What You Need to Know About Trump's Mass Deportation Threat
By Maryam Saleh, The Intercept
19 June 19
In between tweets complaining about Fox News polling numbers and boasting
about the size of future rallies, President Donald Trump took a moment on
Monday to send shock waves through immigrant communities with a threat meant
to rally his base - but one that is not actually logistically possible.
"Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal
aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States," he
tweeted. "They will be removed as fast as they come in." An administration
official later told the Associated Press that the effort would target people
who have received final orders of deportation. There are more than 1 million
people living in the United States with final deportation orders, among an
undocumented population of about 11 million.
"He obviously wants everyone to believe he's talking about some mass
roundup, which is just not possible," immigration attorney Matt Cameron said
of Trump, "both because of resources and because of due process."
The genuine fear, coupled with the artificial threat, coming at a time of
maximum insecurity for immigrants in the United States, has put immigrant
rights' groups in a bind. They are being careful in their responses to
Trump's tweet, trying to avoid creating panic, while also trying to equip
people with resources needed to defend themselves legally. Adonia Simpson,
director of the Family Defense Program at the Miami-based Americans for
Immigrant Justice, said her group was considering whether to host a know
your rights training, noting that, in her experience, immigrants tend to be
afraid to go out and access legal resources at times like these. The
National Immigrant Justice Center, for its part, has been circulating know
your rights information online.
Simpson described people with final deportation orders as the "lowest
hanging fruit" of the immigration system. "The easiest population to go
after would be individuals that have final orders of removal and are perhaps
going to check in at their local ICE offices," she said. (People with final
orders of removal are sometimes allowed to stay in the United States as long
as they periodically check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
often because the agency lacks the resources to deport them, they have
strong family ties in the country, or there is no other country willing to
take them in.)
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Trump linked his announcement of a mass
roundup to recent talks with Mexico and Guatemala to keep asylum-seekers
from reaching the United States, which is vastly different from removing
people with final deportation orders from the country. This is yet another
indication that Trump's tweet - issued the night before his official 2020
campaign launch - was about appealing to a nativist base rather than an
actual policy.
Another possibility is that Trump was referring to the rumored expansionof
expedited removal, a program that currently allows ICE to quickly deport
people within 14 days of their entry to the United States, if they're caught
within 100 miles of the border. "To be totally blunt, I don't think Trump is
capable of that level of nuance," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy
analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
By all measures, a plan to deport "millions" of people is an astounding
exaggeration - even beginning to deport millions, as Trump pledged ICE would
do, stretches the truth to a breaking point. As Sarah Pierce, an analyst at
the Migration Policy Institute, pointed out on Twitter, ICE has deported an
average of 90,000 people from the interior of the United States in recent
years. The largest number of people ICE deported overall - from the
interior, as well as recent border crossers - was about 420,000 people in
2012.
In response to a question about Trump's tweet, ICE sent a statement that
referred to interior enforcement. "ICE will continue to conduct interior
enforcement without exemption for those who are in violation of federal
immigration law," the statement reads. "This includes routine targeted
enforcement operations, criminals, individuals subject to removal orders,
and worksite enforcement."
REGARDLESS OF WHAT Trump was referring to, or if such a plan to deport
immigrants actually exists, ICE is not actually capable of such a
large-scale deportation operation, immigration lawyers and analysts say.
There are about 5,000 officers in Enforcement and Removal Operations, or
ERO, an arm of ICE, who carry out deportations. From a basic staffing
perspective, that's not enough people to work to arrest and deport millions
of people. Even if ICE transferred personnel from Homeland Security
Investigations, the arm that looks into criminal activity and trafficking,
to ERO, there would still be a shortage of officers.
"The only way they could really actually do this is to reassign people from
HSI without actually going after people with serious criminal records," said
Cameron, who noted that the majority of immigrants with final deportation
orders don't have criminal records. "Potentially they're giving up serious
security investigations," he added, referring to ICE. "We can talk about the
necessity of those investigations, but at least on paper, that's what they
justify their existence with."
ICE did not respond to a question about whether it would transfer personnel
from HSI to ERO.
Another factor that makes it impossible for ICE to effectuate the plan is
the lack of available bed space. Deportees don't go straight from custody to
a foreign country, but are generally detained first; there are about 50,000
beds in immigration detention centers around the country. Then there are
basic logistics. To track down people with final deportation orders, ICE
would probably look them up at their last known address, which, in most
cases, is likely not their current address, Cameron said. Immigrants with
final deportation orders often don't have passports, and ICE would have to
engage in a monthslong process to obtain travel documents for the people it
intends to deport.
One of the first immigration actions Trump took as president was to
eliminate a system of priorities that President Barack Obama created for
deportations. The system prioritized the deportation of people with serious
criminal records or who otherwise posed a threat to public safety, and its
creation was an acknowledgement by the Obama administration that it's simply
not possible to deport the 11 million people who live in the United States
without proper legal documents. Though the Department of Homeland Security
under Trump has gone after all undocumented immigrants with equal zeal, it
has maintained that it is doing so in the interest of public safety - a
notion that is easily disproven.
"Trump has abandoned any pretense of any kind of priorities," Cameron said.
"If they're going to apply that standard for people with final orders,
you're going to give up any pretense that this is about public safety."
Due process safeguards in the immigration system are another hurdle the
administration would face.
"If you start aggressively enforcing against people who have final orders
right now, you're going to see lots of motions to reopen being filed, which
would slog up a court system that's already backed up," said Cameron, who is
based on Boston and works frequently with Central American immigrants.
The same issue would exist even if a future enforcement operation were to
expand beyond people with final orders of removal to something like a
workplace raid, Simpson said. "Most of these individuals would have the
opportunity to have their case heard before the immigration judge," she
said. "These aren't people who would be immediately deported. This is
something that isn't being considered in terms of effectuating removals of
people in the coming weeks."
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