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Mark January 20, 2025, as the start of the biggest man-hunt in American history. That’s when the newly minted Trump administration 2.0 will begin hunting down and deporting millions of criminal aliens welcomed in by the Biden-Harris administration. If successful, they’ll purge our cities of murderers, child traffickers, and drug pushers, a result that will prove wildly popular with a country tired of mass illegal immigration.

But that’s only step one.

Restoring America’s honor and independence requires freeing her from millions more nonviolent illegal migrants who’ve lived for years within our borders in violation of the law. Finding them will prove tricky. Trump’s commitment to mass deportations may be ironclad, but pulling it off will require using a powerful weapon his predecessors ignored: E-Verify.

E-Verify is a federal service created 28 years ago that employers can use to confirm employees’ eligibility to work in the United States through the Department of Homeland Security. It stems from the 1986 Reagan amnesty law, which banned employers from knowingly hiring illegal aliens and later gave them a tool to enforce it. While hardly a silver bullet, it’s free, fast, and effective.

“If you aren’t for E-Verify, you aren’t serious about controlling immigration,” says border expert Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies. The system works through deterrence. A sign on the door indicating a fast-food restaurant uses E-Verify is “a signal to illegal job-seekers that they should apply elsewhere,” he explains.

CIS considers universal E-Verify a “basic tenet” for any robust immigration policy. “We can’t control the border without it,” Krikorian told me. “It’s important to deport the illegal migrants already here, but you must weaken the jobs magnet attracting people to sneak across the border or overstay their visas. It’ll make tracking people down a lot easier if it’s less attractive to come here in the first place and embed themselves in our society,” he added.

“E-Verify can do that.”

Some 75% of the illegal migrant population in the U.S. is in the labor force. Without jobs, most of them will leave. This happened after the 2008 recession when the illegal immigrant population fell by 1 million amidst a devastated U.S. economy. Encouraging them to self-deport is the cleanest, most efficient way to remove them from the country.

But that only works when the program is universal and mandatory, as it is in just 10 states. A 2016 study found that illegal immigration rates fell by as much as 50% in states with mandatory E-Verify laws, yet only when all employers were required to use it. Limiting the requirement to government contractors – as 11 states do – does almost nothing.

Most southern states get this, such as Florida, which mandated E-Verify across the board last year. There’s no reason President Trump and the incoming Republican Congress shouldn’t require every employer in all 50 states to enforce its use.

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