Donald Trump’s dream of mass deportations is a fantasy
JUDGE CHRISTOPHER thielemann already seems exhausted when he walks into his chambers. But his exasperation is not directed towards the lawyers, interpreter or immigrants seated before him. It’s just another day at immigration court in downtown Dallas—and lately those days have been busy. Judge Thielemann says he currently has 23,000 cases pending. “I’m going to keep saying that out loud,” he remarks, as if he can’t believe it himself. Then his next deportation hearing begins.
During his campaign for president, Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions of irregular immigrants. Delegates at the Republican National Convention last month in Milwaukee waved “Mass deportation now!” signs. He portrays the policy as something he could achieve by sheer force of will. But the grinding pace of Judge Thielemann’s courtroom in Dallas is just one example of the ways in which carrying out mass deportations would be harder than Mr Trump allows. In practice, such an effort would be stymied by legal, logistical and political obstacles.
Mr Trump has talked about mass deportations since 2015. Even during his first run for president he spoke approvingly of “Operation Wetback”, the Eisenhower administration’s aggressive campaign in the 1950s that resulted in the return of seasonal farmworkers to Mexico. Mr Trump has not said how many people he wants to deport. The Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank, reckons there were 11.3m unauthorised immigrants living in America in 2022. The former president sometimes suggests he would like to get rid of them all. J.D. Vance, a senator for Ohio and Mr Trump’s running-mate, recently said they should “start with 1m…and go from there”.
Yet even removing 1m immigrants in one year is wildly ambitious. Deportations are a combination of “removals”, when a migrant is ordered to leave, and “returns”, when they voluntarily agree to leave. In the 1990s and early 2000s most migrants were Mexicans who could be returned relatively easily. Fewer migrants trekked north during the global financial crisis, beginning in 2007, and returns plummeted (see chart).
Expelliarmus
Removals increased under Barack Obama, who was dubbed the “deporter-in-chief”. But the most Mr Obama removed in one year was 430,000 people, less than half what Mr Vance is suggesting. At first glance, President Joe Biden may look like the recent deporter-in-chief, but that is only because Title 42, a public-health measure, allowed him to expel border-crossers quickly during the pandemic. Often those expelled just tried to cross again.
It is now common for migrants crossing America’s southern border to try to claim asylum, a lengthy process adjudicated in the country’s immigration courts. As of July, there were 3.7m cases pending. While a migrant’s case is being considered they cannot be deported. If their claim is denied they can appeal. Recently arrived illicit migrants who don’t claim asylum can be deported quickly without a hearing through a process called “expedited removal”. Mr Trump could try to expand that policy to migrants who have been in the country longer and live far from the border, as he attempted to do during his first term, though he would face legal challenges.
If Mr Trump cannot find his millions to deport near the border, he may try to round up migrants who have been deported previously and returned to America, or have been ordered to go but have not yet left. Records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that carries out removals, suggest that there were 1.3m people in 2023 awaiting deportation. Some of them are monitored by ICE, but many are not. Finding and deporting those people would require cash from Congress to hire and train more ICE agents, build more detention centres and operate more deportation flights. “The issue has never been a willingness to enforce the law,” says John Sandweg, a former acting head of ICE under Mr Obama. “It’s a resource issue.” That is despite ballooning spending on immigration enforcement. Together, the annual budgets of ICE and Customs and Border Protection grew by 78%, to nearly $30bn, in the decade to 2023.
A visit to the Prairieland detention centre south of Dallas reveals why such facilities can’t be built quickly. Barbed wire abounds. Rooms are set up with video conferencing so detainees can meet their lawyers and attend virtual court. To enter any room, staff must push a button that signals to some unseen watchman to unlock the heavy-looking doors. A woman scared to be seen by a doctor screams for several minutes before staff can calm her. Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr Trump’s restrictionist immigration policy during his first term, has suggested setting up detention camps on open land in Texas. It’s hard to imagine that a camp in the Texas hinterlands would have the infrastructure needed to respond to security challenges or safeguard the well-being of its detainees.
The final hurdles Mr Trump would face are political. Persuading countries to take back their citizens requires a diplomatic touch. Mr Biden has had some success here. Deportation flights to Venezuela resumed last year when America, briefly, lifted sanctions. They have since stopped. The first large flight to China since 2018 took off this year. Mr Trump’s tendency to act more like an insurgent than a diplomat may undermine his stated aims.
Domestic politics also matters. Mr Trump might decide to focus on unlawful migrants who are already incarcerated. When Mr Obama was in office he prioritised the deportations of convicted criminals using “Secure Communities”, a programme that helps identify the immigration status of those in custody. ICE can request that a local jail detain an immigrant. But not all states and cities comply. An unofficial tally from the Centre for Immigration Studies, which advocates lower immigration, suggests that 13 states and more than 200 cities and counties have some kind of “sanctuary” law on the books that restricts co-operation with ICE.
Consider two states home to large numbers of irregular immigrants: Texas and Illinois. Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, would probably be a willing partner in federal immigration enforcement. ICE’s Dallas field office has arrested more illicit migrants this year than any other. The deputy field-office director attributes this, in part, to politics. Meanwhile, Illinois passed a law in 2021 that blocked local jails from detaining people for ICE. If Mr Trump wins the election in November, blue states may pass more sanctuary laws to pre-empt any attempt at mass deportations. The result would be a deportation campaign enforced unequally across the country, depending on the politics of each place.
To get around the lack of ICE agents the former president has suggested that he would use the National Guard. A Reconstruction-era law prohibits the military from taking part in civilian law enforcement. There are some ways the National Guard might still be used, but the president cannot, for example, suggest that a Republican governor send troops to a Democratic state to round up immigrants. “The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the Insurrection Act,” says Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Centre, a think-tank. The law, which has been invoked 30 times, allows the president to use the military as a police force. Mr Trump’s dream of deporting millions is far-fetched. But even botched attempts to do it could breed chaos.■
Correction (August 9th 2024): A previous version of this story mis-stated the highest number of people Barack Obama was able to deport in one year.
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