After the post-midterm recriminations and the inevitable November 2026 pro-amnesty push fade, Republican legislators and hardworking officials in the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement ranks need to prepare for how quickly political circumstances are going to change.

If you’re among them, imagine it’s mid-2028, and we are staring down the barrel of an AOC presidency. The Overton window of fall 2026 will be long forgotten. The base, and likely a great many other Americans, won’t ask whether we went too far or were too bold. They will only wonder why we didn’t go further while we had the opportunity. Plan according to that reality, recognizing that what’s best for America and your political future are directly aligned.

In that light, here’s what will no longer matter: Enforcement Twitter. That genre is effectively retired as of today. The subgenre of posts from administration-aligned X policy accounts touting the number of people estimated to have left the country or the number of statuses canceled is also now best left in Drafts.

A significant portion of your legacy—the regulatory changes, the secretary-level guidance, and the refreshing and inventive reforms—will be eliminated or reversed within the first few months of the next Democratic administration, and the courts will watch it all happen without lifting a finger. No breathless injunctions by activist judges, no staggering overreach by federal appeals courts, no golf course tree-number-level interventions.

The political ground is shifting rapidly, and any cabinet secretary who continues to measure the Trump Administration’s enforcement record against the political environment and expectations of 2026 will soon find the ground buckling beneath them. What worked in October and November will not work in December.

We never blackpill—but we will no longer swallow the pill of incrementalism. There is no room for proposals that center on linear, if aggressive, progress on immigration enforcement or explanations of why the current approach is the most we can do.

How do we know that space is no longer there? Because even if we took the highest officially reported monthly arrest total on record and counted all those arrests as removals, even that best-ever month multiplied over four years would equal only 2.44 million removals—less than a quarter of the number of illegal aliens brought in by Joe Biden.

That fact alone should remove any doubt that the current approach, however much it improves on what preceded it, cannot by itself deliver the promised result.

The Trump Administration continues to ratchet up the pressure on illegal aliens and the illicit economy that serves as their lifeline and patronage network in bold and creative ways. I am confident there are serious new initiatives afoot, including cross-government approaches that make living here illegally harder and pressure these aliens from multiple angles.

But we have run out of time to keep turning the ratchet one or two clicks at a time, hoping the next turn finally produces that breakthrough. The ratchet is no longer the right tool: enter the sledgehammer.

Break open the mental model. Invert our thinking and with it our understanding of what constitutes an acceptable proposal. Right now, we are caught in a trap of reasonableness, and it will haunt us sooner than we think. That trap is set when officials begin with what the existing system can accommodate, propose aggressive but ultimately incremental improvements, and convince themselves they did all they could.

Start instead with the requirement: 26 months, millions removed. Work backward from there. If your plan cannot plausibly produce that result within that timeframe, throw it away. Those doing the hard and dangerous work of implementing the current plan deserve tremendous respect, but the clock indicates that the bulk of our thinking must now focus on breakthroughs.

If an idea does not seem jarring, excessive, or politically impossible, you’re likely not on the right path. Those reactions reflect today’s expectations, which will be changing very soon.

Let’s establish a baseline. Democrats will not fund ICE. But thanks to the Secure America Act passed in the summer of 2026, that fact limits our options for mass deportation without being immediately debilitating.

ICE is already operating with multiyear reconciliation funding. As of September 30, the Office of Management and Budget’s books showed roughly $160 billion unobligated across the Department of Homeland Security’s multiyear accounts funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill and the Secure America Act. Much of that money is restricted to narrow purposes (e.g., border wall construction). But substantial amounts were appropriated for much broader purposes, including detention, transportation, hiring, and technology. ICE still had approximately $33 billion in unobligated Secure America Act funding at the end of September, which could help sustain operations into 2028 if spending remains near last year’s levels, with additional costs covered by legally available OBBB funds through January 2029.

Assuming continuing operations cost roughly what they did in FY2026, excluding one-time construction costs and other capital expenditures, the remaining ICE and secretary-level multiyear balances, plus some support from CBP operating funds, could leave roughly $60 billion for a new mass deportation effort. The Trump Administration has some of the greatest minds in the world and a trillionaire on its team. With resources like these, surely figuring out how to return enough Guatemalans to their own country is within America’s capabilities.

The administration deserves credit for securing the border and dramatically expanding enforcement. But given the mandate of 2024 and the extraordinary resources Congress provided, those accomplishments were the baseline, not the finish line.

The immediate aftermath of the midterms is the perfect opportunity for the administration to be more candid with its base. If officials believe the existing approach is sufficient, they must demonstrate why and define what sufficient means.

Administration officials will undoubtedly identify legitimate deficiencies in ambitious outside proposals, which may lack the benefit of direct operational experience and sufficient consideration of logistics, funding, or political will. But identifying those obstacles does not relieve anyone of the responsibility of solving the immigration problem at scale. Explaining why something cannot be done does not absolve you of the responsibility to figure out how it can.

Show how many people you’re removing monthly, show your top-line future goal for monthly removals, and show when you’ll reach it. Show how those numbers produce the required millions of departures before January 2029. And please tell us if that future numerical goal or that plan does not exist.

Not arrests, not detention beds, not canceled statuses, and not estimates of people who may have left the country based on indirect extrapolation of survey results—only completed, individually verified departures. A human being was here and is now demonstrably there.

Any official who continues to propagate the status quo removes himself from what the future will require and from political relevance. The sole responsible planning horizon is the next 26 months, and the metric of success is singular: millions removed.

In that vein, things that seem unreasonable now won’t seem unreasonable for very much longer, mostly because of what the Democrats want to do. Think the Democrats won’t try to abolish ICE? Read the vitriolic letters they send to the agency, and see their staged, fake-tears photo ops. Preventing immigration enforcement is as central to their project as mass deportation is to ours.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani can’t be president, but AOC can, and she can appoint him secretary of state or even director of homeland security. Look at who the U.K. home secretary is and tell me it’s far-fetched.

So, 26 months. Millions removed. The only acceptable debate is how this task is carried out.

There are two immediate opportunities in the wake of the midterms. The first is that the Trump Administration can use this time to reset with the base, be transparent about the state of enforcement and the numbers it’s collecting, and spend time re-courting those who will be in the administration’s corner over the next two years.

The second opportunity is for any current administration official who does not see it this way—who does not understand that linear expansion of enforcement capability is insufficient and that the fight over who we are is moving to the center of our politics—to plan your exit. The next two months are the interregnum during which you can find your next private-sector opportunity, for soon after there will be nowhere to hide. If that’s you, start reaching out to buddies who will retweet your departure announcement on X, and we’ll all still write “Patriot” underneath.

None of this is a feelings-based argument; it’s an observation of the math. Blackpilling is out. Results-pilling is in.

Over the next few weeks, President Trump will hear that he is a lame duck, with ample press attention given to the Republicans who were already primed and waiting to jump ship. But the president and lame-duck status do not mix. He is instead a roaring lion.

And we are asking these questions about a better approach now because, at some point before this is all over, he will. And you do not want to be the one without a good answer.