Speak to anyone in Donald Trump’s orbit and the message is clear: fixing the border is paramount. The incoming administration will stop at nothing to resolve the vast migrant crisis that has afflicted America under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
And senior Team Trump members are looking at Britain, in particular, as a salutary lesson in how uncontrolled immigration can hobble a country.
Elon Musk, aka Trump’s First Buddy, is especially interested in what he regards as the disastrous British experiment with multi-culturalism.
As his outbursts on social media suggest, he was profoundly affected by the anti-immigration riots in Southport, as well as by Labour’s attempts to clamp down on free speech in the aftermath.
A Common’s select committee’s decision to ‘summon’ Musk for a parliamentary grilling on the subject this week has only added to the sense in Trumpworld that something is going badly wrong in what Musk calls ‘the Mother Country’.
Musk promptly retaliated by saying UK MPs will be called to the US to ‘explain their censorship and threats to American citizens’.
Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, have attacked Britain’s Online Safety Act as part of a ‘tsunami of censorship headed towards America’ and vowed that the incoming administration is ‘committed to confronting this growing threat’.
JD Vance, the vice president-elect, has many British friends and does not appreciate Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner calling him ‘fruity’ for having suggested that the United Kingdom is ‘the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon . . . especially since Labour just took over’.
Fixing the problem that is the US border was a key campaign point for Donald Trump
Elon Musk , aka Trump’s First Buddy, is especially interested in what he regards as the disastrous British experiment with multi-culturalism
Musk has been a vocal critic of Labour ’s attempts to clamp down on free speech in the aftermath of the Stockport riots
Even more importantly, Donald Trump himself shares Musk’s and Vance’s concern that the UK is not OK.
‘Musk’s affection for the UK is extraordinary,’ adds Nigel Farage, the Reform leader. ‘We’re very lucky to have these people coming in. In fact, throughout Trumpworld, from the big man down, the affection for our country runs deep. They are currently looking on with a sense of despair about what’s happening here.’
As the proud son of an even prouder Scotswoman, Trump is widely said to be troubled by the left-wing zealotry of Keir Starmer’s administration. He’s also determined to show the West that the world’s most powerful democracy can and will stop uncontrolled mass migration.
‘We see that cultural cohesion in the UK has collapsed,’ says an immigration adviser at Trump’s Palm Beach estate in Mar-a-Lago. ‘We see that Western notions of free speech and public behaviour have collapsed. We look at that and we think: “Hmm . . . we don’t really want that for America.” ’
There’s even talk in Trump circles of taking over the British Conservative party’s Rwanda scheme, which Labour has abandoned, as a destination for migrants deported from America.
But the incoming US administration is under no illusions that any ‘third-party option’ will make the immigration issue magically disappear. Under Joe Biden’s watch, the US has allowed up to ten million ‘aliens’ to enter the country, illegally.
Trump knows he has been re-elected in large part because he explicitly promised to fix the broken border and remove masses of illegal migrants. Unlike the Labour Party, or indeed the Tories before them, he fully intends to deliver.
Trump’s team is now assembling what it believes is a crack team of fierce border hawks to, as The Donald puts it, Make America Safe Again. Americans who were effectively dismissed as ‘far right’ only a few years ago are now being brought in to direct the effort at all levels of federal government.
Trump knows he has been re-elected in large part because he explicitly promised to fix the broken border and remove masses of illegal migrants, writes Freddy Gray
There’s even talk in Trump circles of taking over the British Conservative party’s Rwanda scheme
There’s even talk in Trump circles of taking over the British Conservative party’s Rwanda scheme
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government have brought an end to Tories short-lived Rwanda policy
Trump has named South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, to be his telegenic yet tough Secretary of Homeland Security. Noem’s political career appeared to be on its uppers earlier this year after she published a memoir in which she bizarrely confessed to having shot and killed a 14-month-old dog called Cricket in a gravel pit because the pet was ‘dangerous’ and ‘untrainable’. ‘I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,’ she wrote.
Such overt political incorrectness is exactly what Donald Trump, who also happens to dislike dogs, is looking for when it comes to immigration control.
And Noem will be ably supported from within the White House by Stephen Miller, another figure of hate in polite society for his hardline views, who is to be Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy. ‘You cannot conceive of a nation without a strong, secure border,’ Miller says. ‘It is fundamental and essential to the idea of sovereignty and national survival.’
To do the even uglier work on the frontlines of the US immigration war, Trump has appointed the impressively thuggish figure of Tom Homan.
He’s a former New York police officer who served in Trump’s first administration as acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ‘He’s a cop’s cop,’ says Todd Bensman, author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History. ‘He especially understands what’s happened in the past three years under Biden.’
Homan appeared this week on the podcast hosted by Donald Trump Jnr, the President-elect’s eldest child, and promised to implement a strategy of ‘shock and awe’. He said: ‘I’m getting a lot of negative press, but they simply don’t understand that I don’t care what they think of me. I’m going to do the job.
Please keep screaming, keep yelling, coz I’m coming. And me and the president of the United States, we’re going to make this country safer.’ Homan boasts that the ‘best part of this job is that I’m guaranteed success because I’m following such utter failure’.
On ‘day one’, he insists, the new administration will end ‘catch and release’ – the Biden policy of arresting illegal immigrants, then letting them go free.
Trump has named South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, to be his telegenic yet tough Secretary of Homeland Security
Noem’s political career appeared to be on its uppers earlier this year after she published a memoir in which she bizarrely confessed to having shot and killed a 14-month-old dog
To do the even uglier work on the frontlines of the US immigration war, Trump has appointed the impressively thuggish figure of Tom Homan
Homan is a former New York police officer who served in Trump’s first administration as acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Homan’s plan is to go after ‘the worst, first’. By this he means tracking down known criminals – including, according to official records, some 13,000 immigrants who have been convicted of homicide but somehow aren’t in jail – as well as the many foreign-born individuals ICE considers threats to national security.
The next objective is to catch and expel ‘fugitives’ – the 1.2 million or so people who have ignored orders from the US government to leave. Joe Biden did, in fact, issue a number of executive orders to deter and remove illegal migrants but the Democrats in charge of homeland security conspicuously failed to implement his proposals. ‘Biden put in place some tools for solving the problem,’ says one source. ‘We’re going to actually use them.’
As a demonstration of his resolve, Trump is willing to go further than his predecessor and deploy the US Army or National Guard to carry out his orders.
On his Truth Social platform this week, the president-elect confirmed that his administration will ‘use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion’.
The Trump deportation programme also intends to tackle the further 10 million or so undocumented migrants within the United States. As Homan puts it, ‘If you are here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.’
If the rhetoric sounds brutal, that’s the point. Trump is playing mad-man politics: intimidating his opponents into believing he is crazy enough to do just about anything in order to push his agenda.
‘It’s everything the president does,’ says an insider. ‘What we’re seeing is the aggressive first phase of a Trump negotiation.’
The Trump administration knows that, in a country as large as America, tracking down and forcibly removing quite so many people will be near-impossible.
On his Truth Social platform this week, the president-elect confirmed that his administration will ‘use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion’
The Trump deportation programme also intends to tackle the further 10 million or so undocumented migrants within the United States
There was a global outcry over ICE agents separating migrant families and putting children in cages during Trump’s last term– a policy that began, in fact, under President Obama
The agenda is more to make the political, economic and social conditions so uncomfortable for non-US citizens, or those without visas, that many will ‘self-deport’.
Trump’s Department of Commerce, led by the billionaire Howard Lutnik, will introduce tougher laws to stop businesses from using undocumented labour.
US border officials, meanwhile, will deploy the ‘carrot not stick’ approach, making it clear to migrants that, if they depart the country they entered illegally, their chances of being granted asylum or citizenship in the future will not be harmed.
‘It’s a silver buckshot, not a silver bullet approach,’ says a source. ‘We’re going to be doing a million things to try to establish facts on the ground.’
More realistic experts admit that the idea of some voluntary mass exodus is mostly wishful thinking. It’s also acknowledged that, in a country as large as America, any forced deportation drive will run up against insurmountable obstacles, even if Trump’s administration spends a trillion dollars trying.
The big idea, rather, is that the very harshness of the action against illegal entrants will create a significant psychological barrier to those following their path.
Insiders point to the first Trump term, when a dramatic drop-off in migrant numbers coincided with the global outcry over ICE agents separating migrant families and putting children in cages – a policy that began, in fact, under President Obama.
For this reason, Team Trump 2.0 actually wants its opponents to howl about the inhumanity of its agenda: the more the media denounces the President as a racist xenophobe, the better.
Mexico’s new leader Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, who was elected on her pledge to smash the cartels, is seen as a crucial ally by the Trump administration
The 2024 election showed that, even in the most migrant-heavy parts of the American south, Trump’s anti-immigration platform has majority appeal
The incoming administration will revive the ‘remain in Mexico’ policies of Trump’s first term, which pressured the Mexican government to quell the waves of migrants
The people-smuggling gangs operating in Latin America will get the message that America is no longer a soft touch. And Trump is confident he has already won the political argument, having been re-elected on a promise to fix the border no matter what.
It also helps that so many Latino voters now support Trump. The 2024 election showed that, even in the most migrant-heavy parts of the American south, his anti-immigration platform has majority appeal. The worry for Republicans looking to the 2028 election, in fact, is that the Democratic Party may finally have understood that the Biden-Harris administration has lost the debate.
Noem, Miller and Homan believe their side now has the moral high ground. They point to evidence that the US government has, in recent years, ‘lost’ some 300,000 migrant children, many of whom have been drawn into drug dealing and the sex trade.
Team Trump will also wage a popular war on the Mexican drug cartels, which run the people-trafficking business and whose fentanyl-smuggling operations result in tens of thousands of American dying each year.
The incoming administration will revive the ‘remain in Mexico’ policies of Trump’s first term, which pressured the Mexican government to quell the waves of migrants.
Mexico’s new leader Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, who was elected on her pledge to smash the cartels, is seen as a crucial ally on this front. She has been quick to establish cordial relations with Donald Trump since his victory.
Last, though not least, comes the actual wall. Thanks to his real estate background, Trump is sensitive to the criticism that his first administration only ever erected a small section of the great barrier he promised to build across the southern border. For Trump 2.0, its completion will be their leader’s crowning achievement. ‘We gotta build the wall,’ says Homan. ‘The wall works.’
Nobody seems to care, this time, if Trump doesn’t make Mexico pay for it.