President Donald Trump
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 shockwaves 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 round up, 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 the 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, the 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 this. 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 ICE, often because the agency lacks the
resources to deport them, they have strong family ties in the country,
or there is no other country that is 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
expansion of 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 months-long 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 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.”