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Andrea Austria / Media Matters

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The Trump administration’s pressure on ICE to make arrests has had fatal consequences — now right-wing media figures are calling for more deportations

Steve Bannon: “We want — wait for it — mass deportations”

Written by Isabella Sherk

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Right-wing media figures have doubled down on calling for mass deportations, despite multiple reports that some immigration officials believe the Trump administration’s pressure to make more arrests was to blame for recent fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Maine and Texas.

In July alone, “mass deportation” has so far been mentioned on Steve Bannon's War Room at least 64 times, on Alex Jones Live shows at least 23 times, and on Nick Fuentes' America First at least 19 times, according to a Media Matters review of transcripts from Fight.Fudgie.org.

Even after these killings, right-wing media figures continued to push for more deportations, saying they want all “illegal aliens the hell out of our country” and expressing disappointment over the 350,000 deportations ICE says it has completed in fiscal year 2026, complaining, “That's the best you can do?”

  • ICE agents are reportedly under stress from the Trump administration to make more arrests

    • ICE agents are being tasked with unprecedented arrest targets in President Donald Trump's second term — 2,000 per day. In early July, The New York Times reported that immigration officials detained more than 10,000 people in just five days in a push encouraged by the Trump White House. The Times reported that top ICE officials were instructed to “make sure that as many officers as possible were working seven days a week, and to put 80 percent of their officers on arrest operations.” [The New York Times, 7/1/26]
    • Earlier this month, ICE agents killed two people who were not the intended targets of their operations in less than a week. The killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine were both carried out during vehicle stops by ICE. Additionally, The Guardian noted that “another man fleeing immigration agents in Florida died after being struck by a truck. Twenty-two people have died in ICE custody, including inside immigration detention centers, this year.” [The Guardian, 7/19/26]
    • Multiple outlets reported that some immigration officials believe pressure on officers to hit arrest targets is to blame for recent deadly shootings. NBC News reported that current and former Department of Homeland Security officials believe the Trump administration’s pressure on immigration officers to arrest more people is to blame for the deadly shootings in Maine and Texas. The outlet reported that one “former senior DHS official said officers are under ‘too much stress’ as they are being asked to arrest more people, work more hours, and with requests for time off often being denied." CBS News reported that ICE is worried about more shootings occurring as agents are “under tremendous political pressure from the White House” to “record up to 2,000 daily arrests.” [NBC News, 7/14/26; CBS News, 7/14/26]

  • Right-wing media figures have continued to call for mass deportations

    • War Room host and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon: “We want — wait for it — mass deportations.” He complained that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said 70% of the people ICE is arresting are felons: “That's not a statistic that MAGA wants to hear. They want to hear mass deportations.” He continued, “It's not good enough. We're at war. We're burning daylight, and your department's not getting it done.” He later demanded, “Where's [former Border Patrol official Greg] Bovino when you need him? Bovino reminds me of the guys Caesar had when he pacified Gaul, and that's what we need right now. Bring back Bovino.” (Since retiring as “the face of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown,” NPR reports that Bovino has “appeared alongside neo-Nazis and white nationalists” at a European “Remigration Summit.”) [Real America's Voice, War Room, 7/17/26; NPR, 6/5/26]
    • Fox host Tomi Lahren complained that 350,000 deportations in a year was too few: “I'm like, that's the best you can do?” In a podcast titled “The ‘Largest Mass Deportation Operation’ IS A LIE!,” Lahren stated, “It's not like it's hard to find them, right? When you take the case of Houston and what happened with the illegal alien there who, you know, the left is like he's been here for 35 years, like that's like a badge of honor. He's been illegal for 35 years. Good job. Oh, and he has American kids — you mean anchor babies? Wow. Gold star. You look at that and it’s like he wasn’t the intended target, but that just tells me that there are so many flipping illegal aliens in this country that you could be going after somebody and you could bump into somebody else.” [YouTube, Tomi Lahren Is Fearless, 7/21/26, 7/21/26]
    • On Bannon’s War Room, the Article III Project's Mike Davis said, “The American people want illegal aliens the hell out of our country. And not just the worst of the worst — all of them.” He said, “We don’t want them in our country, they don’t share our values, right? That’s strike one.” Davis concluded that Mullin “needs to stop being a wimp, he needs to stop being weak, he needs to stop being stupid. If he’s not up to doing the job, get the hell out of the job and we’ll put someone who can.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 7/15/26]
    • Host Harrison Smith said, “We can talk all we want about finances or whatever — we just need to deport 50 million people.” He continued, “If you deport 50 million people, people will be able to buy houses. They won't be living in their cars. They won't be attending DSA meetings and trying to overthrow the government because they're going to have families and other things to concern themselves with.” [The Alex Jones Live, War Room, 7/16/26]
    • White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes complained that Trump should “do the things they say you're doing,” including “killing protesters, mass arrests of illegal immigrants, massive deportations.” He said, “Look, they're going to call you a dictator anyway. Just take it one step further. Just do the things they say you're doing: killing protesters, mass arrests of illegal immigrants, massive deportations, destroying the institutions that serve at the pleasure of radical leftists. Just do it — we could have done so much. We blew it.” [Rumble, America First, 7/21/26]
    • Fox News host Laura Ingraham: “ICE is not backing down because if it does, Trump can kiss the midterms adios." She said that the left wants to “interfere with the Trump administration's mandate for mass deportations. Remember, they want to remake America with new voters.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 7/14/26]
    • Right-wing podcaster Laura Loomer complained, “We haven't really seen a lot of mass deportations, especially not deportations of Islamic jihadists.” She said, “Our idiotic, retard DHS secretary, Markwayne Muslim, as I call him, doesn't want to do traffic stops, doesn't want to deport Muslims, doesn't want to deport jihadis, doesn't want to break up these terror networks and these sleeper cells in America. And well, he hasn't really done much at all to address mass deportations as we've seen, right? That's just kind of a promise that I don't really think we're going to be seeing or receiving.” [Rumble, Loomer Unleashed, 7/16/26]
    • Streamer Amrou Fudl, who goes by Myron Gaines, complained in late June that Trump “completely bailed” on mass deportations for the “fucking Iran war.” Speaking with Fuentes, Gaines claimed, “So when Trump finally said you know what? We're going to go ahead. We're going to do mass deportations. We're going to actually back ICE. We're going to let them go into these countries, into these cities. … But then they completely bailed on it for the fucking Iran war.” Fuentes agreed, complaining that Trump isn't a “visionary” like Adolf Hitler and claiming that Trump should have gone into sanctuary cities, deported everybody, and brought in the National Guard to “crush” any “antifa and left-wing protesters interfering” with mass deportations, calling it “dictatorship 101.” [Rumble, Fresh & Fit, 6/27/26; Southern Poverty Law Center, 7/29/25]