June 18 2019, 5:25 p.m.
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
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 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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