Sending Them Home ‘Mass deportation’ starts with the removal of illegal aliens who break the law inside our borders, whether on the streets or on campuses by Mark Krikorian
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mass-deportation-criminal-aliens
Who said the following?
Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.
Donald Trump? Stephen Miller? Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan?
No—civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1995.
Jordan, the first Black congresswoman from the South and a star of the Watergate hearings, was named by President Clinton to head an immigration commission some 30 years ago. It is precisely because her recommendations were ignored that we are where we are today. The lack of credibility that Jordan bemoaned is how you get a man like Trump.
The bottom line is that a large-scale program to make illegal aliens leave doesn’t require soldiers breaking down doors, cattle cars, or concentration camps. This is law enforcement, not war. And it is imperative in light not just of the past four years of immigration mismanagement, but the past four decades of dishonesty.
Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.
And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”
Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.
Herewith a look at what’s likely to be involved.
When your tub is overflowing, you first turn off the tap. Mass impunity at the border will be the first thing to stop, because there’s no point to deporting people if it’s easy for them to return.
What drove the crisis under Biden was a policy of catch-and-release—millions of border-jumpers were simply waved into the country by a Border Patrol that the current administration turned into the equivalent of Walmart greeters. The illegal migrants told their friends back home, and more came. Human-trafficking cartels turned it into a massive business.
There are two ways to end catch-and-release: 1) detain illegal border-crossers until they can be repatriated, or 2) if they make an asylum claim, ensure that they wait across the border in Mexico for their court dates.
A large-scale program to make illegal aliens leave doesn’t require soldiers breaking down doors, cattle cars, or concentration camps. This is law enforcement, not war.
Option 1 will require a significant increase in spending and logistical assistance from the U.S. military. The Biden administration has consistently reduced DHS’s detention capacity, closing government-owned facilities and canceling contracts with private firms and county jails. That pattern will have to be reversed.
Option 2 is cheaper and easier, but requires Mexico’s consent, because the country has no obligation to take back non-Mexican migrants, which account for the majority of attempted crossings. In late 2018, this option was instituted as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (commonly known as “Remain in Mexico”); Mexico went along with it after President Trump threatened punishing tariffs on its exports to the U.S.
It was successful almost overnight. In January 2021, Biden canceled the program.
Despite the fact that Mexico’s new president is more of a conventional leftist than her predecessor, she is likely to be cooperative with the new Trump administration’s demands to restore Remain in Mexico, given that the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement is up for review in 2026. Access to the U.S. market is far more important to Mexico than any rhetorical solidarity with foreigners using its territory as a means of entering the U.S.
These and other measures (such as “safe third country” agreements requiring migrants to have applied for asylum in one of the countries they passed through before reaching the U.S. border) will succeed in stabilizing the border. But what about those already here? Sending back people who’ve just recently snuck across the border is one thing, but finding and removing those already in the interior is something else altogether.
The Biden administration has released into the country close to 6 million foreigners with no legal right to enter, and another 2 million are believed to have eluded the overwhelmed Border Patrol, the so-called gotaways.
They join a large illegal population already here, though because of constant churn in the illegal population (people returning home, dying, or obtaining a green card), these numbers can’t simply be added to prior estimates. Census Bureau data suggests there are now at least 14 million total illegal aliens—given the imprecision of such estimates, the real number could easily be 15 or 16 million, though higher numbers bandied about by some Republican politicians of 30 or 40 million are implausible.
The opponents of immigration enforcement want to make this seem like an insuperable problem. The American Immigration Council, the think tank of the immigration lawyers’ lobby, has estimated it would cost close to a trillion dollars over a decade to return the illegal population to their home countries.
Vice President-elect Vance addressed this counsel of resignation and surrender by likening the problem to “a really big sandwich. It’s 10 times the size of your mouth. How are you possibly going to eat the whole thing?”
His answer:
you take the first bite and then you take the second bite, and then you take the third bite. Let’s start with the first million who are the most violent criminals, who are the most aggressive. Get them out of here. First prioritize them, and then you see where you are, and you keep on taking bites of the problem, until you get illegal immigration to a serviceable point.
Starting the deportation effort by focusing on criminals is both politically astute and simplest to manage. The Biden administration has reduced deportations of criminals by 67% compared to Trump I, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Criminal aliens are picked up every day by police in the normal course of their duties for all manner of nonimmigration crimes. Taking them off the hands of local law enforcement—either as an alternative to prosecution or after they’ve completed their sentences—is a no-brainer.
There is a major obstacle, however: the “sanctuary” policies of many cities and states (not all of them run by Democrats), which limit or altogether prohibit cooperation or even communication with ICE. Sanctuary policies have proliferated over the past decade (see a map here) because only in 2013 were all police departments finally networked to DHS such that a suspect’s fingerprints now go to both the FBI and ICE.
When a suspect who is booked (for drug-dealing, wife-beating, drunk driving, or anything else) raises a red flag in ICE’s system, the agency sends a “detainer”—an instruction to hold the criminal alien up to 48 hours after he would otherwise be released in order for ICE to come pick him up. Ignoring detainers is the main means by which a city becomes a sanctuary jurisdiction.
Even under the limitations the Biden administration has placed on ICE, it still issued 22,000 detainers since January 2021 that were ignored by sanctuary jurisdictions, which released the criminals back into their communities.
The good news is that most of the nation’s states, counties, and cities are not sanctuaries for criminal aliens. The bad news is that those jurisdictions that are sanctuaries are where most of the criminal aliens reside, partly because of the protection they provide for lawbreakers, but mainly because criminal aliens live in the same places most law-abiding immigrants live. When California, New York, and Illinois are shielding foreign criminals from the consequences of their actions, any deportation effort is going to be less efficient and less effective.
Federal law already prohibits jurisdictions from preventing local officers from communicating with ICE, but there are no penalties for noncompliance. During Trump I, the Justice Department threatened to withhold certain law-enforcement related funds from sanctuary jurisdictions, which garnered compliance in a few cases. But the major sanctuaries were unmoved.
Since Trump’s 2024 victory, governors of sanctuary states have begun publicizing their intention to resist any deportation policy. The most theatrical has been Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, who bombastically declared, “You come for my people, you come through me.” Tom Homan, Trump’s nominee to lead the deportation effort, was not impressed, replying that the incoming administration will have “no problem going through him … If any governor wants to stand in the way, go ahead and do it. We’ll see what happens. We’re not gonna be intimidated.”
Although the incoming administration can begin by tackling the problem in red states, a new Trump deportation push will also have to include stepped-up efforts against sanctuary policies. One new idea would be for the State Department to refuse to issue student visas for any college in a sanctuary. This would not simply be punitive—what justification can there be for admitting a foreigner to live for several years in a city or state that pledges to protect him from being deported if he breaks the law? When the foreign-student gravy train for NYU, Columbia, and the University of California system is cut off, legislators in Sacramento and Albany may decide to rethink their policies.
Deporting criminals is perfectly fine. But the vast majority of illegal aliens aren’t criminals, setting aside the immigration-related crimes, like illegal entry, identity theft, and tax fraud. So rather than randomly knocking on doors looking for illegal aliens, ICE’s next priority will be the more than 1.3 million people with “unexecuted orders of removal”—people who had their day in court, lost, were ordered deported, and instead just stayed. More than two-thirds of deportations ordered by immigration judges in FY24 were for no-shows—people who made asylum or other claims as a means of securing release, and who then disappeared.
These fugitives aren’t as easy to locate as criminal aliens sitting in a county jail (though there’s obviously some overlap), but ICE’s Fugitive Operations Teams will be able to find most of them.
After taking the criminal and fugitive bites, a large part of the sandwich remains. Under the policies of impeached DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, agents are essentially prohibited from even investigating, let alone arresting, illegal aliens who don’t meet certain narrow criteria. Though random sweeps are a waste of resources, ICE officers need to be free to take into custody any deportable alien they encounter.
Yet the limits that the current administration imposed on immigration enforcement are so extreme that DHS has established what amount to ICE-Free Zones, covering almost all inhabited areas of the country. The means is a policy prohibiting agents from engaging in any enforcement action in the vicinity of a school, church, doctor’s office, or any other so-called “protected area.” The absurdity of the policy is illustrated by a map of a portion of Washington, D.C., showing it to be almost completely an ICE-Free Zone, with only a few stray areas where enforcement would be permitted, several of which are highway interchanges.
There is a major obstacle, however: the ‘sanctuary’ policies of many cities and states. A new Trump deportation push will have to include stepped-up efforts against these policies.
Even after immigration agents are freed from such strictures, a significant challenge will be where to detain the deportable aliens during the time it will take to secure travel documents from their home countries. DHS detention centers shuttered by the Biden administration will need to be reopened, but most of ICE’s detention capacity is not in buildings owned by the government. To preserve flexibility to ramp up capacity when needed (and dial back down when not needed) ICE will once again contract with county jails, which frequently have spare bed space, and with private prison companies such as Core Civic and Geo Group.
This too is where the Department of Defense could have a role. The military already assists in border enforcement, though not by arresting, let alone shooting at, anyone. Rather, it has a support role in surveillance, communication, and transportation. That may well be expanded to housing detained aliens awaiting deportation on military bases. Detention is a logistics challenge, and logistics is something the Army knows how to do.
But however effective the logistics, the deportation push will face another challenge—some countries refuse (or unreasonably obstruct) the return of their own citizens. They are known in the business as “recalcitrant countries,” and the challenge is real—we can’t simply fly a planeload of deportees to their home country, push them out the door, and take off again. ICE needs to secure travel documents for the deportees and make arrangements for them to be received by home country officials. If the home government doesn’t cooperate, we will be stuck with the aliens.
Luckily, Congress has addressed this by authorizing the State Department to stop issuing any or all visas in a recalcitrant country. The Bush and Obama administrations used this power only once each, and against tiny countries (Guyana and Gambia, respectively). Biden hasn’t used it even once. But Trump I wielded this cudgel a number of times, often to good effect, and it will do so again. The State Department issues large numbers of visas even in unfriendly countries—in FY23 we issued more than 50,000 tourist visas in Venezuela, many of them no doubt to members of the elite, and shutting that down would get their attention.
Finally, any deportation effort will be supplemented by efforts at self-deportation. Although Mitt Romney was ridiculed in the press in 2012 for using that phrase, it delivers the most bang for the buck. No one has to be arrested or detained, and the illegal immigrants themselves can put their affairs in order and return on their own terms.
This isn’t some think-tank whimsy—illegal immigrants go back home on their own all the time. From 2011-18, more than 300,000 immigrants (legal and illegal) are estimated to have gone home voluntarily each year. A self-deportation push, making it harder to get a job, open a bank account, and other things needed to function in a modern society, would seek to boost that number.
This is the practical impetus behind some of the rhetoric we heard during the campaign and since Trump’s win. For instance, border czar-designate Tom Homan said at the Republican convention, “I’ve got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released into our country in violation of federal law: You better start packing now.” It was not just an applause line; it was an effort to limit the amount of force that deportation efforts will require.
Sending a message like this is important, but it needs to be backed up once the administration takes office. And the most effective way to do that would be through worksite enforcement, and mandating use of the E-Verify system to make sure new hires are authorized to work. The point of this and any other self-deportation measure (like requiring proof of legal status to open a bank account or get a driver’s license) is to make it untenable to remain here illegally, so that people leave on their own.
And it can work. When Arizona enacted a state-level E-Verify mandate, its illegal population fell 17% in one year without any effort on the part of law enforcement. Many almost certainly just moved to other states. But the point is that legal, duly adopted policy changes can convince illegal immigrants to comply with the law and leave of their own accord.
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