President Vance: Immigration Enforcement After the Current Administration

Photo: File:Border Patrol Vehicle near U.S. Mexico Border.jpg by AH829, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

01 The record and the scenario

JD Vance enters any 2028 conversation with something no other prospective candidate has: twenty months as the sitting vice president of an administration whose signature domestic project is immigration enforcement. He has been its most visible political salesman — taking his first border trip to Eagle Pass, Texas in March 2025 alongside the Defense Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence, defending the crackdown in his first interview in office as arrests began in Chicago, and telling critics in April 2025 that the administration did 'not need permission to deport' people with serious criminal records.

That is the verifiable record. What follows is not a prediction. This is scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement: as of September 18, 2026, AP describes Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris as potential 2028 Democratic contenders and reports Republican discussion around JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz; most figures profiled have not formally entered a presidential race. This article takes the spec exercise seriously on its own terms: if Vance were sworn in on January 20, 2029, what would his first 100 days on immigration actually look like, given the machine he would inherit, the money only Congress can appropriate, and the courts that have already been contesting every piece of it?

The honest starting point is this: a President Vance would not be building an enforcement apparatus. He would be inheriting one that is two years old, partially litigated, and — by the administration's own early numbers — running below its own targets.

02 Day 1: executive orders

The first-day menu is largely a re-issuing exercise, because the current administration already used most of it. The January 20, 2025 executive orders — declaring a border emergency, directing Homeland Security to terminate parole programs, shutting down the CBP One scheduling app, and ordering the U.S. Digital Service to prioritize immigration-system IT — established the template. A Vance day one would plausibly add his own emphasis: broader designation of cartels and gangs as terrorist or 'invasion' forces under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, expanded use of visa sanctions against countries that refuse deportation flights (the tool that turned Colombia around in January 2025), and directives to agencies to coordinate enforcement with state and local partners.

The Alien Enemies Act is the most consequential lever, and the one Vance has defended most forcefully. The current administration invoked it in March 2025 to target alleged Tren de Aragua members; Vance publicly backed the flights even as federal judges, including Judge James Boasberg, pressed the administration on whether they violated court orders. A Vance day one would almost certainly include a new, broader proclamation — and with it, a fresh wave of litigation within hours.

What a first day cannot do: print detention beds, hire immigration judges, or change the asylum statute. Every one of those requires Congress, and every one of them is where the actual pace of enforcement is set.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

The month after inauguration is where a Vance presidency would differ most from a generic successor, because Vance has a specific diagnosis of why removals lagged: capacity. In March 2025 he argued that 'President Biden gutted the entire immigration enforcement regime of this country' and that rebuilding DHS — hiring, beds, flight contracts — was the binding constraint. Expect the first 30 days to be dominated by exactly that: surge hiring at ICE and CBP, expanded 287(g) agreements deputizing state and local officers, new detention facility contracts, and pressure on the Executive Office for Immigration Review to accelerate case processing.

The early-2025 numbers explain the urgency. ICE was averaging roughly 645 removals a day — about 17 percent below the same period in 2024 — even as interior arrests rose, because the pool of recent border crossers had collapsed after crossings fell and removals depend on beds, charter flights, and judge capacity. Border czar Tom Homan said the operation needed at least 100,000 detention beds to sustain the promised scale. That is the difference between a headline and a system.

A Vance-specific twist is the military relationship. He visited the border with the Defense Secretary; roughly 9,000 active-duty troops were deployed there by early 2025. A Vance Pentagon would face the same legal question the current one does: troops can detect and deter, but detention and civil arrest are statutory civilian missions. Expect more of the same, plus pressure on Congress to loosen the Posse Comitatus boundary — a fight that would define the first month's news cycle.

04 The first budget

The first budget request is where a Vance administration's priorities become countable. The current administration's approach — emergency supplemental requests for detention beds, ICE hiring, and the border wall system, often tangled in government-shutdown standoffs — previewed the shape: a Vance FY2030 request would front-load ICE and CBP operational accounts, detention capacity, immigration judges, and deportation flight contracts, and pay for it with cuts to refugee resettlement, humanitarian processing, and agency oversight functions.

The awkward fact a Vance OMB would confront: the border itself is quieter than at any point since 2020. Apprehensions for illegal crossings fell 39 percent in January 2025 alone, off a December 2023 all-time high. The budget argument therefore shifts from 'stop the surge' to 'sustain interior enforcement' — a harder political sell, because interior enforcement is labor-intensive, litigated, and economically entangled with agriculture, construction, and food processing. The first budget would answer, in line items, how many removals per day the administration is actually buying.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

Everything durable requires Congress, and the current administration's experience is the map. Mandatory E-Verify, permanent funding floors for detention beds, the immigration-judge corps, statutory limits on asylum eligibility, and any lawful expansion of the military's border role all require ordinary legislation — meaning either 60 votes in the Senate or a reconciliation workaround, which cannot carry policy riders like E-Verify under the Byrd rule.

The reconciliation route still matters: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 moved tens of billions for border security and ICE hiring through a simple-majority process precisely because funding fits reconciliation and policy does not. A Vance administration's first legislative ask would likely mirror that split — money in reconciliation in the first 100 days, policy bills (E-Verify mandate, asylum standards, state-cooperation statutes) introduced separately and, realistically, slower.

The Senate math is the same for Vance as it was for the current president: a majority is not 60 votes, and immigration policy bills have not cleared that bar in either direction since the 1980s. Expect the first 100 days' legislative legacy to be a funding bill and a pile of introduced-but-unpassed policy statutes — and a president who, like his predecessor, governs the issue by proclamation.

06 The comparative question: Vance vs. the field on enforcement style

Within the Republican field, the immigration argument in 2028 is not whether to enforce — it is how, and how loudly. Vance's distinguishable trait is the merge of immigration with economics: he frames enforcement as part of a broader anti-elite package, tying cartel designations to trade threats and tariffs on Mexico over fentanyl — the same linkage Trump used when he imposed and then lifted 25 percent tariff threats on Mexico and Canada in early 2025. A Vance enforcement presidency would be more likely than his rivals to treat immigration as a lever in trade and foreign-policy disputes, not just a domestic policing question.

Against the prospective Democratic field the contrast is total: Newsom, Harris and Whitmer have all positioned around enforcement-with-reform or cost framing, and none would run a first-100-days agenda built on removal volume. That means the 2028 immigration argument is unusually legible — the Republican nominee, whoever it is, will run on inheriting and intensifying the current architecture; the Democratic nominee on dismantling parts of it. What makes Vance distinctive is that he is the only prospective candidate who has already defended every controversial piece of it, on camera, as vice president — the Alien Enemies Act invocation, the Boasberg fight, the 'we do not need permission' posture. He owns the record in a way no challenger can.

07 What courts could constrain

No first-100-days immigration agenda in modern history has survived contact with the courts intact, and a Vance administration inherits the deepest litigation queue ever. The birthright-citizenship executive order was blocked within days by a Reagan-appointed judge calling it 'blatantly unconstitutional' — a warning for any Day 1 attempt to redefine the Fourteenth Amendment by proclamation. The Alien Enemies Act is under active Supreme Court review on due-process questions: whether detainees get notice and a real hearing before removal, and whether courts can block flights mid-air. The answers, arriving before 2029, will define what a Vance AEA proclamation can lawfully do.

The statutory constraints are older and blunter. Expedited removal operates within INA frameworks with judicial-review channels the Ninth Circuit has used repeatedly; the Posse Comitatus Act limits what 9,000 troops can actually do; and the immigration statutes themselves — written by Congress — cannot be rewritten by executive order. The realistic 100-day outcome for a Vance enforcement push is the current administration's pattern at higher volume: big proclamations, fast injunctions, some wins at the Supreme Court, and an enforcement pace set less by the Rose Garden than by the number of beds, judges, and charter flights Congress is willing to buy.