Trump promised the “biggest deportation” in US history. This is how he can start
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Trump promised the “biggest deportation” in US history. This is how he can start

Morning Edition dives into the promises President-elect Donald Trump said he would fulfill during his second term. NPR’s Steve Inskeep asks immigration policy expert Andrew Selee about Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants.

What Trump said about deporting immigrants

During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised “On day one, I will launch the largest criminal deportation program in American history.” He referred to the 1954 “Operation Wetback”, an effort ordered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Government estimates showed that more than a million mostly Mexican immigrants and some American citizens had been rounded up. The program got its official name from a racist term for Mexicans who swam or waded across the Rio Grande.

He also said he would use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up the removal of undocumented migrants from the United States and “dismantle all criminal migrant networks operating on American soil” at an Oct. 25 campaign rally.

Trump could start by trying to remove recent arrivals and expand deportation guidelines

Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, said Trump’s mass deportation plan could begin with the removal of hundreds of thousands of new arrivals under programs established by President Biden.

“The first thing we know he’s almost certainly going to do is suspend humanitarian parole for people who got it, people who came through CBP One, this app that people use to make an appointment to come across the border,” said Seeley.

He also pointed to the possibility of Trump going after people with Temporary Protected Status, a limited status offered to people displaced from their home countries due to extreme circumstances, and people brought in under a program offered to Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.

Selee also said Trump may change Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation guidelines so the agency can arrest and put undocumented immigrants in deportation proceedings more freely.

“That’s something that changed under the Biden administration, where they primarily went after people who had criminal records or people who are a threat to national security,” Selee said.

Selee also says Trump has talked about expanding detention facilities, “But whether or not he’s going to be able to use military bases or other federal facilities and whether he’s going to try to use the military himself, and that would require going back to the (Alien) Enemies Act from 1798).”

Trump could argue to use the more than 200-year-old law to override due process and justify using military support to arrest and detain people without legal status.

Selee added that people who live in Republican-controlled states are much more likely to see enforcement action.

“We saw that in the last Trump administration. There were very successful enforcement efforts against people who are here illegally in red states because local law enforcement was willing to cooperate,” Selee said.

He added that while law enforcement agencies in blue states did not outright refuse to cooperate, they did not devote large amounts of resources to cooperating with immigration enforcement.

What Trump’s team says

NPR asked Trump’s transition team if the president-elect had more specific details about how his plan to carry out mass deportations would begin. Trump’s transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt offered the following statement in response:

“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin and gave him the mandate to carry out the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”

Trump’s appointments signal seriousness in his enforcement actions

This week, Trump announced that he would do Tom Homan his “border tsar” overseeing the northern and southern American borders. Homan led ICE in an acting capacity for about a year and a half during his first term. Borders is not an official government position and it is unclear exactly what role Homan would take.

Before the election, Homan said enforcement would focus on immigrants who pose “threats to public safety and national security threats first.” He also indicated that more workplace raids could happen.

A CBS journalist Homan asked during an October interview whether family separations could be avoided during mass deportations, particularly for US citizen children with undocumented parents. Homan responded by saying “Families can be deported together.”

Trump also announced Stephen Miller’s expected returnthe hardline immigration restrictionist who is seen as the architect behind Muslim travel ban and the controversial “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of children from their parents at the southern border. The reunification of approximately 1,400 children with their families had not been confirmed from April this year.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was also tapped to lead Homeland Securitythe cabinet that oversees immigration benefits and enforcement. Noem deployed National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border several times in recent years.