Bush Immigration Policy: Reform Attempts, Enforcement, and TPS

Bush immigration policy spans two presidencies and two very different outcomes. George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, the broadest rewrite of legal immigration in more than six decades, and expanded a family protection program that shielded roughly a million-plus relatives of newly legalized immigrants. George W. Bush spent much of his presidency pushing a comprehensive overhaul that paired border security with a path to legal status, watched the Senate kill it in June 2007, and in the same years oversaw a historic buildup in border enforcement, worksite raids, and deportations.

George H.W. Bush and the Immigration Act of 1990

The elder Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990 on November 29, 1990, calling it the “most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws in 66 years.”¹ The law raised the overall annual immigration ceiling to a flexible 700,000 through 1995 and 675,000 thereafter, and it nearly tripled employment-based visas from 54,000 to 140,000 a year, with new emphasis on scientists, engineers, and educators.² It created the Diversity Visa lottery, later fixed at 55,000 visas per year for nationals of countries with low U.S. immigration rates.³ And it established Temporary Protected Status as a new form of humanitarian relief.⁴

Before that law, the H.W. Bush administration expanded the “Family Fairness” program that Ronald Reagan had started in 1987. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act had legalized about 2.7 million unauthorized immigrants but left many of their spouses and children without legal status.⁵⁶ Senator Alan K. Simpson called it “de facto second amnesty.”⁷ The 1990 Act ultimately folded the protections into statutory “Family Unity” provisions.

George W. Bush’s Comprehensive Reform Proposal

George W. Bush laid out his approach in stages. On January 7, 2004, he proposed a temporary worker program to match “willing workers with willing employers,” open both to undocumented immigrants already in the country and to workers applying from abroad.⁸ Participants would get renewable three-year visas, could change jobs, and would have financial incentives to return home, including tax-preferred savings accessible on departure.⁹ The plan explicitly rejected an automatic path to citizenship. Anyone who wanted to naturalize would use existing channels with no preferential treatment.¹⁰

On May 15, 2006, in a primetime Oval Office address, Bush organized his approach around five objectives:¹¹

Add 6,000 Border Patrol agents by the end of 2008, deploy sensors, cameras, and unmanned aircraft, and end “catch and release.”
Create a legal temporary worker channel with background checks and a requirement to return home.
Require a tamper-proof biometric ID card for legal foreign workers and mandate electronic employment verification.
Reject both mass deportation and automatic citizenship. Undocumented immigrants with roots in the country would have to pay a penalty, pay taxes, learn English, and work for a period before being eligible to apply at the back of the line.
Promote English learning and civic integration.

The most immediate action from that speech was Operation Jump Start, which put up to 6,000 National Guard members on the southern border in a support role. Over the deployment’s life from June 2006 through July 2008, more than 30,000 Guard members rotated through, building fencing, running surveillance, and analyzing intelligence, freeing over 300 Border Patrol agents for front-line duty.¹²¹³ The force was 6,000 in the first year and 3,000 in the second.¹⁴

Why the 2007 Bill Died in the Senate

Bush’s best legislative vehicle was a bipartisan compromise in the 110th Congress led by Senators Ted Kennedy, John McCain, and Arlen Specter. An initial bill, S. 1348, arrived in May 2007; a revised version, S. 1639, added a merit-based point system for employment-based immigration at the insistence of Senator Jon Kyl and other Republicans.¹⁵¹⁶ The revisions cost the bill support: 23 Republican senators who had backed an earlier version wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid saying they would not vote for the new measure without more time to negotiate. A late addition of $4.4 billion in border security funding failed to change enough minds.

On June 28, 2007, the Senate rejected cloture on S. 1639 by 46 to 53, 14 votes short of the 60 needed to end debate. Thirty-seven Republicans and 14 Democrats voted no.¹⁷¹⁸ Reid pulled the bill. Representative Zoe Lofgren said the vote “effectively ends comprehensive immigration reform efforts in the 110th Congress.”¹⁹

The word that did more than any other to sink the bill was “amnesty.” Conservative talk radio, bloggers, and grassroots activists pressed the argument that any legal status for people who had entered illegally rewarded lawbreaking.²⁰ The White House drew a distinction: amnesty meant automatic citizenship; its proposal required fines, English proficiency, background checks, continued employment, and waiting behind legal applicants.²¹ Pew Research showed Bush’s approval among conservative Republicans falling from 86 percent to 74 percent between April and June 2007, and pollster Scott Rasmussen concluded that “it was the debate over immigration that cost the president support among his base.”

The Enforcement Record That Did Take Effect

While the reform bill failed, enforcement expanded on nearly every front. Funding for border security and immigration enforcement climbed 159 percent between 2001 and 2008, from $4.8 billion to $12.3 billion. The Border Patrol grew from roughly 9,000 agents at the start of the administration to more than 15,000 by early 2008.²²

The Secure Fence Act

Bush signed the Secure Fence Act on October 26, 2006, authorizing reinforced fencing along hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.²³ The original law called for roughly 850 miles of double-layer fencing; the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 changed the requirement to at least 700 miles and gave Homeland Security discretion over placement.²⁴ Between 2007 and 2010, 548 miles of new fencing went up at a cost of $2.3 billion, bringing the total to 658 miles.²⁵

Worksite Raids

Interior enforcement shifted from administrative fines to criminal prosecutions and asset forfeitures. Criminal arrests in worksite enforcement cases jumped from 19 in fiscal year 2001 to 863 in fiscal year 2007.²² Three operations stood out:

In April 2006, ICE conducted what was then its largest worksite action against IFCO Systems, arresting 1,187 unauthorized workers and charging seven managers with harboring and document fraud.²⁶
On December 12, 2006, Operation Wagon Train hit six Swift & Company meatpacking plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, and Utah, producing 1,297 immigration arrests with several hundred also charged with identity theft. No corporate officials were charged. Wages at the affected plants rose an average of 7.7 percent afterward.²⁷
On May 12, 2008, nearly 900 federal agents raided Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, arresting 389 workers. It was the largest immigration raid in U.S. history at the time and cost the federal government more than $5 million. By May 22, 306 workers had pleaded guilty to immigration or document-related offenses. Plant manager Sholom Rubashkin was convicted in November 2009 of knowingly employing undocumented workers and $26 million in bank fraud and sentenced to 27 years in prison in June 2010, a sentence later commuted by President Donald Trump. The raid also caused documented drops in local school attendance, business patronage, and property values.²⁸²⁹³⁰

Operation Streamline

In 2005, the administration launched Operation Streamline in the Del Rio, Texas, Border Patrol sector. It replaced civil immigration processing with mandatory federal criminal prosecution for unauthorized crossers.³¹ First-time crossers faced misdemeanor illegal entry charges of up to six months in prison; those with prior deportations faced felony illegal reentry charges of up to 20 years.³² The program spread to Yuma in 2006, Laredo in 2007, and Tucson and El Paso in early 2008. Criminal prosecutions of immigration-related misdemeanors in border districts rose more than 330 percent between 2002 and 2008, from 12,411 to 53,697 cases. Courts held mass plea hearings with up to 80 defendants at a time, and in December 2009 the Ninth Circuit ruled in United States v. Roblero-Solis that Tucson’s en masse hearings violated federal law.³³

Deportations and Local Partnerships

About two million immigrants were deported during Bush’s eight years in office.³⁴ In fiscal year 2007 alone, Customs and Border Protection and ICE returned or removed nearly 1.2 million people.²² Starting in 2006, DHS significantly expanded the 287(g) program, which delegated specific immigration enforcement authority to trained state and local officers. In 2008, the administration launched Secure Communities, which automatically checked the immigration status of anyone booked into a local jail by running fingerprints against federal immigration databases.³⁵

Humanitarian Executive Action: TPS

The W. Bush administration also used Temporary Protected Status. In 2001, it designated El Salvador for TPS after a series of devastating earthquakes; that designation has been continuously renewed since.⁴ The administration also extended TPS for Honduras and Nicaragua and transitioned Liberia from TPS to Deferred Enforced Departure.³⁶

What the Legacy Looks Like Now

Bush has been direct about the outcome. In a 2021 interview he told CBS News that the collapse of immigration reform was one of the biggest disappointments of his presidency: “I campaigned on immigration reform. I made it abundantly clear to voters this is something I intended to do.” He added that later presidents had leaned on executive orders instead of legislation, saying, “All that means is that Congress isn’t doing its job.”³⁷

A 2026 Brookings analysis observed that the Republican Party largely moved away from Bush’s openness to immigrants after the 2007 defeat, a shift accelerated by the Tea Party and the political rise of Donald Trump. A bipartisan Senate bill passed in 2013 with 14 Republican votes but died when House Speaker John Boehner declined to bring it to the floor. As of 2026, Congress has not enacted the comprehensive overhaul Bush pursued.³⁸

1
The American Presidency Project. Statement on Signing the Immigration Act of 1990
2
Immigration History. Immigration Act of 1990
3
U.S. Department of State. Foreign Affairs Manual – Diversity Immigrants
4
Migration Policy Institute. Temporary Protected Status in the United States
5
Vox. Family Fairness Immigration
6
American Immigration Council. Reagan-Bush Family Fairness Chronological History
7
American Immigration Council. Reagan-Bush Family Fairness
8
Migration Policy Institute. Bush Proposes New Temporary Worker Program
9
The American Presidency Project. Fact Sheet: Fair and Secure Immigration Reform
10
George W. Bush White House Archives. President Bush Proposes New Temporary Worker Program
11
George W. Bush White House Archives. President Bush’s Address to the Nation on Immigration Reform
12
National Guard Bureau. Operation Jump Start
13
George W. Bush White House Archives. Operation Jump Start Update
14
U.S. Marine Corps University Press. Implications From the Guard’s Extensive Use
15
Congressional Research Service. Immigration: Comprehensive Reform Legislation
16
NAFSA. Front Lines – Immigration
17
U.S. Senate. Roll Call Vote 235 – 110th Congress
18
The New York Times. Senate Blocks Immigration Bill
19
Migration Policy Institute. Comprehensive Immigration Reform Eludes Senate Again
20
The Heritage Foundation. Republicans Not Buying Bush Amnesty
21
George W. Bush White House Archives. Immigration Reform Initiatives
22
George W. Bush White House Archives. Immigration
23
U.S. Congress. Secure Fence Act of 2006
24
American Immigration Council. The Cost of a Border Wall
25
Stanford News. Border Wall Came at High Cost, Low Benefit to U.S. Workers
26
The American Presidency Project. Fact Sheet: The Bush Administration’s Strong Worksite Enforcement Efforts
27
Center for Immigration Studies. The 2006 Swift Raids
28
Iowa Capital Dispatch. Postville Raid Brought Devastation; 15 Years Later, It’s a Sign of Resilience
29
U.S. Department of Justice. Postville Enforcement Action
30
American Immigration Council. Understanding ICE Worksite Raids
31
Vera Institute of Justice. Operation Streamline Report
32
Forum Together. Fact Sheet: Operation Streamline
33
UC Berkeley School of Law. Operation Streamline Policy Brief
34
Pew Research Center. Record Number of Deportations in 2012
35
Migration Policy Institute. Federal-Local Cooperation on Immigration Enforcement
36
Congressional Research Service. Temporary Protected Status: Overview and Current Issues
37
The Hill. George W. Bush Says Failure of Immigration Reform One of His Biggest Regrets
38
Brookings Institution. How 2026’s Divisive Immigration Politics Could Lead to a Solution Down the Road