Democrats won control of the House and Senate last night. Although many causes will be identified for the “stunning blue tsunami,” no one should miss the fact that Republicans spent most of the last two years going all-in on the most extreme anti-immigrant agenda in American history. We can now confidently say that—whatever people think of those policies—the strategy failed to prevent their electoral defeat.

Among many other policies, Republicans and the Trump administration: 

• Pre-funded ICE for the entirety of Trump’s term, avoiding oversight or any potential limits on mass deportation; 
• Appropriated nearly $250 billion for immigration enforcement—more than all other federal law enforcement combined and a decade of funds in two years; 
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Democrats won control of both houses of Congress in last night’s midterm elections. Criminal law and civil liberties are likely to be at the top of the legislative agenda once they take office in January. Here are issues they should prioritize—some in response to abuses committed by the Trump Administration, others as efforts to extend an olive branch to the executive branch and their Republican colleagues.

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New US Census Bureau statistics released October 29 show that the immigrant share of the US population remained essentially flat from July 2024 to July 2025, but the Latin American immigrant population fell by nearly half a million. Despite a significant increase in immigration during President Biden’s term, the immigrant share of the US population has grown more slowly since 2010 than during any comparable period since the 1960s. 

• In 2025, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) estimated that there were 50.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, in the United States—up from 50.2 million in 2024.
• In 2025, the share of the US population who were immigrants, legal or illegal, was 14.7 percent—effectively unchanged from 14.8 percent in 2024.
• From 2010 to 2025, the immigrant share grew by 1.8 percentage points, an average of just 0.12 points per year, the slowest pace since the 1960s.
• Since 2006, effectively all immigrant population growth has come from Asia (47 percent), Latin America (41 percent), and Africa (13 percent).
• Without high immigration rates going forward, the total US population will decline.

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A few months ago, Reddit received an administrative subpoena requesting identifying information for an account that had criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as well as posted biographical details about Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot protester Renée Good. After the user moved to quash, the administrative subpoena was withdrawn. But days after, Reddit received a grand jury subpoena for similar information. The user’s motion to quash the grand jury subpoena was denied, and the user is appealing the denial to the DC Circuit.

Cato joined an amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of DC, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Center for Individual Rights urging the court to rigorously review the basis for the grand jury subpoena. The right to anonymity is deeply rooted in American history and serves critical functions online and off. While the grand jury traditionally has broad investigative authority, judicial scrutiny is warranted where a grand jury seeks to unmask an anonymous speaker. The government’s interest in unmasking will not be sufficiently compelling to justify piercing a speaker’s anonymity unless the government has made a prima facie showing that the speaker committed a crime. Nor is unmasking an anonymous speaker to chill protected speech a proper purpose for a grand jury subpoena.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)—the president’s in-house think tank—released a report this month that purported to find that the average illegal immigrant imposes a lifetime cost on taxpayers of $166,716—or up to $1.9 trillion in total—and that “amnesty” would add to these costs, while deportation spending would cut the deficit.

These estimates are not credible. As I show in a recent Cato paper, illegal immigrants are net taxpayers, meaning that they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Deporting them not only adds to the debt directly through spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement but also indirectly through reduced tax revenue. Illegal immigrants as a group have actually reduced federal, state, and local deficits by roughly $1.7 trillion over the last three decades.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that recent illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who entered from 2021 to 2026 will reduce deficits by about $900 billion from 2024 to 2034. Earlier this year, it found that immigration policy changes from 2025 alone increased the budget deficit by $500 billion from 2026 to 2035.

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In April this year, I detailed how President Trump had reduced legal immigration more than twice as much as he had reduced illegal immigration—a result I had predicted in January 2025. At that time, I was still relying on my estimates for some categories because the administration was so slow to release data. We now have more complete data through February 2026, showing that I somewhat understated the decline. Monthly legal entries had actually fallen 2.7 times more than illegal entries through February 2026. 

Summary

Illegal entries had already fallen before President Trump took office, and while they have fallen further, declines in legal immigration far surpass those in illegal entries. Legal entries in major categories were down about 145,000 compared to a drop in illegal entries of about 53,000. Illegal entries are overstated because we are counting all Border Patrol arrests, including those of individuals expelled immediately. The chart below tracks immigration through February 2026, the most recent month for which the State Department has published data.

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“Sorry to all you people at the Cato Institute or wherever else—I don’t owe you an explanation for this. I just prefer this.” That was book publisher Jonathan Keeperman explaining to Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo why Keeperman’s “desire to preserve homogeneity is just fine.” The podcast clip has been viewed nearly 3 million times on X alone.

The podcast episode was entitled the “Indian Question,” and is Keeperman and Rufo’s hour-long quasi-defense of Texas Republican Bo French’s viral tweet expressing outrage at students celebrating a University of Texas football win merely because they were of Indian ethnicity. It’s worth noticing that respected figures on the political right will defend those types of tweets, but to us it’s also noteworthy that Keeperman chose the Cato Institute as his stand-in for all those who demand reasons for his views.

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