Deportation Team Gets To Work On Details
BY MICHELLE HACKMAN AND ANDREW RESTUCCIA
WASHINGTON—Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump are drawing up plans to carry out his mass deportation pledge, including discussing how to pay for it and weighing a national-emergency declaration that would allow the incoming administration to repurpose military assets to detain and remove migrants.
The discussions, which started months before the election and have picked up since Trump’s victory, include policy changes that would be required to ramp up deportations, according to people working on the presidential transition, members of Congress and others close to the president-elect.
Among the changes: revoking a Biden administration policy memo directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement not to pursue immigrants in the country illegally who haven’t committed other crimes, and making changes to the immigration court system to speed up cases. Trump’s allies have said they plan first to make a priority of immigrants in the country illegally who have re-
ceived final orders of deportation from an immigration court, of which there are about 1.3 million, as well as those with other criminal convictions or charges.
The plans are still in flux, the president-elect’s advisers said. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the transition, said: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”
Trump has argued an aggressive deportation effort is necessary after an estimated eight million migrants entered the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration. It isn’t known precisely how many people are living in the U.S. illegally. The Department of Homeland Security estimated the population to be about 11 million in 2022, though the number has likely grown since.
As a first step, Trump’s advisers are discussing issuing a national emergency declaration at the border on his first day in office, which his team believes would allow him to move money from the Pentagon to pay for construction of a wall along the southern border and to assist with immigrant detention and deportation. But the legality is unclear. A national emergency, Trump’s advisers believe, would also unlock the ability to use military bases for detention and military planes for deportations.
Should Trump realize even a fraction of his vision—he has pledged the largest mass deportation in U.S. history—he could send shock waves across the economy and upend the lives of millions of migrants and their families who have called the U.S. home for years.
One major hurdle to the plan is finding the money to pay for it. One estimate by the American Immigration Council, a liberal immigration group, estimated that an operation to deport the total number of people living in the U.S.
illegally could cost $968 billion over a decade, or roughly $88 billion a year.
Any major deportation effort requires enormous resources to hire more federal agents to identify and arrest immigrants, contract out space to detain them and procure airplanes to fly them to other countries.
Trump has played down the costs. “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not—really, we have no choice,” he told NBC News this past week.
Officials from Trump’s first administration have written draft executive orders to resume construction of the border wall and revise President Biden’s existing ban on asylum at the southern border to remove the humanitarian exemptions. They are planning to enter aggressive negotiations with Mexico to revive the Remain in Mexico policy, a person working on Trump’s transition said, and are identifying potential safe third countries where asylum seekers could be sent.
They also want to revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants who have either been granted a form of humanitarian protection known as Temporary Protected Status—which covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans—or entered the country on a quasi-legal status called Humanitarian Parole. That population includes millions who have entered via government appointments at the southern border, as well as tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed into the U.S. following the Russian invasion.
Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas), an anti-illegal immigration hard-liner, said he believes the Trump administration should disregard those deportation protections because, in his view, they were issued illegally.
Trump has alleged the new immigrant population has disrupted society by committing crimes, taking jobs and inflating the cost of housing— though available data show immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens, and analysts have said they often fill low-paying jobs Americans are less likely to take.
Trump struggled during his first term to deport large numbers of migrants, particularly those living in blue states that cut off cooperation with the federal government. In addition to a huge infusion of cash, massive deportations would require unprecedented coordination among federal, state and local officials.
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of ICE during Trump’s first term, is expected to be appointed to a senior White House role overseeing the southern border and immigration, according to people familiar with the matter.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s first-term immigration agenda, is also widely seen by Trump’s allies as returning to the White House in a high-level job.
Rather than forcibly deporting migrants, Trump’s advisers are also hopeful they can induce some to leave voluntarily, according to people familiar with the matter. They have discussed offering immigrants in the country illegally—or those who entered on parole through Biden administration programs— a chance to leave without penalties, so they can return on a visa if they are eligible. Under normal circumstances when someone is deported, they are barred from returning on a visa for 10 years. —Richard Rubin contributed to this article.
