Trump’s Secret Weapon for Mass Deportations: E-Verify

This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Hayden Ludwig
Real Clear Wire

Mark January 20, 2025, as the start of the biggest man-hunt in American history. That’s when the newly minted Trump administration 2.0 will begin hunting down and deporting millions of criminal aliens welcomed in by the Biden-Harris administration. If successful, they’ll purge our cities of murderers, child traffickers, and drug pushers, a result that will prove wildly popular with a country tired of mass illegal immigration.

But that’s only step one.

Restoring America’s honor and independence requires freeing her from millions more nonviolent illegal migrants who’ve lived for years within our borders in violation of the law. Finding them will prove tricky. Trump’s commitment to mass deportations may be ironclad, but pulling it off will require using a powerful weapon his predecessors ignored: E-Verify.

E-Verify is a federal service created 28 years ago that employers can use to confirm employees’ eligibility to work in the United States through the Department of Homeland Security. It stems from the 1986 Reagan amnesty law, which banned employers from knowingly hiring illegal aliens and later gave them a tool to enforce it. While hardly a silver bullet, it’s free, fast, and effective.

“If you aren’t for E-Verify, you aren’t serious about controlling immigration,” says border expert Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies. The system works through deterrence. A sign on the door indicating a fast-food restaurant uses E-Verify is “a signal to illegal job-seekers that they should apply elsewhere,” he explains.

CIS considers universal E-Verify a “basic tenet” for any robust immigration policy. “We can’t control the border without it,” Krikorian told me. “It’s important to deport the illegal migrants already here, but you must weaken the jobs magnet attracting people to sneak across the border or overstay their visas. It’ll make tracking people down a lot easier if it’s less attractive to come here in the first place and embed themselves in our society,” he added.

“E-Verify can do that.”

Some 75% of the illegal migrant population in the U.S. is in the labor force. Without jobs, most of them will leave. This happened after the 2008 recession when the illegal immigrant population fell by 1 million amidst a devastated U.S. economy. Encouraging them to self-deport is the cleanest, most efficient way to remove them from the country.

But that only works when the program is universal and mandatory, as it is in just 10 states. A 2016 study found that illegal immigration rates fell by as much as 50% in states with mandatory E-Verify laws, yet only when all employers were required to use it. Limiting the requirement to government contractors – as 11 states do – does almost nothing.

Most southern states get this, such as Florida, which mandated E-Verify across the board last year. There’s no reason President Trump and the incoming Republican Congress shouldn’t require every employer in all 50 states to enforce its use.

Yet many blue states go out of their way to discourage E-Verify’s use. California bars private employers from using E-Verify before making a job offer. Illinois penalizes companies that “misuse” the E-Verify system, discouraging them from using the program at all. And in 2021, Colorado Democrats actually repealed the use of E-Verify for state contractors on a party-line vote, calling it a “barrier to certain public opportunities.”

That America hasn’t already mandated this policy everywhere explains a lot about the state of our immigration system. For decades, establishment Republican squishes conspired with far-left Democrats to turn our country into a playground for the world’s poor and privileged alike – so long as those policies lined the right pockets.

In 2010, for instance, the Chamber of Commerce sued to block Arizona’s E-Verify mandate, later losing in the U.S. Supreme Court. (The Chamber now says it supports the measure.)

California Democrat Zoe Lofgren spelled it out in 2018: Mandating E-Verify “would be highly disruptive to restaurants, hotels, and other industries” reliant on illegal labor.

Opening the floodgates to tens of millions of noncitizens, legal or otherwise, proved one of the Beltway’s favorite bipartisan schemes. Corporate “conservatives” got cheap, imported labor; wily “progressives” got future welfare state voters. We the People got the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in American history: over 15%, higher than the mass immigration period of the late 1800s – and steadily rising since the Reagan amnesty mistake 38 years ago.

Cynical Washington elites sold our nation’s culture, jobs, and dignity away and smeared their critics as racist for complaining. For years, that grift worked – until Donald Trump sparked a revival in American self-confidence.

For his part, Trump was soft on E-Verify during his first term because he thought it was too onerous for employers. That’s not entirely wrong. “Plenty of companies ‘fall for’ fake employee documents that would meet E-Verify’s requirements,” warns Ken Cuccinelli, who served as Trump’s director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Fixing that would require an additional layer of scrutiny from both companies and Homeland Security officials.

It was Trump’s 2024 primary opponent, Ron DeSantis, who made universal E-Verify part of his own legislative docket, setting the tone for national Republicans’ immigration agenda in the future. President Trump would be wise to take that ball and run with it in 2025.

Poll after poll shows unprecedented support for sealing the border and mass deportations. That includes nearly one-third of Kamala Harris voters, according to recent polling by Steve Cortes’ League of American Workers. His poll demonstrates the plan’s widespread support among voters aged 45–64 (62%), voters aged 25–44 (59%), and seniors (55%). Even Gen Z “Zoomers” under age 24 – a group Democrats once bet the farm on winning – favor mass deportation by four percentage points (48–44%).

After witnessing globalists’ open border policies firsthand, Americans rejected them in 2024. Their message to Washington: We demand an immigration system that puts America first, not last. And after riding his coattails to a new majority, the Republican Congress owes it to Trump to give this historic mandate teeth – if he doesn’t do it himself.

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both issued orders requiring the use of E-Verify for all federal contractors. CIS experts argue the president indisputably possesses the authority to mandate E-Verify for all employers through executive action under the 1986 immigration law. (Others, including Cuccinelli, believe it would require congressional approval.) Depending on how that law is interpreted, implementation could take either 60 days or two years.

“Companies already file a mandatory employment eligibility form for new hires,” CIS legal scholar Andrew Arthur told me. That I-9 form asks for an applicant’s Social Security number or non-citizen work permit number. “E-Verify simply electronically validates those documents’ legitimacy, so we know whether that Social Security number actually belongs to you.”

Trump will doubtless face legal challenges from well-organized and funded mass immigration groups on the left, but the battle is worth fighting. Mandating E-Verify nationwide would “be a very clear sign to the public that Trump is serious about fixing the border crisis,” says Krikorian.

It’d be popular, too. In an era of dismal, futile federal programs, companies consistently rank E-Verify among the government’s highest-rated services for user satisfaction. More than 1.3 million employers are registered with the program, with 2,300 businesses joining each week.

Above all else, Trump’s incredible comeback hinged on the Democrats’ catastrophic mismanagement of the economy and the border. He promised voters a return to sanity, so they delivered him a historic victory Republicans cannot afford to squander.

How he handles his pledge to fix illegal immigration will prove a make-or-break moment for the second Trump administration. If the President fails to follow through on this crucial pledge to the American people, he will lose the fragile America First coalition he spent eight years crafting.

But if Donald Trump acts with courage and swift determination, he will not just restore America’s greatness – he’ll cement his place as one of her greatest presidents.

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