‘One man’s mass is another man’s meh’: Steve Deace questions whether 1 million deportations is really enough

One of the biggest selling factors of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was his promise to conduct mass deportations, sending millions of illegal aliens the Biden administration had imported back home. According to recent figures provided by the administration, nearly 1 million people have been deported since January 2025. BlazeTV host Steve Deace is pleased with this number. “That’s excellent progress given where we were starting from and all the court challenges and everything else, right? Not to mention how squishy Republicans are,” he says. However, many conservatives disagree. “There are plenty of my friends and contacts who are like, ‘This dog ain’t going to hunt,’ ‘This ain’t going to cut it,’ and ‘Mass deportations is what we voted for, it’s what we expect, and these aren’t massive enough,’” he notes. “One man’s mass is another man’s meh, right?” he quips. Deace asks co-host Todd Erzen and producer Aaron McIntire to weigh in. “Which of these two camps in my friend group right now would you guys come down in?” Erzen is less optimistic than Deace. “I’m way more in ‘this dog ain’t gonna hunt’ ultimately,” he says, noting that he’s nonetheless “grateful for everything that’s being done.” “Right now, Dearborn, Michigan, should be a ghost town. Pockets of Minneapolis, wherever all those Somalis live, ghost town. Take care of that. ... That should be a bat signal to everybody else: Here we come,” he adds. Aaron, however, is more concerned with finding “the real story.” “It’s really difficult, especially when we’ve had as many government shutdowns or partial shutdowns as we’ve had in the last 18 months ... to actually get a bead on what the real data is,” he says. Regardless, no matter what the actual number is, he argues, deportations are “nowhere near the pace that [they need] to be.” “So, what I hear you guys saying, therefore, is that in typical Republican fashion, what we are doing is stopping the left from doing any new bad things, but we’re not going back and really undoing the old system,” Deace summarizes. “Trump will push and stretch that paradigm as much as any previous Republican of our lifetimes has or was probably willing to, right? But ... it still doesn’t inspire the level of paradigm shift that is really required here. Is that what I hear you saying?” he asks. “Exactly,” Erzen says. To hear more, watch the episode above. Want more from Steve Deace? To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.