How Donald Trump plans to ramp up deportations

IT HAS BEEN hard to keep track of the blitz of new immigration policies that President Donald Trump has introduced since taking office in January. During the first 100 days of his second presidency he has tried to end birthright citizenship; used war powers to deport alleged gang members to El Salvador; revoked the visas of more than 1,700 international students and recent graduates; and classified some 6,000 migrants as dead in order to cancel their Social Security cards and encourage them to self-deport. That is just a short list.

His attempts so far to expel illegal and legal immigrants have tested the limits of presidential power and run roughshod over due process. Yet for all the upheaval Mr Trump has provoked, deportations don’t seem to be increasing. Data are sparse, but leaked figures and some official statistics indicate that the pace of deportations may be trailing that of President Joe Biden’s final year in office, largely because irregular crossings at the southern border have fallen to the lowest level in decades. Migrant encounters began falling last year after Mexico cracked down and Mr Biden restricted asylum. Mr Trump’s tough talk, his deployment of the army and the effective end of asylum at the border have depressed crossings further.

A quieter border almost certainly slows the pace of deportations. During the previous fiscal year some 87% of removals were the result of arrests made at the frontier. With crossings so low, increasing deportations requires finding more illegal immigrants where they live and work in America’s interior, and that was always going to be hard to do.

But Mr Trump may soon get some help. Republicans in Congress are negotiating a budget bill that could increase funding for immigration enforcement by anywhere from $90bn to $175bn over the next decade. The annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that carries out deportations, is just $9bn. A funding windfall, combined with increased co-operation from local law enforcement in Republican states and the potential use of the armed forces could unlock a more aggressive phase of Mr Trump’s deportation campaign.

First, consider Congress’s financial contribution. “The most important pressing need for that money is detention,” says Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think-tank aligned with the administration. It’s easier to remove someone from the country if they are already in custody, but ICE’s detention centres are full. ICE will look for new places to detain people by reopening old jails, building tent camps on military bases and partnering with private prison firms to construct and run new facilities costing up to $45bn.

Money will also be funnelled to government contractors which can use technology to track migrants and move them around. ICE will pay Palantir, a software firm used by spooks, $30m to monitor self-deporting migrants. At a recent border-security expo in Phoenix, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, said the agency should resemble a logistics business, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.

Tresspassers beware

To step up deportations, ICE needs more agents. It is strengthening what are known as 287(g) agreements, which deputise local law-enforcement officers as federal immigration agents. As of April 17th, 456 sheriff and police departments or state agencies were working with ICE, 70% of which have signed onto the programme since Mr Trump’s inauguration. Most participating agencies are in states that Mr Trump won in November, but the list also includes several sheriff departments in conservative corners of Democratic states. Florida, home to at least 1.2m unauthorised immigrants, passed a law in 2022 compelling each county that operates a detention centre to join the programme.

Finally, there is a question about whether Mr Trump envisages a role for the army in his deportation campaign. More than 9,600 troops are set to patrol the border, and on April 11th Mr Trump directed the defence department to take control of a small strip of public land north of a section of the border wall. The armed forces are barred from taking part in domestic law enforcement by a Reconstruction-era law called the Posse Comitatus Act. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Centre for Justice, a left-leaning think-tank, reckons the order is an attempt to evade that law. From the administration’s perspective, if a migrant jumps the wall “they are trespassing on a military facility, and as such, they can be apprehended and removed without violating Posse Comitatus,” she notes.

The same law prevents Mr Trump from sending soldiers to help ICE arrest migrants on the street. That is, unless the president were to invoke the Insurrection Act, which overrides Posse Comitatus and allows a president to deploy the army at home, a power most often used to break up riots. The use of the Insurrection Act for immigration reasons would be unprecedented, and has the potential to create conflict between soldiers untrained in respecting civil liberties, and citizens of cities and states who may resent their presence. An April 20th deadline for the secretaries of defence and homeland security, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem, to recommend whether the act should be invoked passed without clarity about how the administration will proceed.

Invoking the act at some point would fit Mr Trump’s pattern of relying on emergency powers. The administration is “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks”, says Ms Goitein.

What sticks will be determined by the courts, and whether Mr Trump abides by the decisions of the judiciary. Worryingly, that is no longer a sure thing. At least 42 immigration actions are already being litigated, according to the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, run by Lucas Guttentag of Stanford University. One federal judge launched contempt proceedings, which are temporarily on hold, to determine whether the administration wilfully defied his order to halt deportations to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. He may not be the last. ■

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