Blue states and heavily-Democratic urban areas are also likely to have explicit local laws preventing local police authorities from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, since whether it is good or bad to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement is a central point of disagreement in partisan American politics right now. For the same partisan reasons involving political support for illegal immigrants, there are probably more illegal immigrants physically residing in heavily-Democratic urban areas and in blue states. So if you're federal immigration enforcement and you want to mass-arrest illegal immigrants, blue states and districts are where you're gonna be inclined to conduct raids anyway.
In any case, visibly arresting illegal immigrants is a core political demand of the MAGA base, and they eagerly want to see more raids like this one. The fact that prominent figures from Democratic-party aligned institutions like prestige news media and academia (which certainly describes Paul Krugman) strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.
In any case, visibly arresting illegal immigrants is a core political demand of the MAGA base, and they eagerly want to see more raids like this one. The fact that prominent figures from Democratic-party aligned institutions like prestige news media and academia (which certainly describes Paul Krugman) strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.