NEWBERG, Oregon — Voters here in Oregon’s rural Yamhill County have backed Donald Trump for three presidential elections in a row, most recently by a six-point margin. His promises to crack down on immigration resonated in these working-class communities.

Then last month ICE detained Moises Sotelo, a beloved but undocumented Mexican immigrant who has lived in the county for 31 years and owns a vineyard management company employing 10 people. Two of his children were born here and are American citizens, and Sotelo was a pillar of his church and won a wine industry award — yet he was detained for five weeks and Friday was deported to Mexico, his family said.

“Moises’s story just really shook our community,” Elise Yarnell Hollamon, the City Council president in Newberg, Sotelo’s hometown, told me. “Everyone knows him, and he has built a reputation within our community over the last few decades.”

The result has been an outpouring of support for Sotelo, even in this conservative county (which is also my home). More than 2,200 people have donated to a GoFundMe for the family, raising more than $150,000 for legal and other expenses, and neighbors have been dropping off meals and offering vehicles and groceries.

“Oh, my God, it’s been insane,” said Alondra Sotelo Garcia, his adult daughter, who was born in America. “I knew he was well known, but I didn’t know how big it would blow up to be.”

“You see the outpouring of love of people just trying to help,” she added. “Now they’re giving back to him what he gave to the community.”

Bubba King, a county commissioner, put it this way: “We want tighter border security” but also humane treatment of families, he said.

New Local Billboard: ‘Losing Immigrants Hurts Us All’

As a result of the Sotelo arrest, a community group erected a billboard in the county that declares: “We live here, together. Losing immigrants hurts us all.” The county newspaper, The News-Register (where I got my first part-time journalism job at age 16, and which refrained from endorsing either Trump or Kamala Harris in 2024), wrote an editorial lamenting the Sotelo arrest and warning that the Trump crackdown was “becoming a growing stain on our national heritage.”

Alondra says her dad wept when she was first able to visit him in detention and told him that community members had contributed $25,000 to his GoFundMe — and on a later visit, she told him, “If you were crying at 25K, you’re really going to be crying now, Dad.”

Sure enough, he cried again.

Judging from what unfolded here in Yamhill County, voters may have wanted a tightening of the border and the deportation of criminals — but not the arrest of a longtime neighbor. They wanted Trump to pursue gangsters, not destroy small businesses. Many people here sought some middle ground on immigration and felt they didn’t get it from Biden, but now they find they’re not getting it from Trump, either.

How Democrats Lost Credibility on Border Issues

It’s also worth acknowledging that Trump is in office in part because Democrats lost credibility on immigration issues. American voters last year said immigration was one of the issues they cared about most, and in one poll they said by a 13-point margin that they believed Trump would do better than Harris at managing immigration.

Trump’s policy in his first term — which included ripping children from their parents and then losing track of 1,360 of those children — pushed Democrats sharply left on immigration. Some liberal Democrats supported abolishing ICE. Sanctuary cities proliferated and Biden accepted an enormous spike in immigrants until a crackdown in his last year in office. This lax attitude toward immigration may be one reason Barack Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win voters without college degrees.

Let’s be pragmatic. We can’t admit all 900 million people around the world who, according to Gallup, would like to move permanently to another country. That includes 37% of people in sub-Saharan Africa and 28% of people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thank God the United States was hospitable in 1952, when my dad arrived as a refugee from Eastern Europe. Of course we need a secure border. And in the United States and Europe alike, voters repeatedly said they wanted a slowdown in immigration. A rule of thumb is that whenever the foreign-born share of a population surges to somewhere around 15%, there is discontent. In the United States, the foreign-born share has tripled since 1970 and is now around 15%. The top estimate, 15.8%, would constitute the highest level of immigrants in America since at least 1850.

We liberals refused to listen to concerns. Sometimes we even sneered at critics, accusing them of bigotry. So fed-up voters, including immigrants and people of color, turned to nationalists and charlatans who are now trying to engineer a mass deportation that would upend society and the economy.

Deported Business Owner Convicted for DUI

I reached out to ICE, and a spokesperson noted that Sotelo had a conviction for driving under the influence and had already been deported once. That appears to be true: Alondra said her father had been arrested around 1994 for drinking and driving. She also said that he had been deported in 2006 and soon returned to the United States.

No one makes excuses for Sotelo driving drunk. But one offense decades ago should not define his life. “Donald Trump has convictions himself, and my dad has practically a clean slate,” Alondra said. “I’m like, ‘How is my dad in there? And how is this man our leader?’”

Victoria Reader, whom Sotelo mentored as a vineyard manager, said that she would welcome the deportation of actual criminals. “But this guy who is doing amazing things and started a business, he’s the one who has been arrested,” she said, adding, “or, as I say, kidnapped.”

Even for Americans who welcomed more deportations, there’s something chilling about the militarization of the crackdown and the echoes of police state practices: plainclothes officers wearing masks, refusing to give their names, grabbing people off the streets and hustling them into unmarked vehicles. Something like that happened to me once in China — but State Security there treated me far better than ICE treats immigrants here.

Average Cost to Deport an Undocumented Immigrant Is $17,121

Consider also the financial cost of all this. ICE says that “the average cost to arrest, detain and remove an illegal alien is $17,121.” Thus the administration’s goal of 1 million deportations would cost $17 billion — and presumably be repeated annually. For comparison, that’s more than all 50 states spend together on pre-K.

Trump has more than tripled the annual ICE budget to $28 billion, making it the most expensive law enforcement agency in the federal government. Indeed, that’s more than the current annual budgets for the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives put together. Trump is also using officials from other law enforcement agencies to build a deportation army, meaning that fewer law enforcement officers are left to deal with homegrown criminals.

Here in Yamhill County, an agricultural area, there is also widespread concern that mass deportation will hurt the economy, with shortages of agricultural workers already reported. (Potential conflict alert: I live on a family farm here in Yamhill County, and we depend on a largely immigrant labor force to harvest our wine grapes and cider apples each September and October.)

The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated last year that mass deportation could cause GDP in 2028 to be 7.4% lower than it would be otherwise.

Trump’s Overreach Is Hurting America

A Gallup poll released this month suggests that while many Americans thought that liberals overreached on immigration under Biden, they now think it’s Republicans who are going too far.

Only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, Gallup says, while 62% disapprove. Indeed, Trump policies may be making people more pro-immigrant: A record 79% of Americans say that immigration is good for the United States, and only 30% want immigration decreased (down from 55% last year).

It has long been clear what a sensible immigration deal looks like: strict border enforcement, deportations focused on criminals, a rethink of asylum and a path to citizenship.

Yet now it’s Republicans who are deaf to public opinion. Instead of targeting the worst of the worst with deportations and making us safer, Trump is damaging America’s economy, shattering families and destroying small businesses. Officials exult in the cruelty of all this, even as American children are being imprisoned and deported with their parents. In Trump-voting Yamhill County, many people are disgusted — and all of America should be as well.

—

Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Nicholas Kristof/Christopher Valentine

c.2025 The New York Times Company