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The Trump administration’s nationwide immigration dragnet is “insane,” according to podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed the Republican during the 2024 election.
“We were told there would be no — well, there’s two things that are insane,” Rogan said during an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience released Wednesday featuring Replit CEO Amjad Masad. “One is the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers. Showing up in construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”
Rogan has criticized the raids before, calling them “f***ing nuts” during a June show.
The Trump administration has used aggressive immigration raids against convicted criminals and migrants without criminal histories alike as part of its push to detain 3,000 undocumented people a day and rapidly deport millions.
Raids have taken place in homes, businesses, and residential areas across the country, ranging from restaurants and farm fields, to Home Depot parking lots around Los Angeles and a Louisiana race track.
As The Independent has arrested, these operations, targeting individuals who would’ve been low priorities for removal under past administration, have turned thriving immigrant neighborhoods into ghost towns.
Among those arrested and deported, 61 percent had no previous criminal conviction, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The operations, often conducted my masked, heavily armed federal agents, have been met with increasingly fervent protests, including over a week of protest in Los Angeles last month that saw scores of arrests and the White House deploying the National Guard and Marines over the objection of local officials.
Democratic leaders have also made a point of conducting oversight visits at the ICE detention centers now holding more than 56,000 people, a likely record level.
A May shoving match between Democratic lawmakers, ICE agents, and protesters outside a New Jersey detention facility — in which lawmakers accuse agents of roughing up members of Congress and federal officials say the lawmakers broke protocols — resulted in federal charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver, and since-dropped charges against the mayor of Newark.
Despite the focus on rapid arrests, the Trump administration has brought few apparent penalties against businesses employing undocumented immigrants, despite promising to use unprecedented enforcement actions against employers to break up the economic incentives for illegal immigration.
A Washington Post analysis found that just one business has faced charges from among the roughly two dozen the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has announced raiding.
The Department of Homeland Security has vowed there will be no “safe spaces” for employers illegally hiring undocumented people.
“You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation,” White House border czar Tom Homan said last month. “We’re going to flood the zone.”
In recent weeks, Trump, whose own businesses have been accused of illegally using migrant labor, has toyed with finding some sort of immigration compromise for businesses in hospitality and agriculture, which rely heavily on immigrant labor. But his immigration officials have insisted workplace raids will continue everywhere.
“We’re working on it right now. We’re going to work it so that some kind of a temporary pass where people pay taxes, where the farmer can have a little control, as opposed to you walk in and take everybody away,” Trump said in an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures.
The Trump administration’s Big, Beautiful Bill spending package would further ramp up the pace of immigration raids.
The Senate version of the bill includes an additional $175 billion in immigration funding, including nearly $30 billion for enforcement and deportation operations, an unprecedented increase in funds that would make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency and better funded than many global militaries.
