It’s recently been reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair privately urged House Republicans on Tuesday to stop emphasizing “mass deportations” and instead focus their messaging on removing violent criminals. During the 2024 campaign and the initial phases of the administration’s mass-deportation initiative, Team Trump created and promoted the impression that virtually all its targets would be hardened criminals. That has very visibly not been the case, since all sorts of peaceable legal immigrants, not to mention domestic, health-care, and farm workers, have been brutalized by ICE — as have U.S. citizens and total bystanders. Nearly half — 49% — of Americans now say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive. “The victims of Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller haven’t been just the ‘worst of the worst’ but also more sympathetic figures than their masked tormenters,” writes political columnist Ed Kilgore. “So it’s rational (if not ethical) that Trump’s political advisers want to pursue the same policies under a modified slogan that seeks to take the ‘mass’ out of ‘mass deportation.’” Read Kilgore’s full column: