() – Given his rhetoric demonizing undocumented immigrants and his promise to undertake mass deportations when he returns to the White House in January, it is somewhat shocking that deportations actually decreased in the four years Donald Trump was president.
It is also surprising that President Joe Biden’s administration has kept pace and deported a similar number of people as Trump’s.
There is a lot of context hidden in those figures. Trump spent his presidency hyperfocused on immigration, trying to build a wall on the southern border, limiting entry to the United States by travelers from majority Muslim countries and signaling to Americans and the world that the U.S. would not be so cozy.
Trump also authorized immigration raids on businesses, something his incoming “border czar,” former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, said was to be expected when Trump takes office. in January.
Homan told Fox News on Monday that Trump’s second term will be like his first, but with more deportations.
“It’s going to be the same as during the first administration, only much more so because 10 million people entered this country illegally under the Biden administration,” Homan said.
During his first term, Trump also promised mass deportations. And he actually deported a large number of people – more than 1.5 million – during his four years in office, according to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a political analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
But that’s about half of the 2.9 million deportations carried out during Barack Obama’s first term and less than the 1.9 million deportations during Obama’s second term. That’s on par with Biden’s 1.49 million deportations, according to the updated calculations that Bush-Joseph shared with me. Those numbers do not include the millions of people turned away at the border under a Covid-era policy enacted by Trump and used for most of Biden’s term.
A lot of context is needed to explain those numbers. Biden’s deportations are focused on the border, according to Bush-Joseph. Trump and Obama’s numbers included more deportations from within the country.
Obama’s deportations targeted single men from Mexico, he said, while today undocumented immigrants are more likely to travel to the U.S. from further afield and in family units. This complicates the process of returning them, not only logistically but also because many countries do not accept repatriations. Mexico has begun to welcome people from different countries as part of an agreement with the Biden Government.
“An important context for any administration dealing with deportations is that the American immigration system is very outdated, overwhelmed and under-resourced,” Bush-Joseph said, noting that there are 1.3 million people in the United States who Despite having already received an expulsion notice, they have not been deported.
Another factor that has reduced the number of deportations is that many local law enforcement agencies have stopped cooperating with federal immigration authorities, a change that began during Obama’s presidency and was amplified during Trump’s term, according to David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Bier’s research has revealed that Trump’s tough approach during his first term had some unintended consequences.
For example, instead of prioritizing the removal of people with criminal records, Trump widened his dragnet by placing less emphasis on immigration action against people who were considered threats to public safety and instead prioritizing action against everyone. those who were in the country illegally. This led to Trump’s controversial family separation policy.
Bier holds that by filling detention centers with asylum seekers instead of focusing on detaining people thought to have criminal records, the Trump administration ended up allowing more people with criminal records into the country.
In a separate studioBier also analyzed the increase in detention of people who crossed the border illegally during Trump’s term and found that it did not substantially increase the number of deportations.
Operating at the limit of its capacity
Although Trump will surely authorize the kind of raids that will have public repercussions and include the deportation of people who have family in the US, the system is so overwhelmed right now that Trump’s actions may not lead to a drastic increase in the deportations.
Creating a system of camps to house a portion of the more than 11 million people Trump says he wants to deport would dwarf the current total of the federal and state prison population, not to mention the cost of detaining so many people until their day in court arrives.
“The idea that they are going to be able to quickly establish the infrastructure to carry out deportations in the millions is just a fantasy,” Bier told me.
“They are talking about families”
John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, said on last week that ICE currently has about 41,000 detention center beds. He said a major concern is that Trump will try to find ways to bypass the overwhelmed court system to deport people without a hearing.
Sandweg argued that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants have never committed a crime within the United States and that a large portion of them – 4.6 million, he estimated – are in mixed-status families with spouses or children who are American citizens.
“When you turn it into a numbers game and say, ‘We’re going to get to a million in a year,’ you’re not just talking about criminals,” Sandweg said. “There are not a million criminals to catch. “They are talking about families, and that is the real concern.”
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