The Coming Deportation Force
President Trump has not waffled on his intention to clamp down on immigration and to conduct mass deportations of foreign nationals in the US.
“You are going to have a deportation force, and you are going to do it humanely.” — President Donald Trump, then candidate, Morning Joe, MSNBC, November 2015
Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted raids in at least 6 states — officials say the arrests were routine and planned before Trump was elected, but immigrant advocates are incredulous.
The recent raids are likely just a spark before the fire next time.
Even before he formally announced his candidacy in June 2015, Trump had begun testing anti-immigrant rhetoric , particularly targeting Mexicans, on political audiences, as in a speech to the Texas Patriots PAC in April , where he told the crowd: “Everything’s coming across the border: the illegals, the cars, the whole thing. It’s like a big mess. Blah. It’s like vomit.”
Announcing his run for POTUS Trump let loose perhaps his best known anti-immigrant pejorative, saying that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you.”
“They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
The raids last week were part of Operation Cross Check (pdf), an initiative of the National Fugitive Operations Program. Others, like Operation No Safe Haven, Operation Community Shield, Operation SOAR, Operation Return to Sender, and more have a stated purpose of apprehending certain categories of high-risk undocumented immigrants, and a reputation for racking up collateral arrests (there’s no indication the recent raids were of a greater scale than recent years of the same operation).
During five days of Operation Cross Check in March of 2015 ICE arrested 23 so-called “Dreamers,” referring to the approximately 740,000 children meeting certain conditions that afforded “backdoor” legal status through official deferred action under the DREAM Act.
ICE intended to deport all 23, the Washington Times reported.
ICE has conducted Operation Cross Check since 2007, and for the past several years arrested thousands of persons each sweep.
It is probable that the raids conducted in early February were already planned according to the same standard as the two previous years, under the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). This is not to say that official claims that the recent detentions are routine shouldn’t be taken with a grain of salt, after all, the president has explicitly promised mass deportations.
The new administration’s policy could naturally already be reflected in the actual execution of operations planned under Obama’s DHS — but targeting people for arrest, thousands total, if prior years are any indication, is a long, painstaking, and imperfect process.
Trump has made it clear he plans to use his executive discretion with extreme prejudice — that is, to effect the summary deportation of millions of people with no documented legal status in the United States — it is simply a matter of locating, apprehending, and repatriating or relocating millions of people. To wit, to reverse Obama’s deferred action regime.
The Trump administration is no doubt hard at work implementing new post-PEP operations (you know Trump will want to name his own).
It’s worth noting that even under PEP as with its predecessor Secure Communities, deportations were already at an all-time high.
To supply his deportation force with targets he’s likely to make use of every federal information resource. “[A]t least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out. They will come back some will come back, the best, through a process,” Trump said at a GOP primary debate in February.
Even if we assume that number is 100% accurate, in order to deport 11 million people ICE must first identify and locate the majority of those. Trump is likely to expand the search beyond conventional pools of deportation subjects.
At most, Trump’s force may have access to 3 million already in the ICE ERO system.
In addition to those already in the Deportable Alien Control System, DACS, Trump’s ICE has access to the Enforcement Integrated Database, EID, the central clearinghouse maintained by the agency for use by the entire Department of Homeland Security, of which DACS is a component.
Within EID there’s also EAGLE, a law enforcement biometric database. Many other federal databases contain information about immigration status, including TECS, STAYS, SEN and CMS.
Trump can also employ the TSDB through the Terrorist Screening Center, to cross-reference the terror watch list with immigration status.
Another high risk group is asylum-seekers, who have made themselves known but have no legal status (at least that Trump seems obliged to respect) who are already in detention
Daniel L. Stageman writes February 2 in The Crime Report that he expects Trump to leverage a mechanism, 287(g), to gain local law enforcement as a force multiplier.
My own prior work on local immigration enforcement partnerships leads me to believe that local enforcement will be restarted (or ramped up, where it has been ongoing under 287g “jail enforcement” agreements signed with the Obama Administration) first — and with the most significant impact and potential harm to immigrant communities — in jurisdictions that fit a few key criteria.
First, these “early adopter” jurisdictions will be headed by the same chief executives (most commonly elected county sheriffs) who signed 287g memorandums of agreement in the past.
Second, they will be jurisdictions that started deportation proceedings for significant numbers of immigrant arrestees under these programs in the past. And third, they will be jurisdictions that have clear incentive(s) for directly involving their personnel in immigration enforcement at the local level.
So far the Dreamers have a reprieve, but Trump told Time magazine in November 2016: “I want Dreamers for our children also. We’re going to work something out. On a humanitarian basis it’s a very tough situation. We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud. But that’s a very tough situation.”
The POTUS has never been ambiguous about his superlative plans to maximize deportations, and has indicated since taking office that he intends to keep his word in this regard.
“They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here…some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“We’re going to keep the families together, we have to keep the families together, but they have to go,“ Trump said on Meet the Press in August 2015
“We’re rounding ’em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they’re going to be happy because they want to be legalized. And, by the way, I know it doesn’t sound nice. But not everything is nice,” he said on 60 Minutes the next month.
And at a September 2016 rally: “Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. Otherwise we don’t have a country.”
Trump has just the dream team in place to execute writ-large removals, with Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and kindred spirit Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist.
Legally, Trump may deport a great number of people, and relief is limited. From an Overview of Immigration Law from Santa Clara University School of Law:
“The basis for the current statute is the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act — since amended by IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986), amended again by IMMACT90 (Immigration Act of 1990), amended again by IIRAIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996), amended by Homeland Security Act (2001), by REAL ID Act (2005), plus many other administrative and legislative amendments.”
The Act is a monstrous creature, and the second most complicated statutory law in the U.S. after tax law.
The presentation does note some compulsory protection.
“Unless a non US citizen has been previously removed or has an outstanding order of removal, that person is entitled to request a hearing before an immigration judge
Detention may be mandatory if the person has been convicted of an aggravated felony, otherwise the person may be requested to post bond
The first hearing (other than a bond hearing) is the Master Calendar, where the person will ask for more time, or plead to the charging document (often volunteer attorneys are available to assist)
An Individual (Merits) hearing is where testimony and witnesses may be presented in support of the application for relief.”
I’m not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and you should seek a lawyer for that if you need it. More law from other sources:
