U.S. President Donald Trump came to power promising he would deport as many as a million immigrants a year. By most accounts, he has fallen far short so far. Does that mean his administration will adopt new means to meet its goals? What impact might that have on the economy, and if certain moves go against the law, how will the courts and Congress respond?

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona who also served as secretary of homeland security in President Barack Obama’s first term. Napolitano herself oversaw about 450,000 deportations in a year, but she says she focused on the border rather than the interior of the country. Watch our full interview in the video box or listen to the conversation in the audio player atop this page. What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: When you ran Homeland Security under a Democratic presidency, you presided over a major crackdown on illegal immigration, reaching a record 450,000 deportations a year. Why is Trump’s plan for mass deportations perceived so differently from previous similar attempts?

Janet Napolitano: Well, one reason is the rhetoric that the administration uses, characterizing immigrants as rapists and being released from mental asylums.

It’s important in this conversation to distinguish between border security and interior enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws. I was the governor of a border state at a time when over 60 percent of all Border Patrol arrests were being made in Arizona. And it angered the people of Arizona, and it angered me, because it seemed that the border in Arizona was being allowed to be out of control. When I became secretary of homeland security, I was very clear that on immigration, we needed to have border security and we needed to be firm and fair in terms of interior enforcement. The interior enforcement needed to focus on those who were not only undocumented but who had committed other crimes, were known national security threats, or were proven gang members. Those were our priorities. We didn’t talk about mass deportation. We didn’t talk about going into schools and churches and courthouses to round people up. We didn’t seize people off the streets.

So both the rhetoric and the tactics used make a real difference.

RA: One thing I often hear from people who defend Trump is that immigration in the United States has long been broken. That it needed to be shaken up in a very dramatic way. In other words, you needed to take actions that were harsh, maybe even cruel, if only to deter people from coming in.

But there’s a strange dichotomy here because America has some 11 million undocumented workers. And it’s not politically feasible to make their status legal, so there’s a sense that we’ve chosen to live with a broken status quo. This is a theory that explains Trump and also why immigration remains an area where his actions are most popular. How do you respond to that?

JN: I’ll take the last point first: the so-called popularity of the Trump administration’s actions on immigration. The polls I’ve seen show that he has support for what he’s done on the border. And overall, on the border, I think he’s doing a very good job.

But if you poll separately on interior enforcement and the lack of due process for the people they’ve seized off the streets, the polling becomes much more negative for Trump. And for good reason, because people have an intuitive feeling about what’s fair and what’s not fair, what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. In many states, you would be hard-pressed to find anybody who doesn’t know somebody in the country illegally. And the visuals of the student from Tufts University on her way to an Eid dinner who was Even in the case of the so-called gang members deported to the CECOT [maximum security prison] in El Salvador, without any opportunity to contest the allegation that they were gang members, it hit Americans in their intuitive sense of fairness.

And the courts have agreed. The courts have said, you must go through the processes commanded by the law when deporting someone to another country.

RA: Forty-eight percent of Americans support what Trump is doing on immigration. But 78 percent say that he needs to obey court orders while he is doing so. And Trump, as you’ve pointed out, has already defied some of the court’s orders, notably the demand to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. How do you see that playing out?

JN: Well, the Abrego Garcia case is fascinating and troublesome. First, he was added to that plane flight at the last moment. He wasn’t on the original manifest. It was clearly a mistake. And after the original Justice Department lawyer admitted in court that it was a mistake, he lost his job. It just reveals the infection of the Trump justice and immigration apparatus.

The Supreme Court said that the administration has to facilitate his return to the United States. Trump himself said in an interview, of course he could do something. But the administration has done nothing. This may be one of the first times it’s really put to the courts and the Supreme Court: What do you do in the face of nonobedience to a court order by the administration?

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RA: But how did we get here? With so many undocumented workers in the United States, anyone who supports the rule of law can see that something needs to change. But to do so seems politically unfeasible. And we know from the last few months that mass deportations are also extremely challenging. As someone who’s worked on this at the highest levels, why is the system so broken?

JN: You have to look at U.S. history and our historical pattern with respect to immigration. We periodically go through years where there are high levels of immigration and then years where it is lower. And when there are levels of high immigration, the political system reacts. In the 1900s with the Chinese Exclusion Acts, for example. Or laws restricting immigrants from Southern Europe as opposed to Northern Europe. So you can see by the numbers that high migration into the United States caused pushback from Americans. In a way, it’s understandable. Because it seems like there’s no law, no order. There are fears that illegal workers are depressing wage levels that could go to Americans.

In my view, there’s a general consensus about what needs to be done by Congress. Congress needs to keep funding border security. Congress needs to improve the processes for legal migration. The current caps are far too low and serve as a kind of perverse incentive to come illegally because the legal way is so constricted. And then Congress needs to address what to do with those who are already in the country. How do we regularize their status?

RA: This administration is clashing with the courts. Where do you see that going?

JN: If you were trying to deal with that standoff, you would put real resources into the nation’s immigration courts. That’s where the backlog occurs. People learned that if they got over the border and made a claim of asylum, they could then be given a court date to prove or disprove their claim. And those immigration courts were so backed up that it allowed people to stay for years. And so if you wanted to do something effective, instead of seizing people off the street, you would focus on clearing that backlog.

And then you might look at the criteria for claiming asylum to begin with. Are the criteria fair and just? Do they match what we see as the value of asylum?

You can do a lot of different things to clear that backlog. You could appropriate money. You could hire retired lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges, for example. But the backlog is so extensive and the wait is so long that it created an incentive for people to come across the border, look for a Border Patrol agent to whom they could claim asylum. That’s what happened during the beginning of the Biden administration.

RA: In addition to border security, Trump has essentially put up a giant “do not come here” sign on the southern border. And people around the world, not just from Latin America, knew under the Biden administration that if they could get into the United States, they could seek asylum and have their families join in three or four years. Do you agree, then, that in putting this big “do not come here” sign on the southern border, this administration is doing the right thing?

JN: I think this administration is actually doing some of the right things. Messaging and rhetoric matters because it spreads through the possible immigrant community. So, as vituperative and wrong their language is, it is indeed having an effect.

RA: So what happens next? And you mention the courts, but where does Congress fit into this?

JN: We shouldn’t give Congress a pass on this because, as in many other serious issues affecting the American population, they have really been ineffective on the immigration system, from the underfunding of the immigration courts to legal migration. The Senate bipartisan bill that was negotiated last year covered all the basic elements. It was a really good start. And then candidate Trump got involved and put the political kibosh on it. My recommendation would be to start with that.

Realize that this issue is urgent. It’s an urgent issue for the American people. It’s an urgent issue for the courts. Congress can’t keep ducking.

RA: You’ve made a clear distinction between border security and deportations there and interior deportations. What do you imagine the Trump administration will focus on in the next few months to reach its stated goals on deportations?

JN: I foresee an attempt to force state and local law enforcement to aid in their deportation efforts, which is very controversial and, in fact, against state law in many states. They’ll use the threat of cutting off federal funding to try to obtain those types of agreements, and those threats will be litigated. They’re negotiating massive increases in the budget for ICE and border control for immigration, detention, and the construction of facilities. But we need to remember that the courts have been very clear that each of these individuals is entitled to due process. That seems in conflict with the notion that they’ll sweep up thousands of people in one fell swoop.

RA: I want to globalize this because immigration is a crucial issue all over the world right now. There’s usually global repercussions to very restrictive immigration policies. Smart students, the best engineers and scientists, will be less likely to flock here. How do you see the connection between a sensible immigration policy and soft power?

JN: To me, the actions against students and student visas makes absolutely no sense. The United States has been a talent magnet for the world for decades. It has served us well. It serves the students well. Many end up staying in the United States and building companies and creating jobs in their own rights. And they also become noted professionals, noted academics, noted researchers. And those who return home do so with a greater sense of what the United States is like. That’s to the United States’ benefits. So the actions to kind of just wipe international students off of the F-1 list makes absolutely no sense.

RA: But can you explain why there’s so much hostility toward immigration? It’s not just about students. From an international perspective, many other countries see immigration as America’s secret sauce. It keeps the country’s demographics younger. It brings in the world’s best talent. There’s a direct connection between immigration and the success of the world’s biggest tech companies. So why is there so much anger?

JN: There’s been anger in our history before, against the Irish or the Italians or the Chinese. One of the fears is that new communities of immigrants will not integrate into American society. But it turns out that over the first generation and the second generation, that simply isn’t the case.

And then the lack of knowledge in general about the value that immigrants bring to the United States. If all you hear from the administration is how bad immigrants are, how criminal they are, and you don’t hear the contrary message about the tech companies founded by immigrants and the Nobel prizes won by Americans who began as immigrants, that will affect your perception as well.

RA: If part of the discussion is a lack of awareness, that neatly brings me to higher education, which is caught in the middle of the culture wars. There’s a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion at universities. You ran the University of California system; now you’re teaching at UC Berkeley. Have you felt a chilling effect from this administration’s actions?

JN: The administration is not higher education-friendly, and it seems to view everything through the gaze of antisemitism. Antisemitism is a real problem, and it needs to be dealt with. But not by this blunderbuss of cutting off all your research funding if you don’t obey. Not through this blunderbuss of revoking the student visa of anybody who signs an op-ed criticizing Israel. Some would say that they’re using antisemitism as a cover for undercutting the entire sector. I’m going to use a harsh word here: To extort concessions out of higher education that this administration is not entitled to take will have a long-term negative impact on the United States.

RA: The argument of the cultural right is that at many elite universities in the United States, a lot of people felt silenced by a prioritization of political correctness. Whether or not you disagree with their reaction, do you agree with their diagnosis of the problem?

JN: I don’t think it’s a real diagnosis. When I was president of the UC system, I saw some of the notion of limiting words you could use as overdone and not beneficial to the learning process. But that is different from saying that you can’t express your opinion. If people felt constrained, that was their personal feeling. Universities were not implementing policies constraining opinion.

Now, in contrast, the current administration is clearly constraining opinion of students who want to express disquiet with the war in Gaza, for instance. And it’s putting real action behind those constraints.

RA: I want to ask about the longer term. What does it do to the United States when you signal to the world that you are pulling back on immigration longer term?

JN: As I mentioned earlier, the United States has been a talent magnet for decades. I would say it’s the one of chief reasons why the U.S. economy has been the world’s leading economy for decades. Now, many countries see this as a ripe time to recruit talent from the United States. And people leave or don’t come, don’t go for their Ph.D. training here. That takes away that special sauce to the U.S. economy, which is the creativity and innovation that have propelled it to be the No. 1 performing economy in the world. The long-term consequence of that will be deleterious to Americans generally, whether they’re in a university or a research lab or not.