The thorny logistics of mass deportation

On Monday evening, 85 bishops and denominational leaders representing more than 2,000 Latino evangelical congregations joined a virtual meeting. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, organized the training in response to questions he’s received since Election Day about President-elect Donald Trump’s deportation plans.

“The question is, are we going to have a mass mobilization of people on the scale of the book of Exodus?” said Salguero, who also pastors The Gathering Place church in Orlando, Fla. “I think that most people think that that’s logistically impossible. But even if a tenth of it is possible, that will have a significant impact on the Latino evangelical church.”

Over the course of his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly pledged to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history. Trump’s newly appointed “border czar,” former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Tom Homan, has said the administration will take a “targeted approach” to removals, beginning with the most violent criminals and those whom a federal judge has already ordered to leave.

Immigration experts say it’s unclear what the administration will do after that and whether it will be able to secure the workers and funding to detain and remove millions of illegal immigrants. Trump has also floated the idea of ending temporary protections and parole programs that give legal status to more than 2 million immigrants. Many of those individuals could end up in immigration court, where the system is already sagging under the weight of millions of asylum claims and other cases.

First steps

An estimated 8 million migrants have entered the United States without prior authorization during the Biden administration, and over 1.7 million more have crossed the border and evaded apprehension. The Department of Homeland Security estimates about 11 million people—the majority of whom have been here for more than five years—were living and working in the United States without lawful status as of 2022.

ICE can repatriate immigrants to their countries of origin through a removal order, which comes with restrictions on when the immigrant can apply for reentry. Authorities also conduct returns—a form of repatriation with no accompanying restrictions that includes immigrants who arrived in the country illegally but choose to leave voluntarily.

Currently, most of the immigrants ICE removes are individuals whom local law enforcement has already arrested for committing a crime, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute. In most cases, local agencies notify ICE when they release the individuals from jail so immigration officers can take them into custody.

Shortly after President Joe Biden took office, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo directing ICE to prioritize detaining and deporting illegal immigrants who pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security.

The memo also instructed officers to consider “the totality of the facts and circumstances” instead of deporting someone on the basis of a criminal conviction alone. In practice, Chishti said, that means ICE primarily pursues violent criminals, while deporting immigrants who commit fraud or nonviolent theft has not been high on the agency’s list of priorities.

Chishti expects Trump to quickly rescind the Biden administration’s enforcement priorities, which would “make everyone equally susceptible to deportation.”

But sanctuary city policies could complicate Trump’s efforts to deport more immigrants with criminal convictions, he noted. Some municipalities have laws instructing local law enforcement agencies to inform ICE when illegal immigrants are booked into jail only for committing certain crimes and not others.

And even if the incoming administration can bring uncooperative cities and states into compliance with court orders, officials cannot immediately ship criminal migrants back home. ICE officers must still obtain a final deportation order from an immigration judge. “Just because [they] committed a crime doesn’t give you a right to deport them instantly without due process,” Chishti said.

Stage two

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an organization that opposes large-scale deportations, believes Trump will go further. “To get to the kind of numbers that candidate Trump was talking about, you’re going to have to go after people who don’t have criminal records,” he said.

Trump advisers have indicated that after criminal immigrants, next up are the estimated 1.19 million people in the country who already have final deportation orders from a judge. But it could take years to locate and remove people in that category. Once ICE succeeds in tracking an immigrant down, the individual could petition to reopen the order based on extenuating circumstances, further delaying the process.

There’s also the issue of capacity. The home countries of foreign nationals must be willing to take their citizens back. Currently, there aren’t enough detention beds in the United States to hold millions of people in the meantime. As of Nov. 3, ICE was detaining 38,863 immigrants, and the agency is funded for 41,000 beds. Homan, Trump’s incoming “border czar”, acknowledged the scale of the operation largely depends on Congress’ willingness to increase that funding.

Millions more

The American Immigration Council estimates the administration could spend more than $315 billion if it expands its deportation operation to include the millions of unlawful migrants who have been living in the country for several years, as well as those who entered illegally under the Biden administration.

Reichlin-Melnick argued ICE also lacks sufficient manpower to carry out deportations on that scale. The branch of the agency responsible for enforcement and removals is funded to employ about 7,711 staff, and deportations have never exceeded more than half a million a year.

In a Monday post on Truth Social, Trump indicated he’s willing to declare a national emergency and draw on the military to carry out deportations. Trump’s nominee for deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, one of the architects of immigration policy during Trump’s first term, has also floated the idea of involving National Guard members from cooperative states.

“They’re talking about a lot of interagency cooperation. How can ICE work more closely with Border Patrol? How can both of those work more closely with state and local agencies like sheriff’s departments?” said Selene Rodriguez, an immigration expert at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin, Texas.

Deportations under Trump peaked in 2019 when authorities removed or returned roughly 531,330 people for a grand total of 1.5 million deportations during his previous four years in office. Deportations hit an all-time high under President Barack Obama, whom some immigrant advocacy groups dubbed the “deporter in chief,” but still only totaled 2.5 million.

Trump has referenced efforts to repatriate Mexican laborers under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. That operation succeeded in removing an estimated 1.1 million immigrants, though others repatriated voluntarily, historians note, and some U.S. citizens were swept up in the crackdown.

Widening the dragnet to include migrants who have been living and working in the United States unlawfully for years could have significant economic repercussions. The Pew Research Center estimated that in 2022, immigrants without legal status accounted for about 8.3 million U.S. workers. Proponents of broader crackdowns argue illegal immigration is also costly for state and local governments, straining education and healthcare infrastructures.

Status updates

Many of the immigrants who entered the country during Biden’s past four years in office have some form of temporary legal status. In an effort to lower out-of-control illegal crossings early in his term, Biden created a temporary humanitarian parole program that allows up to 30,000 immigrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba to remain in the country for two years if an American resident guarantees their financial support. Customs and Border Protection data through August 2024 shows nearly 530,000 individuals have arrived through this program.

Biden also allows asylum-seekers and other immigrants seeking entry to request an appointment at a port of entry using a mobile app. If they pass an initial screening, immigrants are given one year of parole and allowed to enter the country to pursue their case. So far, more than 860,000 people have scheduled appointments at ports of entry, according to CBP data through the end of October.

Critics say these programs facilitate mass migration without thoroughly vetting participants. This summer, the government paused and then restarted Biden’s four-country parole program after discovering 101,000 sponsor applications filed by a small number of serial sponsors using similar information.

Trump has threatened to shut down the programs, though Reichlin-Melnick believes it’s unlikely he will end similar parole programs for Ukrainians and Afghans.

But even if Trump shuts down Biden’s parole programs for new applicants, immigration attorney Lance Conklin warned that revoking parole for immigrants already here is more complicated since it is technically granted on a case-by-case basis. Any effort to strip the two-year status from parolees before it expires may be challenged in court, and some of those parolees may have already claimed asylum or filed for another status.

Trump has also toyed with the idea of ending temporary protected status for certain groups of immigrants such as Haitians. DHS can designate immigrants of a specific nationality for the temporary protection due to urgent humanitarian conditions in their home country.

“There’s a lot of questions about mixed-status families,” said Salguero, the Orlando-based pastor and president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. Individuals of 19 different nationalities attend his church. Some of the attendees are U.S. citizens, while others are immigrants who have temporary protected status. Still others don’t have a legal status at all.

At the virtual training on Monday, Salguero told WORLD the group of pastors and denominational leaders considered how their congregations would continue serving immigrant communities regardless of how mass deportations pan out. They discussed how churches would care for children who are American citizens if their parents were removed.

While he’s quick to caution fellow ministers from operating out of fear, he believes it’s essential to be prepared.

“It is uncertain how this is going to play out,” Salguero said. “We’re trying to serve the local church with clear information.”