I'm aware there were such games going on, yes, but I don't believe it had a very big impact on the outcome, to the extent that you can blame the Clinton campaign for Trump's primary win. Certainly the disproportionate media attention he got during that campaign helped him suck all the air out of the room as you say, but that was mostly just because he kept saying such outrageous things that the media felt obliged to report them, I don't think they needed much pressure from Clinton or anybody else for that.

Depends what exactly your goal is, I guess. Looking at the longer term, illegal immigration in the US has been fairly complex because a large share of it was temporary migrant workers who weren't necessarily trying to stay for good and in fact went back and forth across the border several times - and who made themselves indispensable for certain industries in certain areas because they did jobs Americans weren't willing to do, or not at the wages that were on offer anyway. If you simplify the whole issue to 'let's just toss out as many illegal immigrants as possible, doesn't matter what jobs they're doing or how they're acting or how long they've been here', that's going to hurt a lot of companies and local economies - and it rather remains to be seen whether Americans or legal residents will in fact be taking over the jobs that become vacant in such a way, at higher wages, or if the farms and companies will just go bankrupt.

Then there's asylum seekers for whom you'd want to have reasonable decisions on whether or not they should qualify for legal residence (whether temporary or permanent), but for that you need sufficient staff to make those assessments and reach justified decisions within a reasonable period of time - and if the decision is negative, then yes, you need enforcement of that decision.

That bipartisan proposal at the time may not have been perfect - and tbh I can't remember what I thought of it at the time - but looking back at it now, it does look like a missed opportunity, since it rightly dealt with the bigger picture, not only law enforcement against illegal immigrants but also legal immigration, the impact on the labour market etc.

As for the enforcement of 'the law we already have' under the past few presidents, that may be your view but the statistics don't back that up to be honest... Trump's first administration actually deported fewer people than Obama's second and while Covid did obviously mess up pretty much all statistics in almost any domain for 2020 and 2021 so the Trump-Biden transition period is difficult to assess, still the Biden administration maintained many policies from the Trump administration with regards to illegal administration much longer than they might have done and basically used Covid as an excuse to reduce illegal immigration, at first.

Subsequently they did set up or greatly expand various programs that allow immigrants from certain countries to come to the US without becoming legal residents - 'humanitarian parole', TPS, a TPS-like program for Ukrainians, etc - and since those people are counted as 'unauthorized immigrants' even if they were coming into the country in a controlled, legal manner and on a temporary basis, the number of 'unauthorized immigrants' did indeed increase substantially. They then strongly cut back on those programs in mid-2024, which I suppose is what you refer to in your comments about the election, but neither the initial expansion of these programs nor their later reduction had much to do with enforcement of the existing laws or expulsion of immigrants who were really illegal rather than granted such temporary access.

Which I'll admit also means the Trump administration is entitled (legally and politically, whatever one may think of it morally) to end or refuse to extend these programs, as they have been doing, which presumably covers a large part of the 'self-deported illegal alien' numbers they've been boasting about. Their number of 622k actual deportations, while record-breaking, is not nearly as spectacular compared to the roughly 400k per year in most years of the Obama administration.