WASHINGTON —“Deported or departed.”
That was Rick Jackson’s promise to Georgia’s undocumented immigrants when he was running as Donald Trump’s man. With 29 days left before Georgians decide whether to make him governor, the Trump part is gone.
Jackson’s campaign website used to feature his pledge to work with President Trump. It no longer does, Aaron Parnas scooped on Monday.
What’s left on immigration rests on one word: criminal. That word is a quiet step away from the deport-them-all machinery that Stephen Miller built and that congressional Republicans have defended throughout the 119th Congress.
This matters most in Georgia. The state has had a front-row seat to that machinery. ICE recently announced more than 1,200 immigrant arrests in Georgia during a federal enhanced enforcement operation, and the number of immigrants in ICE detention in the state has grown 90% under Trump’s second administration.
Last fall, Georgia was the site of the largest single immigration raid in the history of Homeland Security Investigations: hundreds of workers were zip-tied at the Hyundai battery plant site in Ellabell. When the man asking to run the state removes the president’s name from his pitch, he is telling you what his pollsters told him.
The candidate who beat Trump’s pick
Jackson is a healthcare-staffing billionaire. He put more than $100 million of his own money into his campaign and won the Republican nomination by defeating Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in a primary runoff. He still ran on Trump’s playbook. He campaigned as a close ally of the president and adopted Trump’s hard-line immigration stance in that “deported or departed” ad. He vowed to make Georgia No. 1 in the nation for deporting immigrants who break the law and to work with Trump to enforce federal immigration law.
Days after the runoff, a reporter asked him about the ad at a Mexican restaurant on Buford Highway. Jackson narrowed his target. “So my focus has been criminal illegals, period,” he said.
The word “period” did a lot of work in June. Now, with the Trump pledge gone from his website, the word “criminal” has to carry his entire immigration message alone.
His opponent, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, has said ICE tactics under Trump have “terrorized communities and harmed Americans.”
A party scattering
Jackson is backing away quietly. Other Republicans have been louder.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., told Trump in a September campaign ad that his immigration push had “gone too far.” She said that Hispanics who helped elect him felt betrayed. Trump responded by calling her “softer” on the border. In the same month, former Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a longtime restrictionist now running for Congress, called the planned deportation of his son’s father-in-law, a work-permit holder, “not right.”
Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., said agents can get “carried away” and questioned “dragging people away” after 15 years in a community. Within a day he said he backed Trump’s strategy “full stop.” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who once boasted of voting 100% of the time to build the wall, said ICE operations caused “mass disruptions” to southwest Kansas meatpacking towns. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., warned that broad dragnets were costing Republicans their advantage on immigration.
None of these lawmakers has abandoned deportation. They are drawing a line around the people they can see from their district offices: the worker, the neighbor, the father-in-law.
The people on the other side of that line have names too. Federal agents killed two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Macklin Good, in Minneapolis. Citizens have been swept up in raids. Latino Americans have been stopped on the street on the theory that looking Latino is reason enough to ask for papers.
What voters see
The public has turned against ICE’s methods. A New York Times/Siena poll found 50% approval for deportations. In the same poll, only 36% approved of ICE’s job performance and 61% said its tactics had gone too far. Marist found 65% saying ICE had gone too far, up from 54% in June 2025. NBC’s September survey put ICE at 39% positive and 51% negative among registered voters.
That split is the bet Jackson is making: keep the toughness and drop the name attached to the cruelty.
Jackson can delete a president from a webpage in an afternoon. The 1,200 people arrested in Georgia’s latest enforcement surge have no such option.
Campaigns delete things when they think nobody’s watching and paid subscribers are the reason we can keep the archive running on every candidate who says one thing in the primary and another in October.
27 days to midterms and these idiots are trying to fool voters by “ distancing from trump”. Far too little far too late and far too unbelievable”. Vote blue everywhere
Do NOT trust them, they will always be loyal to him! Remove as many of them as possible! We need a People’s Party, For the People, By the people!! No more Government over reach! We need to get back to the core values and principles. No more money in politics!