In his first 100 days, President-elect Donald Trump intends to begin the process of deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants. He is anticipated to revoke parole for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. And he is likely to reverse a policy that severely limited deportations of those who were not judged threats to public safety or national security.
Trump’s administration is already considering ways to construct executive measures that can withstand legal challenges from immigrants’ rights groups, in the hopes of avoiding an early setback like his 2017 travel ban targeting majority-Muslim countries. This time, Trump may have more friendly arbiters. These battles will be decided by a federal judiciary that he altered during his first term, including nominating over 200 federal judges himself. And at the very top — the final decider of these issues — is the Supreme Court, to which Obama chose three conservative justices.
Legal battles, however, will not be the main long-term hurdle to Trump’s ambitious immigration policy. Mass deportation presents logistical issues that are more difficult to forecast. The pace with which Trump can overhaul deportation policy is dependent on overcoming tactical hurdles such as increasing detention capacity and clearing a vast immigration court backlog.
Trump has already appointed South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has limited expertise with the Department of Homeland Security, to run the massive department. Stephen Miller, widely regarded as the architect of Trump’s first-term restrictionist agenda, wields significant power in domestic policy from within the White House. Thomas Homan, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, is returning as the administration’s border czar.
Throughout it all, Trump’s immigration staff will face severe and ongoing scrutiny from the president.
Here are some of the immigration efforts that Trump’s administration is anticipated to launch swiftly, as well as the challenges they may face:
Increasing deportations
Trump campaigned on mass deportation, which may effect a major portion of the 11 million people estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to be in the United States without legal license.
However, deporting millions of individuals may cause logistical challenges. According to DHS, the highest number of annual removals occurred in FY 2013 during the Obama administration, when more than 430,000 persons were removed from the United States.
Trump’s advisers have stated that they will prioritize immigrants with criminal convictions and final removal orders for deportation. According to the pro-immigrant American Immigration Council, around 1.19 million people will have such orders by 2022, indicating that their cases have progressed through immigration court and judges have decided they must depart. Simply removing the persons from that category might take years.
Finding, detaining, and removing those persons would require significant resources, according to John Sandweg, ICE’s acting director from 2013 to 2014. Detention capacity alone would be an expensive and immediate concern. Lawmakers must authorize the funds, and even if they do, the administration must employ, vet, and train additional cops, which is no easy task.
According to the agency, ICE currently employs 7,000 officers and conducts 250,000 deportations each year. If Trump’s government wants to triple this figure, as he has promised, training academies could not handle the influx of new employees.
“It is just a resource game, but it’s a hard game to play,” Sandweg indicated.
Despite the obstacles and obstructions, Trump has been unwavering.
“It’s not about the price tag. “It’s not—really, we have no choice,” he told NBC News on Thursday. “When people have been killed and murdered, when drug lords have ruined countries, they will return to those countries because they will not stay here. “There is no price tag.”
Ending parole for individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela
Another policy during the Biden administration that is likely to be phased out soon is a unique visa-free humanitarian parole mechanism for select Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan residents. To dissuade migrants from crossing the border illegally, the Biden administration proposed allowing some persons from these nations to enter legitimately if they were vetted and had an American-based sponsor. As of August, almost 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans had arrived in the United States through the program and been granted two years of legal residency and employment.
In contrast, Trump campaigned on expelling a large number of them. Over the summer, he falsely claimed that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. He also pledged to cancel Haitians’ status for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which protects some people from deportation and offers them work permits. Many Haitians can lawfully work in the United States thanks to TPS, a measure that Homeland Security secretaries have employed since 1990.
“All that stuff is going to end very fast, almost immediately,” said Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a restrictionist organization.
Stein’s group is tightly aligned with Trump’s team and served as a personnel feeder throughout the first Trump administration.
“They basically hired half our staff,” he told me.
Mark Krikorian of the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies acknowledged that the temporary provision of TPS work documents to people from certain risky nations would most likely be severely restricted.
Currently, DHS offers this program to immigrants from 16 countries, including El Salvador, Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, and Haiti. During Trump’s first term, the administration attempted to eliminate TPS for more than 300,000 people. However, immigrants filed a lawsuit, claiming that the move was motivated by racial animus. They obtained a countrywide injunction that lasted throughout the Trump presidency.