Two weeks into the second Trump administration, big-city mayors have their hands full: a torrent of executive orders, ICE raids on criminal migrants, and the prospect of a federal funding freeze. Some, most notably New York mayor Eric Adams, have indicated a willingness to work with the administration, at least on certain issues. Others, including Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey and Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, have signaled outright hostility. Urban leaders, overwhelmingly Democratic, are unlikely to see eye-to-eye with the administration on many things, but a constructive relationship with Washington on common-sense issues like deporting criminal migrants would be both popular with, and beneficial to, their constituents. 

President Trump has made deporting criminal and gang-affiliated aliens a central part of his campaign. Recent polling shows that nearly two-thirds of American adults support this move, including 53 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independents. Yet many local sanctuary laws limit city employees’ cooperation with federal deportation efforts. These laws often date back years or even decades, well before the Biden administration’s migrant crisis. In New York City, their aim was to encourage communities with large illegal populations to cooperate with the NYPD without fear of deportation—not to protect members of transnational gangs or convicts.

Urban leaders can make a deal with Trump. City governments could amend their sanctuary laws to permit cooperation with federal immigration officials; in exchange, Trump could agree to prioritize the expulsion of gang members and criminal aliens. This would provide security for peaceful migrants who arrived before the Biden administration’s recklessly lax border policies, let Trump make good on his core promise, and make cities safer.

A revived ICE Secure Communities program could provide another means of limited cooperation. Begun in 2008, this initiative took the digitized fingerprints that local law enforcement shares with the FBI of all arrestees—noncitizens and citizens alike—and forwarded them to the Department of Homeland Security (and, in turn, ICE). President Obama replaced the program in 2014 with a watered-down alternative; Trump reinstated it via a January 2017 executive order, only to have Biden rescind that order on the first day of his presidency.

Reviving Secure Communities would tip off ICE when migrants get arrested, facilitating their deportation. Customs and Border Protection collects fingerprints of those apprehended at the border, even when they are released into the U.S., as occurred during the Biden administration. Migrants would be on notice that getting arrested would subject them to expedited removal, creating a powerful deterrent to crime. Importantly, Secure Communities neither involved local police officers in immigration enforcement nor changed local operating procedures. Since the program leaves enforcement squarely in federal hands and does not require local assistance with detainer requests, it would likely not run afoul of sanctuary city laws.

The mayors also share an interest with the Trump administration in clearing the years-long immigration-hearing backlog. The new administration should make headway by hiring more immigration judges and streamlining deportations for those who fail to make their asylum claims. This will ease pressures on city budgets and free up resources for long-term city residents. New York City, for example, has already spent nearly $7 billion over three years on shelters and other migrant-related costs.

Increasing detention capacity for criminal migrants is another potential area of cooperation among local, state, and federal governments. In a sharp departure from the Biden administration, Trump has prioritized detention over probation. As the recent diplomatic spat with Colombia highlighted, noncooperative countries can constrain (at least temporarily) America’s ability to deport foreign nationals, intensifying the need for additional detention space in the meantime.

ICE officials warned lawmakers that the recently enacted Laken Riley Act will require an additional $3 billion in funding for 60,000 more detention beds. Under this legislation, the Department of Homeland Security must detain immigrants charged with, or convicted of, a broad array of crimes, ranging from theft to assaults to drunk driving. ICE leaders have expressed concern about how to accommodate such a sizeable increase in detainees, especially on short notice. Thus, on January 29, Trump announced controversial plans to make 30,000 beds available for immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Still, ICE will need more beds.  

Over the last 13 years, New York State closed 18 prisons and correctional facilities. The prison population has declined dramatically. New York State prisons housed more than 70,000 inmates in 1999, 56,000 in 2011, and about 33,500 by late 2024. This reduction—largely a result of criminal-justice changes like the 2009 softening of the 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, discovery reform, and budget cuts—made the closures look financially attractive.

New York governor Kathy Hochul is continuing this trend by expediting the closure of up to five more prisons, despite GOP resistance. As a result, many state correctional facilities—including Downstate Correctional Facility in Dutchess County—now sit abandoned, further depriving communities north of the city of economic opportunity. To prevent these expansive properties from deteriorating beyond use, the state has been selling them at bargain prices to private developers.

New York State could instead lease or sell these former correctional facilities to the federal government to detain aliens charged with or convicted of crimes. A leasing arrangement would not only generate recurring revenue for the state but also offload the cost of renovating and maintaining the facilities to the federal government, so they could be sold at a more favorable market value, if not used for their original purpose in the future. Beyond the fiscal benefits, some of the jobs lost when these prisons closed—positions in security, food service, and maintenance—might return, helping upstate communities.

The federal government could also renovate its long-neglected facilities in New York City to provide additional detention space for migrants. Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, for example, has been closed since 2021 due to poor conditions. The federal Bureau of Prisons’ only remaining facility, the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, has likewise struggled with staffing shortages, inmate violence, and contraband smuggling. The Trump administration’s investment in and reform of these facilities would open more detention space and signal a commitment to public safety in the city.

The notorious Rikers Island Jail also held more than 20,000 inmates in the early 1990s but now holds just 6,500 or so. Local law requires the facility to close in August 2027, to be replaced by four borough-based jails with a combined total of 4,160 beds, which would require releasing more than 2,000 violent offenders back onto the streets. Leasing part of Rikers Island in exchange for federal rehabilitation and the re-opening of an ICE office might provide the investment that city leaders have been unable to make. Given the improbability of meeting the August 2027 deadline, a renovated Rikers might allow for pausing or even canceling the borough jail plan.

On first glance, the notion that New York officials would cooperate with federal immigration authorities might seem farfetched, despite general support for some enforcement efforts from Hochul and Adams. But public opinion in New York mirrors national polling in favoring stricter immigration enforcement. A recent Siena College poll indicates that 54 percent of New York State voters support Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts, with only 35 percent opposed. Another, released just yesterday, found that 79 percent of New Yorkers support deporting criminal aliens. Given her recent statements advocating for the removal of criminal migrants, Hochul shouldn’t object to repurposing vacant prisons for ICE detainees or accepting federal investment to expand the city’s detention capacity.

City leaders need not endorse Trump’s broader agenda to recognize a chance to make their cities safer and financially stronger over the next four years. They can resist for the sake of resistance—or they can make deals that benefit their constituents.

Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Vice President J. D. Vance has emerged as one of the Trump administration’s unwavering defenders on many issues. One of his most widely quoted retorts to critics occurred on the January 26 edition of CBS’s Face the Nation. Vance was responding to statements by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning as “deeply troubling” the administration’s enforcement actions against illegal aliens and its pause of government-funded refugee-resettlement programs. As a Catholic, Vance said, the criticism left him “heartbroken.” Then he hit out at the church for its role in garnering hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to serve immigrants over the last several years. “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

The Catholic Church has indeed emerged as one of the largest government contractors of immigration services. In the process, it has not only rapidly expanded its role as a taxpayer-supported nonprofit but also became one of the chief facilitators of the Biden administration’s loose borders policy. That relationship has troubled many politicians and other critics, who fear that reduced border enforcement has worsened numerous social problems, including human trafficking. “I believe the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, if they’re worried about the humanitarian costs of immigration enforcement, let them talk about the children who have been sex trafficked because of the wide open border of Joe Biden,” Vance said in the Face the Nation interview.  He went on to slam church leaders for not being good partners in “common sense immigration enforcement.”

The Catholic Church has long positioned itself as an advocate for poor immigrants and provided them with services in the United States. But for decades, including during the great migration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the church’s work was charitable in nature, funded by contributions from parishioners. Over the past 50 years or so, however, Catholic Church-affiliated organizations, especially Catholic Charities, have become government contractors with a stake in a growing welfare state. Even before the last four years of explosive immigration, Catholic Charities nationwide derived more than six of every ten dollars of revenues from government contracts. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities have been among the biggest beneficiaries.

Now, with Trump changing the immigration focus to border enforcement and deportation, most of the Biden programs that aided in resettling immigrants are being curtailed, along with their funding. That policy change may represent an existential crisis for nonprofits dependent on government contracts, including dozens of Catholic Charities branches around the country. This conflict of interest makes it harder for Catholic leaders to claim the moral high ground on immigration.

The Biden administration used radical changes in immigration policies, especially through its so-called parole program, to justify a vast expansion of federal spending on migrant services. Under Biden’s plan, those seeking entry into America received dates to appear in immigration court, often months in the future, and then were released into the country, usually without any means to support themselves. To service the swelling numbers of unsettled immigrants, including a sharp uptick in those applying for refugee status, the Biden administration and Congress dramatically expanded spending on immigration services. Funding for refugees and other “entrants” soared fourfold annually, from $2.2 billion in 2021 to $8.9 billion in 2022 and then to $10 billion in 2023. The biggest increases were in annual funding for unaccompanied minors, from $1.7 billion to $5.5 billion—suggesting the magnitude of the problem that Biden’s open-borders policy facilitated. Medical services for refugees and others grew fourfold, from $225 million to $1 billion. Large chunks of this money made its way to nonprofits as discretionary grants from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which rose from $33 million in 2021 to $400 million in 2022 and then $616 million in 2023, according to Open the Books.

Catholic groups were among the leading recipients of this money. Total federal grants and contributions made to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its affiliate organizations for refugee-assistance programs rose from $14.6 million under the first Trump administration in 2019 to $122.6 million in 2022, according to audited financial statements. In just three years under Biden, those grants totaled more than $200 million. One signature federal program, Preferred Communities, tries to integrate immigrants into local communities. In 2023, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was the top recipient of these grants, garnering $66.5 million, reports Open the Books. Over three years, Catholic groups received some $110 million from this program alone.

This federal money, often heavily supplemented by local government contracts, has led to a startling growth in groups like Catholic Charities across the country in just four years. The ProPublica database of the financial filings of nonprofits lists 234 Catholic Charities entities around the U.S. The top 25 had revenues of slightly more than $2 billion in 2023, the last year filings are available for all groups. That’s an almost 50 percent increase, a gain of about $660 million, in four years. Some of these groups have been utterly transformed. Catholic Charities Fort Worth has become one of the nation’s largest local Catholic groups, with revenues of $289 million in 2023, compared with just $32 million in 2020. And like so many religious social services groups today, the charity exists almost entirely on government funds. Catholic Charities Fort Worth’s 2023 federal 990 form, which nonprofits must file, lists $270 million in total government grants. Much of that money appears in the form of pass-through grants to local organizations for “refugee case management assistance,” such as a $29.7 million grant awarded to a local YMCA.

The growth has been especially noticeable in border states, where the Biden administration released many of its parolees to local groups. Catholic Charities Dallas recorded $188 million in revenues from 2021 to 2024, compared with just $64 million over the previous four years. Similarly, Catholic Charities San Diego saw its local revenues rocket to $70 million in 2023, up from $12 million in 2020, with $64.9 million of that money in the form of government grants. In Phoenix, meantime, Catholic Charities recorded nearly $47 million in revenues in 2023, up from $33 million in 2019. Nearly 80 percent was in government money.

Because taxpayers increasingly support these swelling budgets, the organizations have attracted more criticism. Just a few days after Vance replied to the bishops on television, reports emerged of a Catholic Charities in Milwaukee releasing on its website a video from an immigration lawyer coaching illegals on how to deal with workplace raids by immigration authorities and recommending not cooperating with authorities, among other strategies. Other such incidents have occurred in recent years. In late December 2022, Texas governor Greg Abbott called for investigations into reports that a Catholic group was using taxpayer funds to help illegal aliens.

Government-backed Catholic groups have also taken heat for lobbying for benefits for illegals. For example, Catholic Charities of Trenton, New Jersey, one of the 20 largest taxpayer-funded Catholic groups, has promoted a campaign to award drivers’ licenses to illegals, including organizing protest marches in the Garden State. Catholic officials have sought to justify their work as a “safety issue” for state drivers—but that’s disingenuous, because local governments that provide illegals with access to such government programs as drivers’ licenses or unemployment insurance (as New Jersey did during Covid) encourage illegals to come to their area, adding to the burden on public services and raising calls for greater government funding.

Though some Democrats and liberal commentators have criticized Republican scrutiny of church immigration contracts, Democratic administrations have also found fault with Catholic Charities and other church-affiliated organizations in the past. Catholic adoption agencies, for instance, saw contracts yanked by Democratic-controlled state governments for refusing to facilitate adoptions by gay couples. The Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services withdrew a contract for helping victims of sex trafficking from a Catholic group because it wouldn’t provide the victims with condoms.

As Vance’s remarks suggest, the Church’s role in helping to carry out the undeniably controversial immigration resettlement policies of the Biden administration is potentially divisive within Catholicism itself, because it appears to be at odds with what the American Catholic congregation broadly supports. Within the pews, there’s growing discontent, reflected in Vance’s criticism, of what some regular churchgoers call “professional Catholics”—that is, the administrative class that organizes and carries out the social-welfare mission of groups like Catholic Charities and lobbies for liberal social policies to support their work. Polls suggest they are out of sync with everyday Catholics. A Pew survey last year showed that 55 percent of those who identified as Catholic supported Trump. Even Hispanic Catholics were almost evenly divided in their support of the candidates. Catholics who said they attended church regularly were even more supportive of Trump. Those results were part of broad backing among religious voters for Trump. By contrast, about seven in ten voters claiming no religious affiliation or belief said they supported Biden.

In his Face the Nation interview, Vance described himself as a “practicing” Catholic—that is, one who regularly attends church. Though polls suggest as many as 20 percent of American adults, or about 50 million people, identify as Catholic, only about 28 percent of them, or 14 million, say they go to church frequently. Once, parishioners financed the church’s social mission, their contributions a vote of confidence in this work. But as the numbers in the pews have diminished over the years, the church has turned to the state for support; individual donations from churchgoers now represent a minuscule portion of its funding for social work. That dynamic has produced a church whose leadership and mission seem increasingly out-of-step with its own congregants.

Photo by Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.

Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.

The basic problem, which reformers have been trying to remedy since the Clinton administration, is that the system is operated by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy—the same bureaucracy that’s also responsible for overseeing air safety. The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.

Nearly all  other developed countries sensibly separate these roles, so that a federal aviation agency oversees an independent corporation that operates the control towers and the rest of the system, functioning as a public utility. This independent operator can be a state-owned company (as in Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and Scandinavian countries), a nonprofit corporation (as in Canada), or a company with private investors (as in the United Kingdom and Italy).

In 2017, the Trump administration and Republican congressional leadership tried creating a similar system in the U.S., operated by a not-for-profit corporation. The bill was backed by some Democrats and by a broad coalition that included even the union representing air-traffic controllers, which had previously helped block reform but finally decided that this was the only way to fix the system. The legislation also enjoyed support from unions representing pilots and flight attendants, the major airlines, and a bipartisan array of former officials at the FAA and the Department of Transportation.

The bill went nowhere, partly because many legislators, especially Democrats, wanted to retain Congress’ control over the system—and the campaign contributions and pork-barrel opportunities that came with it. But the effort was doomed mainly because of opposition from private plane owners, who pay a pittance for the services they use. Though the legislation guaranteed that they would not be charged new user fees, their lobbyists scared enough lawmakers to quash it.

Now, after the Washington collision, could the second Trump administration and a new Republican Congress finally create a state-of-the-art system? “The public and opinion leaders now know a lot more about the FAA’s shortcomings,” says Robert  Poole of the Reason Foundation, who has been leading the reform campaign for five decades. “With DOGE and the Trump administration shaking things up, perhaps the time for real reform has finally arrived.”

Trump’s executive order last week for a review of aviation safety focused on investigating and eliminating DEI practices in hiring controllers. Unsuccessful applicants for those jobs have sued the FAA, contending that the agency practiced racial discrimination by introducing a “biographical questionnaire” to favor minorities at the expense of other applicants, including those better prepared because they had taken college courses in air-traffic control. “The FAA affirmative-action scandal is indeed a scandal,” says Marc Scribner of the Reason Foundation. “The biographical questionnaire was gamed to rig the application selection for a limited number of training spots. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it caused unqualified controllers to be certified, which some have alleged following the latest accident.”

The safety review that Trump ordered should shed some light on the competence issue, and the investigation of the D.C. crash could reveal whether the controller bears any responsibility for the helicopter flying into the airliner. (Critics have said that the warning to the helicopter pilot failed to specify where to look for the plane.) Whatever evidence turns up, the FAA has already been ordered to scrap identity politics and hire controllers based strictly on merit.

Eliminating diversity mandates is just one small step in the right direction. The system will remain mired in mid-twentieth-century technology until it’s run by an independent corporation accountable to regulators but freed from congressional micromanagement, annual budget battles, and the federal bureaucracy’s convoluted hiring and procurement regulations. Experience in Canada and other countries shows that an independent corporation, able to issue its own revenue bonds because it’s funded directly by user fees instead of taxes, can modernize air-traffic control far more efficiently and cheaply than a government agency.

Reforming the system is an ideal issue for the new administration, particularly Elon Musk and his team at DOGE. It would help drain the D.C. swamp, shrink the federal budget deficit, improve aviation safety, reduce flight delays, conserve fuel, lower carbon emissions, and save money for airlines and passengers. It’s inspiring to dream of sending Americans to Mars in a new Golden Age, but the ones flying closer to home are still stuck in the Stone Age.

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images