U.S. President Donald Trump is getting ready to take a stronger approach to immigration in 2026, with a big increase in funding, including by checking more workplaces – even as people are starting to get upset ahead of the midterm elections next year.
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Trump has already sent more immigration agents to major U.S. cities, where they went into neighborhoods and had conflicts with people living there.
Even though federal agents did some big raids on businesses in 2025, they mostly avoided places like farms and factories that are important to the economy but are known to hire people who don’t have the proper papers.
In July, a spending bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol an extra $170 billion in funding through September 2029.
This is a big jump compared to their usual annual budget of about $19 billion.
Administration officials said the extra money will be used to hire more agents, build new detention centers, increase efforts to find and catch undocumented immigrants in local jails, and work with private companies to track people without legal status.
Even though there is growing political anger ahead of next year’s midterms, Trump is pushing forward with these plans.
His approval rating on immigration dropped from 50 percent in March, before he started cracking down in major cities, to 41 percent in mid-December.
Along with more enforcement actions, Trump has taken away temporary legal status from hundreds of thousands of Haitian, Venezuelan, and Afghan immigrants, making more people eligible to be deported.
He promised to remove one million immigrants each year, but he will almost certainly not reach that goal this year. So far, about 622,000 immigrants have been deported since Trump took office in January.
The administration is also targeting legal immigrants.
Agents have arrested spouses of U.S. citizens during their green card interviews, pulled people from certain countries out of their naturalization ceremonies right before they were about to become citizens, and revoked thousands of student visas.
The planned focus on job sites in the coming year could lead to more arrests.
Replacing the immigrants caught during these raids may raise labor costs, which could hurt Trump’s argument about fighting inflation. Analysts expect inflation to be a big issue in the November elections, which will decide who controls Congress.