Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican businessman from Tulsa, is in the midst of serving his eighth and last term as Oklahoma’s 28th governor.
Late last year, Stitt was also elected as Chairman of the National Governors’ Association, a longtime bipartisan group focused on helping governors find solutions to common problems and shape federal policy to serve their states.
State Capitol reporter Lionel Ramos sat down with him one-on-one to talk about immigration enforcement in Oklahoma and how to manage increased welfare administration costs imposed on states by Congress.
100% support for Trump’s mass deportation agenda over the last year
Stitt said he and the State Legislature have been in lockstep with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement, and that he’s proud of the work Oklahoma’s state and local law enforcement agencies have accomplished to support federal deportation priorities.
“First, I'll say, you know, President Trump won the presidential election based on immigration because I think Americans were really frustrated with Biden's open border policy and the amount of people pouring into the country unvetted, unchecked,” Stitt said. “So, he won by securing the southern border. And we applaud him for that. We support that 100%.”
The governor touted his decision to send Oklahoma National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lonestar. The 50 Guard troops were sent as a “force multiplier” to aid Abbott’s multi-billion-dollar enforcement operation for 30 days. Their deployment included Oklahoma in a coalition of 13 states that did the same.
The idea was to address border security, an issue Republicans say former Democratic President Joe Biden failed to address, but critics in Oklahoma and across the nation called the move political, aimed at garnering Trump’s favor. In all, the move cost Oklahoma about $825,000.
Last November, Stitt also announced his own Operation Guardian, an Oklahoma-based operation led by Public Safety Commissioner Tim Tipton aimed at maximizing local law enforcement’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as Trump's mass deportation agenda was set to roll out in January.
“I set up Operation Guardian because I looked through our prison system, I said, ‘I want an accounting of how many people are here that taxpayers are paying for that should not even be in our country anyway,” Stitt said. “Actually, Oklahoma's number three in the entire country in getting criminals that are not supposed to be here anyway out of our state.”
Stitt made the same claim in an interview with NPR in late February, but a fact brief by the investigative nonprofit news organization Oklahoma Watch published March 31 reports that's not true.
The brief, using ICE arrest data, reports that Oklahoma ranks somewhere around No. 13 for total ICE arrests, and No. 5 for arrest rate per 100,000 residents. It also points out that nearly half of all immigration arrests in Oklahoma were made by local law enforcement or by jails already holding people without legal immigration statuses.
A more recent analysis of government data provided by ICE in response tog a FOIA request, processed by the Deportation Data Project, and analyzed by KOSU, shows that of the 4,116 people arrested in Oklahoma for immigration violations between Jan. 1, 2025, and March 10, 2026, 73% have no prior criminal history. 11% are convicted criminals, and another 15% are categorized as “other immigration violators.”
Officials with Stitt’s office referred KOSU to the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety for data showing the governor’s statements are true. A spokesperson at DPS then referred KOSU to ICE, which did not respond to inquiries for the information.
‘What’s the endgame?’
When asked how Stitt reconciles numbers showing that nearly three-quarters of people arrested in Oklahoma for immigration violations have no prior criminal record, he said it boils down to federal law tying the hands of states that may want to do things differently.
“You know, it's a complicated issue,” Stitt said. “If you've got a retainer for your deportation and the feds are enforcing that, that is the federal law. That's why we need to have people sit down to say, ‘Who do we want here contributing to our society? Who are the best people to be here?’”
He said there is a balance to strike between allowing people who contribute to Oklahoma’s economy to stay, with state-level legal avenues to enable that, and making sure that immigrants in the country without federal permission aren’t a ‘drain’ on tax dollars meant for U.S. Citizens.
“We have Medicare and Medicaid and some of these social services, you know, we have to think about what is the drain on the US taxpayer if we have open borders, right?” Stitt said. “I mean, technically, the people that they're kicking out, it's hard to argue with the fact that they were here illegally. And so that's the nuance of this issue.”
Still, as several nationwide polls show, the American public’s approval of Trump’s immigration agenda wanes, Stitt has begun questioning the president’s ultimate goals on this front.
“I also kind of went against a little bit against my party when I said, ‘hey, what's the end game now?’” Stitt said, recalling his NPR interview shortly after two U.S. Citizens were shot and killed at the hands of ICE agents in Minnesota.
“Tell us what the endgame is,” Stitt said. “That's what we need to know because I think we're overthinking this immigration policy.”
What immigration policy in Oklahoma – and elsewhere – should look like
As Chair of the bipartisan National Governors Association (NGA), which he leads alongside Maryland’s Democratic Governor Wes Moore, Stitt said he thinks states should have a greater role in regulating their own immigration policies, based on their needs.
“I believe that governors need a seat at the table, and we need to issue workforce permits,” Stitt said. “I know what my agricultural community wants. I know what my hospitality and construction industries want. So, for example, if a construction company is vouching for an employee, we should make that happen. We should give them a workforce permit. And I think that's it's very simple.”
He said he’s putting together a group of governors from both major parties to consider what such policies might look like and to take those ideas to Congress, which has sole authority to regulate immigration in the United States.
Stitt said the focus is on protecting existing government resources meant for U.S. citizens, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid or Medicare.
It’s why he’s said he supports recent legislation that requires state and federal authorities to report people without federal immigration status who apply for those benefits, despite concerns that such laws would keep immigrant parents from applying on behalf of their U.S. citizen children, who are entitled to receive them.
“If they don't have a job, if they're on government assistance or Medicare or Medicaid, we don't want them. Right?” Stitt said. “We have enough problems taking care of our own citizens.”
But people don’t migrate to the United States only to work, but because they feel they have to escape violence and political persecution in their home countries. Hundreds of thousands of people arrive each year as refugees, asylum seekers, temporary immigration status holders, and special visa applicants. All of which are federal designations for the purposes of legal immigration.
Recent examples include people from Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Myanmar, Somalia, and Syria, all of whom, as of November last year, began being slowly rolled off federal benefits they once qualified for.
When asked if there was room for such immigrants in Stitt’s vision of state-run immigration policy making, he said it depends on how much they end up contributing to where they live, and took the opportunity to repeat a recent catch phrase he’s come up with in light of the broader conversation around increased welfare administration costs.
“Government benefits are supposed to be a bridge between getting a job,” he said. “They're supposed to be a trampoline, not a hammock. We can't afford to have someone who is a working-bodied person able to get a job and provide for their families on government assistance.”
