The White House is attempting to deport at least 1 million illegal immigrants in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a lofty figure larger than the number of removals undertaken during any of his first four years in office.
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security have discussed with the White House how to deport the 1.4 million immigrants who have already been ordered removed but not actually left the country because their home countries, such as Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, will not allow them to return, according to the Washington Post.
The Trump administration is also in talks with roughly 30 countries about their willingness to accept immigrants who are not originally from that country.
The conversations reflect the harder line the White House is taking on immigration in Trump’s second term. Federal data show that fiscal 2012, during the Obama administration, had the most annual deportations in recent memory, just over 409,000, with Trump’s first-term numbers falling below 300,000.
But Trump will face obstacles, both logistical and legal, to undertaking such a large operation, making the goal more aspirational than a firm target for border officials.
In fact, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who is credited with steering Trump’s border policy, told reporters that he is aiming even higher than the 1 million figure.
“Much more than that, much more,” Miller said on Monday ahead of Trump’s bilateral meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Stepped up enforcement
On the campaign trail, Trump and Vice President JD Vance touted plans to start arresting and deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records to commence what the Republican Party’s platform referred to as the “largest-ever” mass deportation.
The Trump administration also signaled in its early weeks that many illegal immigrants without convictions would be swept up in those operations. Border czar Tom Homan told the Washington Examiner in December that “collateral” arrests were certain to occur, which could leave any of the more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the country vulnerable to arrest and deportation.
The Trump administration has restarted some of the practices that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials halted under President Joe Biden, including worksite enforcement operations, or going into job sites that had failed to respond to audits with suspected illegal employees.
The White House has also worked out arrangements with third countries like El Salvador, which has begun accepting alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and housing them in its mega-prison. Venezuela had refused to accept migrants, though it began accepting repatriation flights again in March.
The steps have invited legal scrutiny, with Trump employing the Alien Enemies Act to deport illegal immigrants without due process, but immigration experts are skeptical the president can attain a goal of 1 million deportations even with its efforts to stretch the limits of the law.
In most cases, arrested migrants must still go before an immigration judge who ultimately decides whether he or she will be removed, creating a drawn-out process in a backlogged court system.
ICE does not always have the cooperation of local jurisdictions, some of which have explicit “sanctuary” policies that prevent cooperation with federal officials, either. The agency’s budget constraints are another limitation.
David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the biggest factor in whether Trump will achieve his goal is whether he has the money to do it.
“Whether the administration achieves its goals of record deportations will depend primarily on Congress and, to a lesser extent, the courts,” Bier wrote in an email. “If Congress appropriates the roughly $300 billion that the GOP budget reconciliation bill calls for, ICE will have literally decades of funding to carry the largest deportation campaign in US history. The courts may slow deportations to some extent, but ‘much more’ than a million is certainly achievable when money is no obstacle.”
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that the last deportation operation of a similar scale occurred in 1954. The since-remade Immigration and Naturalization Service office deported somewhere between 300,000 and 1.3 million illegal workers.
Lack of visibility
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has contributed to a precipitous drop in illegal crossings at the southern border, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection detailing the figures each month on its website.
The agency recorded just 11,000 encounters at the southwest border in March, compared to 189,000 in the same month last year.
But its efforts at interior enforcement are not similarly posted, making the administration’s success difficult to analyze. Trump’s deportation operation started on Jan. 20, with arrests of illegal immigrants topping 5,500 in 10 days. However, the government has shied away from posting daily, weekly, or even monthly figures since early February.
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics recently ceased publishing monthly statistics of immigration enforcement actions, including deportations.
Nayna Gupta, director of policy at the American Immigration Council in Washington, said predicting whether Trump will hit 1 million removals this year is challenging, primarily because the administration is not being forthcoming with the data.
“We don’t have enough information on numbers of deportations because the administration is purposely withholding those numbers. They continue to face significant operational, resource, and diplomatic barriers to achieving their deportation goals,” Gupta wrote in a statement. “That is why the Trump administration is requesting billions of dollars from Congress this month to fund this indiscriminate, cruel, and expensive agenda.”
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin claimed in late March that ICE had removed more than 100,000 people, which would be a dramatic uptick since January.
ICE did not respond to a Washington Examiner request for figures on the number of deportations to date.
Vaughan said deportation figures could theoretically include people who depart as a result of Trump-era initiatives. The administration is requiring illegal immigrants to register with the government and also has provided a tool to self-deport.
“The Trump administration is on track to accomplish what could be the largest deportation operation in our history if it is sustained, based on the pace of removals and returns together with other measures, such as the CBP-1 ‘self-deportation’ app and the new registration program, which encourage illegal migrants to return home on their own,” Vaughan, whose employer supports limits on immigration, wrote in an email.
TOP TRUMP ADVISER SAYS ‘NO UPPER LIMIT’ ON DEPORTATIONS TO SALVADORAN PRISON
Regardless of whether Trump is able to reach his goal, Gupta said his efforts are having a “chilling effect” on immigrant communities across the country.
“Threatening to deport one million non-citizens in a single year has a significant chilling effect regardless of how many people the administration actually deports — it makes people scared to go to work and school — and local economies and communities are already suffering as a result,” Gupta said.
