Why Missouri’s Eric Schmitt is doubling down on mass deportation tough talk | Opinion
Maybe Eric Schmitt didn’t get the memo.
President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive — the central plank of his election campaign in 2024 — has turned out to be somewhat unpopular with the American public, and even a substantial number of MAGA voters: A January poll found that 1 in 5 voters who backed Trump in the last election think the expulsion effort has been “too aggressive.”
Among “non-MAGA” Trump backers — swing voters, the kinds of folks who tip an election’s balance one way or the other — the number was 29%. Not a majority. But big enough to raise eyebrows.
Numbers like those have made Republicans nervous ahead of the November midterm elections.
How nervous? Axios this week reported that a White House official this week urged House Republicans “to stop emphasizing ‘mass deportations’” in their campaign messaging.
Focus on getting rid of criminal migrants instead, GOP representatives were told.
That Axios report came out on Tuesday. The Washington Post followed up with confirmation on Wednesday.
Which brings us back to Schmitt.
On Wednesday afternoon, Missouri’s junior senator posted a simple message on X.
“Mass migration,” Schmitt wrote, “must be met with mass deportations.”
While his fellow Republicans try to play down the whole deportation thing, then, Schmitt is doubling down.
And why not? He’s not the one up for reelection this year.
Attacking birthright citizenship
Indeed, Schmitt spent last week proving his anti-immigrant bona fides.
On Wednesday, he led a Senate subcommittee hearing designed to prove that birthright citizenship — the idea that if you’re born on American soil, you are probably an American — is actually unconstitutional.
Which might be a surprise to the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment, created to protect the citizenship of freed slaves after the Civil War, and would certainly be a shock to Supreme Court justices who affirmed in an 1898 case that birthright citizenship is the law of the land.
The Constitution “in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States,” Justice Horace Gray wrote in that 19th century case.
The U.S. government has operated with that understanding for more than 100 years. Until a few years ago, that understanding went mostly uncontested.
But Schmitt thinks everybody else was wrong. That a lot of babies born to immigrants in the United States — children who grew up here, who have only known America as their home, who have contributed to the life and prosperity of this nation — simply don’t belong.
“For most of our history, Americans understood citizenship in straightforward terms,” Schmitt said at the committee hearing. “It reflected allegiance to the United States. It meant loyal to this country and attachment to its institutions. It meant belonging to the American nation. But over the past several decades, that understanding has steadily been pushed aside.”
Funny thing: Most of those birthright citizens would probably agree with Schmitt about loyalty to America, attachment to its institutions, about allegiance. They’re Americans, after all.
Another funny thing: Polls show that two-thirds of Americans favor keeping birthright citizenship.
Which means Schmitt isn’t in this for political advantage. He’s an anti-immigrant true believer.
Why reopen Leavenworth CoreCivic prison?
Here’s the thing: You ought to believe Schmitt when he doubles down on mass deportations, much more than the Republicans who are now eager to distance themselves from the idea.
Contempt for immigrants has been one of the few consistent positions held by Trump. Stephen Miller, the brains behind the deportation effort — and one of the few Trump aides to survive the president’s fickle ways — has been positively zealous about the project.
You think they’re giving up just because deportations are unpopular with Americans?
Or to put it in closer-to-home terms: Do you think that CoreCivic is reopening an unused prison in Leavenworth as Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center just for fun? Or does the company expect to fill that facility with migrants and turn a profit?
That battle over mass deportations isn’t over. Trump and anti-migrant Republicans are simply biding their time for the moment. Schmitt wants you to know they’ll be back with a vengeance.
This story was originally published March 16, 2026 at 5:08 AM.
