Tim Dillon decries Trump’s “performative” ICE raids, says administration is “unserious and cruel”

Citation

From the January 31, 2026, edition of The Tim Dillon Show, posted on YouTube

TIM DILLON (HOST): If people are here and they came in illegally, you have to figure out a way to deal with that — and you can do it the way Rand Paul wants to do it. You can encourage them to self-deport by denying benefits. You can pass legislation, whatever.

But the performative ICE raids right now that are all over the media and all over the news, and people are disgusted by them, aren’t doing the cause of border security any good. So you have to look at these options and figure out what exactly you can do without tearing the country apart. There’s a mandate to close the border. Trump was elected with a pretty sizable mandate, specifically on that issue; people do not want more immigration into the United States of America. Again, it’s just, they don’t want it.

They also don’t want this. So you’ve got to figure out a way to do this. What you could do, which Trump does not want to do, is enforce something called E-Verify, which means that it’s the employers that will pay fines and possibly be jailed if they hire illegal labor. The reason Trump doesn’t want to do that is because his friends in the construction industry, and the hotel industry, and the agriculture industry don’t want him to do that. Because they are the ones that are benefiting from use of illegal labor. Now, and you might be, and they have a point when they go, ‘Listen, by the way, we can’t just fire everyone who’s not legal. We’d be looking at massive delays. The economy would have a problem.’ So there is a humane way to do it. There’s also an economic way to do it where you don’t cause a three-year slowdown in the construction of houses because you’ve just — there are ways to do it. 

This administration is not interested in those ways. They’re interested in running the country like a reality show. They’re interested — they passed no legislation. They are not communicative on this issue at all, other than these, like, childish memes, and they’re losing support across the board. But on this issue, they’re losing support specifically. It’s like unserious and cruel.