New data shows Trump’s immigration cuts hurt people ‘doing it right’ in Miami | Opinion

For all of President Trump’s talk about deporting the worst of the worst, his administration has been steadfast in closing avenues for people to enter and stay in the country legally. This frenzy to rid the nation of foreigners doesn’t seem to provide any benefits to Americans, and it looks motivated by pure hostility to immigrants, including those trying to come here “the right way.”

Many voters, including first- and second-generation immigrants in South Florida, elected Trump assuming his promises of mass deportations would target people here illegally, especially those who committed crimes, and not the people who followed the rules. But two reports released this month by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, paint a different picture. One of the reports is titled “Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration.”

New immigration policies hit communities like Miami the hardest. The administration has “nearly ended green card approvals for Cubans” and has targeted them for arrests and deportations, according to one of the Cato reports. Approvals of resident status for Cubans fell from 10,000 in October 2024, just before Trump took office, to just dozens by the end of last year, as the Herald reported. Meanwhile, arrests of Cubans grew by more than five times between late 2024 and late 2025.

Overall, green card approvals for people of all nationalities were cut in half with the biggest cuts reserved for Cubans, refugees and asylum seekers, Cato found. Under Trump, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency in charge of processing immigrant applications, has imposed barriers to immigrant visas, including bans on dozens of countries.

The Trump administration has also drastically reduced access to refugees, asylum seekers, spouses and fiancés of U.S. citizens seeking green cards and work and student visas, according to another Cato report. The administration’s reduction in people legally entering the country was 2.5 times larger than cuts to illegal entries.

By obstructing people’s ability to obtain legal status, USCIS has made them vulnerable to arrests by ICE. The agency, for example, has detained many spouses of U.S. citizens whose initial status expired but who would otherwise be eligible for residency, according to the report. Sometimes that has happened during their green card interviews.

“The end game is to foreclose any options for people to come to the United States and get legal status and prevent their deportation,” David Bier, Cato’s director of immigration studies, told the Herald Editorial Board.

When America’s immigration policy is reduced to the deportation of as many migrants as possible, the only metric for success becomes how many arrests ICE can make. The administration boosted arrest numbers by turning people with legal status into illegal residents. The best-known example in Miami is the effort by the administration to cancel Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Venezuelans and end humanitarian parole for Cubans and others.

This system is neither sustainable nor good for the nation or for communities like Miami that have historically relied on immigrants for labor in important industries such as construction, hospitality and elder care. Trump and Congress should be talking about immigration reform that takes into account both legal and illegal immigration. Instead, the country has fallen back on a scattershot approach that doesn’t take into account that the U.S. actually needs immigrants.

Bier said there’s a “fantasy” that American workers will replace migrants, but that’s not the case, at least not in the long term. With falling birth rates, the country isn’t producing enough working-age adults, putting programs like Social Security at risk as the population ages. In Miami’s case, many of the immigrants who arrived in the past five years — those on TPS and parole — are among the most vulnerable to losing their permission to stay and work here, Bier said.

Beyond the economy, there’s the personal price U.S. citizens pay when they aren’t reunited with their spouses or when their family members cannot get a green card or another immigrant visa. This should weigh heavy on Miami, where families have been built through immigration. If America’s end goal is to stop being a nation of immigrants, then our community will be among those that suffer the most.