In his first 100 days, President-elect Donald Trump plans to initiate the deportation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, ending parole programs for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. He is also expected to reverse a policy that limited deportations to individuals deemed threats to public safety or national security. Trump’s team is carefully crafting executive actions designed to withstand legal challenges from immigrants’ rights groups, aiming to avoid an early setback like the one his 2017 travel ban targeting majority-Muslim nations faced, Politico reports. He is also set to reimplement “Remain in Mexico” on his first day back in office.
This time, Trump may benefit from a judiciary more favorable to his policies. During his first term, he appointed more than 200 federal judges, significantly reshaping the judiciary. At the pinnacle of this transformed court system is the Supreme Court, now bolstered by three conservative justices appointed by Trump. However, legal battles are not the only hurdles for Trump’s ambitious immigration agenda. Logistical challenges, such as expanding detention capacity and addressing the immense backlog in immigration courts, could slow the implementation of mass deportations. The speed at which Trump can reshape deportation policies will depend on overcoming these operational obstacles.
Trump has appointed South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, whose gubernatorial experience should help her lead the vast agency. Within the White House, Stephen Miller, widely regarded as the architect of Trump’s first-term restrictive immigration policies, will have a broad role overseeing domestic policy. Additionally, Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, is returning to serve as the administration’s border czar.
Trump’s advisers have signaled that the administration will prioritize deporting individuals with criminal convictions and those with final removal orders. According to the pro-immigration American Immigration Council, approximately 1.19 million people had final removal orders in 2022, meaning their cases had been adjudicated in immigration court, and judges determined they must leave. Deporting even this subset could take years.
Finding, detaining, and removing these individuals would require significant resources, said John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE from 2013 to 2014. One of the most immediate and costly challenges would be expanding detention capacity. This would require congressional funding, and even if approved, the administration would face the logistical hurdle of recruiting, vetting, and training additional officers—a time-intensive process, Politico noted. Currently, ICE employs about 7,000 officers, who oversee roughly 250,000 deportations annually, according to the agency. To meet Trump’s pledge of quadrupling that number, ICE training academies would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new hires required to execute such a plan.
“It is just a resource game, but it’s a hard game to play,” Sandweg said. Regardless of the hurdles and impediments, Trump has been unequivocal. “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice,” he told NBC News on Thursday. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
At the start of the Biden administration, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo outlining priorities for immigration enforcement. The guidance emphasized focusing on individuals who pose threats to national security and public safety. It also directed ICE officers to consider “the totality of the facts and circumstances” surrounding a criminal conviction, rather than using the conviction alone as the basis for deportation. Immigration restrictionists anticipate that this guidance will be one of the first policies reversed under the incoming Trump administration.
The Biden administration introduced a mobile phone application called CBP One, allowing migrants to schedule appointments to seek asylum. While Democrats promoted the app as a way to bring more order to border processes, Republicans criticized it as a tool to expedite entry for individuals who shouldn’t be permitted into the United States. Amnesty International also condemned the app, arguing that it violates international law by restricting where and how people can seek asylum. Under the Trump administration, according to a source familiar with the transition, the app is unlikely to survive.
The Trump administration is expected to leverage threats against countries that refuse to repatriate migrants slated for deportation as a tool to expedite removals. A significant obstacle to rapid deportations is that some migrants’ home countries—especially those convicted of violent crimes—often resist accepting their return. This can result in individuals remaining in U.S. jails or immigration detention centers indefinitely. To compel compliance, the U.S. government can threaten to impose visa restrictions on certain categories of applicants from those countries.
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