sunday the administration will not slow down its immigration enforcement after Republicans lost control of Congress in Tuesday's midterms — and, on source-based reporting, ICE officials have been told to raise the daily arrest target. ICE sources told CBS that in recent weeks officials have been instructed to aim for about 2,700 arrests of illegal immigrants per day, an increase from an earlier target of 2,000 a day. That instruction has not been announced publicly by the administration; it is reported here on the word of those ICE sources, stated plainly as source-based reporting, not as an official announcement. Asked on Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security showed no sign of a U-turn: “ICE is NOT backing away or slowing down,” a DHS spokesperson said.
Earlier on Sunday, a White House spokeswoman put the administration's case in the same terms: “the administration will not slow down its efforts to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens who terrorise our communities”. On Friday, President Donald Trump promoted Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff — a promotion that signals no climbdown, with Miller widely seen as the architect of the hardline policy. Together, the spokeswoman's statement, the DHS line and the Miller promotion are the administration's answer to the midterm result on enforcement: the pace is not easing.
Trump himself, in a television interview aired Sunday evening, defended the record while naming the cost inside it. “I think I got an A plus for closing up the border,” he said. “For getting people out, I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.” Then he added the admission that now sits alongside the no-retreat line: “But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.” Asked to judge the crackdown, he said: “I think it was too tough.” Trump said immigration “both helped and hurt” his fellow Republicans in Tuesday's midterms, and that he would “love to do something on immigration” with congressional Democrats, without offering details. A year earlier he had said the raids “haven't gone far enough”.
Vice-President JD Vance, in a lengthy online post reflecting on the results, left a different door open — not a slowdown, but a change in where enforcement points. “I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement - by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labour, for instance,” Vance wrote. The post is his stated openness to shifting the focus toward employers; it is not a policy announcement, and no change was announced on Sunday.
The politics around the decision are on the record from election day itself. Election-day polling indicated immigration was the third most important issue for midterm voters, after the economy and the state of democracy. In Texas, a swing of Latino voters towards Democrats helped seal Democratic landslide majorities in Congress. Enforcement sweeps this year spurred anti-ICE demonstrations in Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, and in Minneapolis two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were fatally shot by immigration agents this year. No current arrest numbers — no daily average and no recent total — were given alongside the two targets, and none are stated here.
What this means: for ordinary people, the weekend's two messages pull in opposite directions, and both are on the record from the administration itself. For communities, the White House says the continued arrests target “criminal illegal aliens who terrorise our communities” — that is the administration's stated public-safety case, pinned on the White House. For workers and employers, Vance's own suggestion of shifting enforcement toward businesses that hire illegal labour would move the pressure from workers in jobs to the employers who hire them — stated as his openness, not as a decided policy. And for families and neighbourhoods, the counterweight is the president's own: the same enforcement pace that he said removed some people whose only violation was entering the country illegally, in the crackdown he himself called “too tough”. On Sunday, the target went up on the sources' account, DHS said ICE is not backing away, and the president's admission stood unwithdrawn beside both.
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