President Donald Trump spoke for 108 minutes during the 2026 State of the Union — the longest address in American history. He covered the economy, foreign policy, manufacturing, and national pride. But for all the words, one of the most consequential issues facing the country was reduced to a single statistic and then set aside.
Immigration — one of the administration’s signature issues — was nearly invisible in the address. A Medill News Service analysis shows the president devoted less than 10% of his remarks to the topic, amounting to roughly ten minutes in total.
And when he did touch on his immigration crackdown, his language stayed firmly in familiar territory.
Trump never used the word “immigrant” a single time during the entire address. Instead, he referenced the border 16 times and used terms like “criminals,” “aliens,” and “illegal” a combined 25 times.
Roughly two minutes of the speech were spent attacking Somali residents of Minnesota, whom he labeled “pirates” and accused of corrupting the state. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D‑Minn., the nation’s first Somali‑American member of Congress, repeatedly yelled at Trump from the chamber floor.
“You have killed Americans,” Omar yelled, referencing the fatal shootings of two Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents earlier this year.
Trump then devoted another four minutes to promoting his immigration agenda through stories of Americans harmed by what he called “illegal aliens.”
Trump has repeatedly asserted that rising immigration is driving a surge in crime, but available data does not support that claim. Federal crime statistics do not distinguish offenders by immigration status, yet there is no evidence of any crime wave linked to migrants, whether along the U.S.–Mexico border or in cities experiencing the largest recent arrivals, such as New York and Chicago. Multiple studies using state‑level arrest records show that people living in the U.S. without legal status are, on average, less likely than U.S.-born citizens to be arrested for violent, property, or drug offenses.
The president briefly cited a drop in arrests for illegal border crossings. That was it. No mention of the sweeping enforcement actions underway. No acknowledgment of the human, economic, or legal consequences of the administration’s policies.
This silence is not occurring in a vacuum.
Here is the long list of major initiatives currently reshaping the immigration landscape:
- Expansion of immigration detention
- Continued construction of the border wall
- Efforts to end birthright citizenship
- Denial of bond for people in immigration custody
- Suspension of asylum at the border
- A mass‑deportation campaign that has sparked protests and was linked to two fatal shootings in Minnesota
These are not minor administrative tweaks. The detention expansion and the border wall alone represent nearly $100 billion in federal spending. The scale of ongoing enforcement operations have become a central point of tension in communities across the country.
Yet none of this appeared in the speech.
The omission did not go unnoticed. In the official Democratic response, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger criticized President Trump for his attacks on immigrants: “They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies. They have sent children, a little boy in a blue bunny hat, children, to far off detention centers. And they have killed American citizens in our streets. And they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability.”
A State of the Union is more than a policy update. It is a declaration of national priorities. When an issue as consequential as immigration is reduced to a single line, it raises questions about transparency and accountability.
In the end, the loudest message on Tuesday night may have been the silence. At a moment when immigration policy is reshaping communities, straining local governments, and prompting legal battles nationwide, Americans were left without clarity on where the administration intends to go next.
A State of the Union is supposed to confront the country’s hardest questions. This year, one of the hardest was left unanswered.
Immigration Was the Loudest Silence in Trump’s State of the Union was first published on the Latino News Network and republished with permission.
Hugo Balta is the publisher of the Latino News Network, executive editor of The Fulcrum, and twice president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.