By Jacob G. Hornberger
The Future of Freedom Foundation
August 19, 2026
Upon being elected president, both the first time and the second time, President Trump vowed to make America great again. That's what his MAGA movement has been all about.
Central to Trump's vow has been his war on immigrants, which I think most everyone would describe as ruthless and brutal. Having promised to "secure the border," Trump has not settled for strengthening the immigration police state along the borderlands, including the fortification of his Berlin Wall. Instead, employing ICE, the Border Patrol, and other elements of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump has taken the immigration police state nationwide, wreaking death, suffering, and misery in the process, not only to foreigners but also to American citizens.
It's not difficult to find immigration-control horror stories every day in the mainstream press. Deaths in U.S. immigration camps are a good example. The violent ICE kidnappings are another. One recent article that struck me was about a 59-year-old Cuban man named Roberto Mosquera. He had been living here in the United States for almost 50 years. U.S. officials forcibly deported him to Eswatini, which is located in Africa. He'd never been there before. He's been imprisoned there for a year.
Yesterday, I read about 48-year-old Brent Jindra, who was an ardent Trump supporter - until immigration officials grabbed his girlfriend Galina Bobreneva, a Russian citizen, and took her into custody at the Burbank, California, airport. And get this: that was after a domestic flight, not an international flight ! A federal immigration gendarme in a brown hooded sweatshirt stopped Bobreneva and said to her, "Congratulations, you've been chosen for secondary screening." I have no doubt that that type of experience will soon become as normal as immigration highway checkpoints in the borderlands.
So the question naturally arises: Has all this immigration police-state mayhem made America great again?
It sure doesn't seem so to me. In fact, all I see is things getting worse and worse, especially from the standpoint of liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony.
The federal government's screws continue to tighten on the American people, especially with respect to its deadly and destructive war on drugs and its highly regulated society. Federal spending continues to exceed tax revenues. The Federal Reserve continues to guess on which way to go with respect to its decades-long debasement of the currency. The federal debt continues to soar. The feds continue assassinating people on the high seas based on supposed top-secret information that the victims are violating the beloved U.S. war on drugs. The war on terrorism is still in full swing. The war on communism is returning with a vengeance. The Cold War racket redux is once again upon us, with the Chinese Reds and other commies supposedly coming to get us. The Pentagon's bombings in Iran continue to rain massive death and destruction on the Iranian people. The CIA, unable to forget its 1961 defeat at the Bay of Pigs, continues to target the Cuban people with death by starvation. The U.S. government continues to partner with a socialist-communist, narco-terrorist totalitarian regime in Venezuela.
The discomforting fact is that the American welfare-warfare state, regulated-managed economy, national-security-state, pro-empire militarist way of life has been a catastrophic failure. So has the war on drugs. The same with respect to the war on poverty. Social Security, Medicare, and other socialist programs are bankrupting the nation. Public schooling has converted Americans into loyal and patriotic good little citizens who automatically defer to authority. America's paper-money system and central bank plunder and loot people surreptitiously through the debasement of their money (i.e., inflation). America leads the world in wreaking death and destruction, including through state-sponsored assassinations.
Americans still just cannot bring themselves to admit that all these systems have been manifest failures. Instead, they look for distractions and scapegoats. That's what the war on immigrants is all about. If we can just cleanse America of all those illegal immigrants-and maybe some legal ones too-we can make America great again. In other words, those foreigners-not the evil, immoral, deadly, and destructive systems Americans have adopted-are supposedly the obstacle to making America great again.
But look what's happening. It's clear that the war on immigrants isn't making America great again. It's making America worse, especially for those Americans whose economic well-being has come to depend on those illegal immigrants.
I just read an article about the large number of Americans who are spending a large amount of time and effort caring for someone else- for example, aging parents or a disabled child. When added to all of the other things those Americans have to do - keep house, go to work, raise children, and so forth, the stress is enormous.
What many people don't realize is how America's decades-old system of immigration controls contributes to that stress. Blinded by the notion that immigrants are the cause of America's problems, they can't see how immigrants could greatly relieve their stress by doing things like cleaning their house, cooking their food, doing their laundry, watching their children, or cutting their lawn at very low, mutually agreeable wages. I know this from experience because I saw housewives in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, which is located on the border, benefiting from immigrant maids, nannies, and gardeners.
An immigration police state will not make America great again. What will make America great again is freedom-which necessarily means a dismantling, not a reform, of the evil, immoral, deadly, and destructive statist systems that have been attached to America's federal governmental structure. That's what will put America back on the right trajectory-toward freedom, peace, prosperity, harmony, and greatness again.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.