No More Back Doors: Recapturing the Public’s Trust on Immigration

A sovereign nation starts with a secure border. We are a country that welcomes immigrants, and also a nation of laws. For too long, our broken immigration system has made it more appealing for migrants to enter this country illegally than to work through legal pathways. This is due to inadequate border security and a lack of available legal pathways, but also a failure to address “pull” factors such as the broken asylum system that releases immigrants into the interior as they wait for their cases to be heard.

It is time for a more muscular approach to fix these problems. It is time to close all of the back doors and loopholes in our system even as we expand our legal pathways. There should only be one way into America—through the front door. We welcome immigrants as an essential part of a thriving and growing nation, but they must come the right way or not at all.

The Problem

Liberals and conservatives have created a false choice on immigration: inhumane enforcement or lawlessness. Outraged by a series of inhumane immigration actions taken by the first Trump administration—including the unconscionable separation of children from their parents at the border and the overtly racist Muslim travel ban—Democratic leaders succumbed to the pressure of advocates and swung the pendulum too far to the left. This unleashed a wave of illegal immigration that led to chaos at the border and ultimately helped re-elect President Trump.
The broken U.S. asylum system is the main problem at the southern border. By focusing on “push” factors—like poverty or persecution— liberals have failed to diagnose the real driver of migration: the pull factor created by our broken asylum system, which takes far too long to decide cases and has over time become the most generous labor pathway. In fact, over the past 15 years most migrants we encountered at the border weren’t trying to evade detection; instead they walked up to Border Patrol agents and turned themselves in to claim asylum. None of the major comprehensive immigration reform efforts over the past 30 years would have directly addressed the asylum system—which means that, even if they had been enacted, surges at the southern border almost certainly would have continued.
The immigration court and migrant removal process is slow and defective. Because Congress has never adequately invested in our immigration courts or asylum process, border officials have often needed to release people encountered at the border to pursue their immigration cases in the interior. Once migrants are released, the immigration court process currently takes more than 4 years on average to complete. This means that people who have legitimate claims to asylum wait far too long to be granted protection, and it gives ample time for illegal immigrants to put down deep roots in the United States. Ending releases of people encountered at the border who will ultimately not be granted asylum must be the north star.
We need a solution for the 12-14 million people living in the shadows. Our current system leaves an estimated 12–14 million people living in the shadows, working in a gray economy that undercuts wages for U.S. citizens and leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. Many of them have U.S. citizen spouses or children. Many have small businesses. Few have committed crimes. We need a better status quo for these migrants that allows them to stay and work without living in fear.
Liberals need to look beyond ICE. The current administration’s lawless, brutal, and cruel approach to interior enforcement is rightly the focus of outrage, but it should not be the sum total of the left’s immigration agenda. We need to acknowledge that crossing the border illegally is a crime and shut down the illegal immigration channel altogether—primarily by fixing the asylum system, but also by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border and instituting lawful, humane interior enforcement. We must completely overhaul the legal channel to provide migrants with safe and orderly means to come to the United States and help foster economic growth that benefits all Americans.

The Terrain

Americans from both parties think that our immigration system is flawed. 66% of Americans say our immigration system in the United States is broken, including more than 65% of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. Of these respondents, more people said we had too much illegal immigration (31%) than those who said our current “enforcement is too chaotic or cruel” (21%). Only focusing on interior enforcement is not a comprehensive agenda.
Comfortable majorities of Americans support strong enforcement at the border, but Democrats rarely prioritize border security in their immigration proposals. 65% of Americans support increasing the number of border patrol agents. 52% support sending the military or national guard to patrol the border. 73% support modernizing ports of entry and increasing staffing at border crossings. 53% building more physical barriers such as walls and fencing at the US Southern Border and 61% support stronger detection technology.

Overall, Americans believe that immigrants help the country and support legal immigration. 59% of respondents believe immigrants strengthen the US due to their hard work, talents, and economic contributions. And 52% believe that more legal pathways would reduce illegal immigration, compared with 27% who believe it would encourage more people to try to come.

But voters drew a distinction between legal, and illegal immigration. They expressed concerns about the impact of illegal immigration, including 60% who were at least somewhat concerned about illegal immigrants committing crimes and almost half (46%) expressed concerns about illegal immigrants taking jobs away from them or their loved ones. Conversely, there is broad support for creating more legal options for people to come to the United States, including visas for workers in specific industries like healthcare, child care, agriculture, technology and other critical industries. And 61% said we should make it easier for foreign students to stay and work in the U.S. after they graduated. When asked about the overall levels of legal immigration, however, only 20% thought we needed to increase immigration compared to 40% who wanted immigration to stay at its current level and 27% who wanted it decreased.
Americans support an orderly asylum system, but believe asylum seekers should start the process outside the United States. 55% of Americans said people should be required to apply for asylum from their home country before traveling to the U.S., compared with just 12% (and just 18% of Democrats) who said people who cross the border illegally should be able to apply. In fact, slightly more people (41%) believe asylum seekers should wait in Mexico, their home country, or any third country while their claim is considered than those who believe people seeking asylum should be allowed into the U.S. (39%). A majority supports asylum for those fleeing violence or persecution from their government, gangs, or as a result of their religion or political beliefs, (53-58%), compared to just 35% who believe that those who are seeking economic opportunity should be eligible.
Voters believe that people who have been ordered removed should be deported, even if it is to a third country. When immigrants who are ordered removed cannot be deported to their home country, 51% believe that they should be deported to any third country (20%) or one that has been verified as safe (31%), compared to 26% that would keep them in the U.S.
Americans support providing legal options for people who have been in the United States for many years and have not committed crimes. 54% believe that an immigrant who enters the U.S. illegally but lives here for many years as a productive community member without committing crimes should be allowed to stay. And 63% believe that we should provide some legal option for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the U.S. to stay at least temporarily, including 54% who think they should be allowed to apply for citizenship after meeting certain requirements. Those who supported a pathway to citizenship believed people should pass a background check (64%) in order to be eligible.

No More Back Doors

Recapturing the Public’s Trust on Immigration

To recapture the public’s trust on immigration, we need to create a modern, functioning immigration system that is unforgiving to those who cross the border illegally but generous to those who go through an orderly legal process.

This immigration agenda should be grounded on three key principles:

Restricting illegal border crossings to ensure we never see another surge,
Enforcing our immigration laws humanely but firmly in the interior, and
Providing legal opportunities for law abiding migrants who are here to remain in the United States, and for those who want to come to do so in an orderly manner.

Zero tolerance at the border.

There is a right way and a wrong way to come to the United States, and we must put an end to policies that encourage people to come the wrong way. Policy makers must publicly acknowledge that crossing the border illegally is a crime, that real enforcement at the border deters illegal immigration, and that our immigration policies play a key role in driving migration. Supporting smart investments in border infrastructure, technology, and staffing are necessary but resources alone will not secure the border.

To secure the border and save asylum, restrict it.

The measures taken by President Biden in 2024 and President Trump in 2025reduced illegal immigration because of one simple fact: no migrant would take the perilous journey north, paying smugglers thousands of dollars along the way, if they did not believe they had a significant chance of staying in the United States for an extended period of time. Over the past three decades, Congress has completely failed to provide adequate funding for immigration courts and asylum adjudicators at USCIS—even as it has showered funding on the Border Patrol. As a result, we do not have enough asylum officers to screen everybody we encounter at the border when surges begin, which has led the Border Patrol to regularly release migrants to pursue their asylum claims in immigration court under Democratic and Republican Administrations.

Recommendation: People who cross illegally between ports of entry should generally not be eligible for asylum, unless there is an extraordinarily compelling reason—such as their life being in imminent danger—why they could not wait. Instead, we should create an orderly process that starts abroad for individuals who are fleeing persecution or torture to claim asylum safely at a port of entry. The screening standard used during credible fear interviews at the border should be significantly raised to ensure that people who are economic migrants are identified at the beginning of the process, not the very end. And we need to ensure that all asylum claims are adjudicated in weeks instead of years by adequately funding the immigration courts and asylum officer corps. Lastly, we should repurpose OBBBA funding for detention to create asylum processing facilities where everybody encountered at the border goes through this expedited process, to ensure that the only people who are released from detention are those who will ultimately be given asylum.

Build some walls. Deploy technology too.

Policy makers need to support building walls at the border in locations where they are operationally needed. Walls don’t stop people from crossing—every day smugglers tunnel under the wall, climb over it, and cut holes in it. But they do slow people down, giving Border Patrol agents more time to apprehend people trying to cross illegally. They are operationally needed in parts of the border where people who cross illegally can quickly disappear into urban and suburban neighborhoods—the time it takes for migrants to navigate the wall is time that the Border Patrol needs to deploy to make an apprehension. Walls are not needed in remote and rugged areas where it takes people who cross illegally hours, or even days, to walk to the nearest road or town. Walls are not a magic bullet and they need to be combined with technology that provides situational awareness about what is happening on both sides of the border—cameras, underground sensors, and radars—in order to be most effective. But Walls serve a purpose at the border, and policy makers would do well to recognize it.

Recommendation: Build walls along urban and suburban parts of the border. But get politicians out of the wall building (and painting) business and let our frontline personnel and their mission requirements drive where and how we build walls at the border. Continue to increase investments in surveillance technology that allow border personnel to quickly respond to illegal border crossings.

No interior release for those waiting—even for families.

How to process families and children at the border is one of the toughest policy quandaries we face in immigration. Not having the capacity to quickly process asylum claims for families encountered at the border means that border officials have no recourse but to release the vast majority into the interior of the United States to pursue their cases in our immigration courts. This has, in turn, regularly led to large surges in family migration, including during the first Trump and the Biden Administrations. The images of children being held in Border Patrol facilities during these surges are heart breaking, and we can and must do better. But the advocacy community has convinced many policy makers and elected officials that holding families encountered at the border for 2-3 weeks in facilities for expedited immigration processing—even facilities that are not custodial—amounts to “long term detention”. This hard line position is at odds with the policies and practices of other peer countries in Europe and beyond, which involve holding families in secure non-custodial residential facilities—places that often look very similar to a college campus, but with restricted entry into the facility—during an expedited asylum process. To be clear, this does not mean locking up families for months in jail-like detention facilities like the Trump Administration is currently doing. Instead, it means building a new model of non-custodial family residential facilities that allow for a quick and humane adjudication of asylum claims for families encountered at the border.

Recommendation: Build secure non-custodial family residential facilities to process families encountered at the border. These facilities will be campus like settings where parents and children are treated in a humane and dignified manner during an expedited immigration process. At these facilities, families will have freedom of movement and access to educational and recreational spaces as they undergo a thorough asylum screening by trained professionals in less than 3 weeks.

Enforce immigration law firmly, but fairly, in the interior.

Our immigration system cannot be lawless.

There have to be real consequences for people who enter the United States illegally and, after a rigorous process, are ordered removed having exhausted all their legal options. But we will never have enough federal immigration enforcement personnel—even after President Trump’s doubling of ICE—to find and remove every single person who is here illegally. This means we need to make smart decisions about how, and where, to focus our interior enforcement efforts. We cannot tolerate an immigration system that incentivizes lawless behavior—either by law enforcement agents or by migrants.

Recommendation: Institute commonsense guidelines for where and how immigration enforcement takes place to ensure that we focus our limited resources on people who pose the highest risk to our communities. This includes working with State and Local authorities to address their concerns and ensure that timely information is being shared with ICE about people who have been convicted of crimes and serving time in prison. It also means ICE committing to picking up those people promptly when they are set to be discharged from custody.

People who have been ordered removed by an immigration judge need to go home.

As a result of Congress’ failure to provide adequate funding, the immigration courts have enormous case backlogs that lead to most cases taking years to come to a conclusion—despite a statutory requirement that cases be resolved within 6 months. A contributing factor is that our immigration courts have near endless due process. Migrants who are ordered removed at the end of this extended court proceeding have 30 days to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which can add another 6-12 months to the process. If they lose before this board, they can appeal in federal court. If, after all of these bites at the apple, an individual is issued an executable final removal order, they must be removed in a timely manner. Historically, if an individual is not removed within 12 months of having crossed the border illegally they are generally never removed—even if they are ordered removed years later by an immigration judge.

Recommendation: In our criminal court system, when an individual is found guilty and sentenced to prison, they are typically not released on their own recognizance—they are taken into custody. We need to ensure that our immigration courts function the same way for most people, with reasonable accommodations given to families to minimize trauma for children. We also need to significantly reduce the time it takes to adjudicate appeals, and provide sufficient resources for our immigration courts to actually meet—or beat—the current statutory requirement that cases be adjudicated in 6 months.

We must enforce our immigration laws in the interior of the United States in a way that respects our constitution and the public.

Interior enforcement should be focused on individuals who pose a threat to public safety and on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. We cannot tolerate indiscriminate enforcement, warrantless home invasions, masked plain-clothed law enforcement officers arresting people off the street, or wildly excessive use of force incidents. State and local government law enforcement agencies should share information with ICE about illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and are serving prison sentences so they can be promptly removed when their time is served–this will make all of our communities safer. They should not, however, do the federal government’s job for it by asking people they interact with for their legal status. And, as noted above, ICE can and should take individuals who are ordered removed into custody at the courthouse.

Recommendation: We must reform ICE, root and branch to transform it into a modern law enforcement agency that is grounded in the laws it enforces and builds trust with the public it protects. We must ban the use of masks and uniforms that don’t identify a home agency and ensure that any searches of an individual’s home are authorized by a search warrant. We should create an oversight board of distinguished law enforcement professionals to undertake a comprehensive review of ICE and CBP’s actions. At the beginning of a new administration, this board should initiate an expedited 120 day review of ICE and CBP personnel, enforcement policies, training regimes, and use of force incidents. Particular focus should be given on reviewing the impacts of the Trump Administration’s relaxation of screening, vetting, and training requirements in its drive to double the size of the agency. Personnel found to be in violation of the law or new standards of conduct should be quickly dismissed and indefinitely barred from subsequent law enforcement employment. Any conversations about the future of ICE as an agency should bear in mind that Congress’s failure to modernize our immigration laws set the stage for Trump’s ICE overreach. By reducing the number of illegal immigrants released indefinitely into the country’s interior and swiftly adjudicating asylum and other immigration cases, ICE—or any other law enforcement agency—can rightly focus on removing criminals and others deemed dangerous to our communities. These considerations should be the starting point for any debate about what to do with ICE, given that we will always need an agency charged with removing people who are in the United States illegally.

We will always need to remove people to safer third countries.

There will always be countries that make it difficult, or impossible, to remove their nationals—and the U.S. government will always need a mechanism to lawfully remove these migrants to other countries. During the Biden Administration, the inability to remove nationals of Venezuela and Nicaragua to their home countries led to waves of migration that swamped the border. The Trump Administration, which has become unmoored from the law, is sending migrants to countries that are patently unsafe in the hopes of instilling fear in immigrant communities. This includes countries that are in the middle of civil wars, such as Sudan, or that declare they will incarcerate these migrants, like Eswatini. We cannot, and should not, continue this lawless practice. But U.S. and international law already provide a more rigorous mechanism for this activity: safe third country agreements. These agreements have been difficult to implement because the lofty standards we have required for these compacts have precluded considering countries that are objectively safer than the country of origin for many migrants. For a Haitian migrant who is fleeing gang violence and chaos in their home country, Guatemala may not be as attractive a destination as the United States, but it surely provides more safety and economic opportunity than the dystopian gangland that Port au Prince has become. Likewise, a Venezuelan migrant fleeing the crushing poverty and repression in Venezuela would surely be safer in Honduras than in Caracas.

Recommendation: We should support a pragmatic approach to “safer” third country removals that allows us to designate countries along transit routes to the United States. This aligns with international law, which encourages migrants to claim asylum in the country that is closest to their country where they will no longer suffer from political persecution. We should oppose the Trump Administration’s lawless actions in sending illegal immigrants to third countries where they will be imprisoned or subjected to persecution or torture.

Use immigration detention in order to remove people, not as punishment.

Immigration detention is not intended to be a form of punishment—removal is the punishment for those who violate our immigration laws. Our immigration detention facilities are required to ensure that individuals who have exhausted their legal avenues to remain in the country are removed promptly. The Supreme Court has made clear in the past that we cannot detain people unless there’s a significant likelihood that they will be removed soon—that means we cannot and should not detain people indefinitely, or for years. However, we can and should detain people who have been ordered removed by an immigration judge but appeal the ruling through their appeals process—even if this process takes months—with commonsense exceptions for families with children and individuals with health concerns.

Recommendation: At the border, we should support detaining people who cross illegally between ports of entry during an expedited asylum process. In the interior, immigration detention should be used to facilitate removing people after an immigration judge has ordered them removed. This includes taking people into custody when their court process ends, even if that means holding them during an expedited appeals process. There should be commonsense exceptions to this general rule for families and individuals with health concerns or other special needs. We should also modernize and expand our use of GPS tracking technology as an alternative to detention for people who meet certain criteria, including families, and who do not otherwise represent a risk to the community.

Build a legal immigration system that fuels economic growth and prosperity.

Immigrant labor has long been a lynchpin of our economy. Immigrants have helped us keep food prices affordable, build our infrastructure, and develop cutting edge technology. Immigration should be calibrated to meet the needs of the economy, but our current work visa system includes arbitrary caps set by Congress decades ago that have not been updated or modernized and does not adequately prioritize fostering economic growth and creating jobs. The lack of sufficient labor visas to meet the demand for employment in the United States has also been a key contributing factor to the recurring surges in migration that have turned our asylum system into a backdoor labor pathway. We have critical staffing shortages in key industries, from low skilled workers in the agricultural sector to higher skilled workers in nursing and elder care, that will increasingly become a drag on our economy and raise prices for all Americans if they are not filled. As part of its overtly nativist agenda, the Trump Administration has taken a number of ill-advised steps to make it even harder for students and guest workers to come to the United States. This is a mistake that we need to correct. But it is also important to recognize that more immigration may not always be the answer—we need a flexible immigration system that can ramp up and down as needed, and that prioritizes the types of immigration that create more economic opportunities for Americans as well. The good news is that this has been a bipartisan issue that should have bipartisan solutions: the Biden Administration regularly received letters from industry leaders and governors and mayors from both political parties asking for more legal immigration to fill job vacancies.

Recommendation: Convene private sector companies, labor groups, and state and local government leaders to make concrete recommendations to create labor pathways that supercharge prosperity. Remove statutory caps on labor visas and instead create a process that allows visa issuance to increase, or decrease, to reflect demand for labor in our economy. Allow state and local governments to sponsor visas for individuals who can fill job vacancies in their jurisdictions. Roll back Trump Administration restrictions on student visas, and make it easier for foreign students to work legally in the United States after their graduation. Ensure that our current labor pathways prioritize bringing in individuals who will help create more jobs and economic opportunities for Americans.

Provide a pathway to certainty for immigrants who have not committed crimes, and a limited pathway to citizenship for those who meet certain conditions.

Liberals have been pushing for a pathway for citizenship for those who crossed the border illegally for decades. Our polling showed strong support for providing a pathway to citizenship for a subset of people here illegally who meet certain conditions: namely, they have U.S. citizen family members, have been here for a long time, and have not committed any crimes. Other polling shows continuing strong support for allowing Dreamers—illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and grew up here—to petition to become U.S. citizens.

These groups comprise roughly 1-1.5 million, or 10%, of the estimated 12-14 million people living in the shadows, who are not only unable to participate in our democracy but who cannot legally work and who could be arrested and deported at any time. They are vulnerable to exploitation by criminals and unscrupulous employers; they are often afraid to report crimes committed against them or other members of their communities.

Recommendation: We should provide a limited pathway to citizenship for people who were brought to the U.S. as children or have U.S. citizen family members, have been in the United States for more than 10 years, and have not committed crimes that allows them to go through the process while remaining in the U.S. For others here illegally who do not meet these conditions but are contributing members of our society and have not committed crimes, we should create a pathway to legal certainty by creating a new legal status that allows them to stay in the United States and work.

Make it easy, and mandatory, for employers to verify work authorization online.

In the United States, employers are charged with verifying the immigration status of their workers. This means that they check to see whether the worker has documents that show they are authorized to work–for example, a social security card and some other form of government issued identification, such as a driver’s license. However, this information gets recorded on a form that is filed away by the employer, and it has become routine in many industries for illegal immigrants to present fake social security cards (still printed on a piece of paper that was easily forgeable 50 years ago) and for employers to wink and nod as they review them. This gray market for labor in the United States undercuts wages for Americans and exposes illegal immigrants to exploitation and abuse by unscrupulous employers. It also serves as a significant pull factor that incentivizes illegal immigration. The government created an online system known as e-Verify for employers to quickly and efficiently verify work authorization, but only about 14% of employers use it.

Recommendation: Ensuring that workers are actually authorized to work in the United States will close a significant loophole in our economy and help address the pull factor associated with the gray market for labor in the United States. In concert with efforts to expand labor pathways and regularize the undocumented population, we should make using e-Verify mandatory for all employers and address some of the historical issues with the system that has led liberals to oppose it. We should invest in improving its infrastructure to ensure that the system operates quickly, minimizes false negatives, and reduces the burden on employers and employees. This will ensure that employers have a quick and easy way to verify that their employees are authorized to work. It will also reduce the exploitation of workers who are here illegally and directly address the pull factor associated with the gray market for labor.

Conclusion

Americans—including a plurality of independent voters—are frustrated with Democrats and Republicans on immigration issues. They hated the border chaos of the Biden years but are recoiling from the lawless cruelty President Trump unleashed in our cities. This toxic political pendulum has been swinging from one extreme to another for more than a decade. We can, and must do better—the stakes for our country are simply too high.

We need to show Americans that we are serious about securing the border, enforcing our immigration laws in the interior, and rebuilding an immigration system that enhances prosperity and economic growth for all Americans. The general framework we present here would accomplish all three of those goals. Liberals didn’t lose the trust of voters on these issues overnight, and we won’t regain it overnight either. This is a strong path to repairing that breach and preventing the lawless extremes we are witnessing today from ever happening again.