Trump’s Mass Deportations: What He Can Actually Do

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election to a second term as president, attention has turned to his highest-profile campaign promise: the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

But uncertainty remains about the scope of Trump’s plans. Who exactly does he want to deport? And will he actually be able to carry out a “mass” deportation operation?

Trump and his allies say they will focus on “violent criminals,” staging rallies with posters of mugshots showing alleged “illegal immigrant gang members” and talking about immigrants as “invaders” who are “poisoning” the country with their “bad genes.”

But the fine print is always the same. When they say “criminals,” they mean all roughly 11 million undocumented people in the country, most of whom have lived in the United States here for years, have family and loved ones who are U.S. citizens, and have never committed a serious crime.

The real question is whether Trump has the power to turn his campaign pledge into reality.

The short answer is almost certainly that Trump will not be able to deport every unauthorized immigrant in the country. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s efforts won’t harm millions of people.

While most discussions of immigration and deportation focus on the removal of people encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border each year, removing unauthorized immigrants who have established lives within the country is a separate and typically much slower process. There’s no modern precedent for deporting even 1 million migrants from within the United States in a single presidential term, let alone several million.

In recent history, the single most efficient president at removing unauthorized immigrants from the interior of the United States was Barack Obama, whose first administration deported roughly 872,000 migrants from inside the country. Trump’s first term, by contrast, fell well short of half that figure.

This time around, the scale of Trump’s deportation policy will ultimately depend on how skillfully his administration navigates the logistical and legal hurdles that have always obstructed mass deportation.

If he pursues the most aggressive form of his campaign promise, as outlined by key advisers in recent months — erecting detention camps, aggressive interior policing, and attacks against key temporary legal protections held by millions of undocumented people — Trump’s second term will likely be more indiscriminate, and more punitive, than his first.

Though legal challenges may slow him down, Trump has broad power to pursue mass deportation — and he’s made clear he intends to use it.

U.S. immigration enforcement agencies do not treat all unauthorized immigrants the same.

Under presidents Obama and Biden, ICE lawyers extended “prosecutorial discretion” to cases involving migrants with clean criminal records or close ties to the United States, as a way to prioritize limited deportation resources for people with criminal records or who pose national security threats. Trump, on the other hand, scrapped Obama’s priorities in his first term, replacing them with a much broader scope of deportable migrants. As a Department of Homeland Security memo at the time put it, “ICE will not exempt classes or categories of removal aliens from potential enforcement.”

Trump is expected to follow that same path this time, and key incoming officials have said as much.

“No one’s off the table. If you’re in the country illegally, it’s not OK. If you’re in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder,” Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan said in July. “The bottom line is, very illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country illegally,” he added. Homan made the same point on NewsNation last week.

And Homan said earlier this month that the “massive deportation operation” would be focused on “those people entering the country illegally, which is a crime.”

It’s not technically true that all unauthorized immigrants are criminals. Though crossing the border without authorization is a misdemeanor at first, and then a felony every time after that, some undocumented people — such as those who overstay visas — are civil offenders, not criminals.

Nonetheless, Trump and his allies have painted all undocumented immigrants broadly as criminals, and they’ve said they intend to go after everyone.

Last November, Stephen Miller — a key Trump adviser on immigration and the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy — told The New York Times, in the paper’s words, that “a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.”

That message hasn’t always reached the communities that could be at risk of deportation.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Lautaro Grinspan, for example, spoke to several people in line at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office who said they didn’t believe Trump would deport them because they are “not criminals.” One woman who’s lived in the country for decades told the BBC of Trump’s mass deportation threats, “That’s for criminals to worry about. I pay taxes, and I work.”

“President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history while simultaneously lowering costs for families,” Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary and a Trump-Vance Transition spokesperson, told HuffPost in a statement. “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail, like deporting migrant criminals and restoring our economic greatness. He will deliver.”

In order to understand who Trump will try to deport, it’s important to get our definitions straight. That means defining who’s considered “undocumented” — and, within that group, who’s actually legally and practically able to be deported quickly.

Roughly 11 million undocumented people lived in the United States as of 2022, according to both the Department of Homeland Security’s and Pew Research Center’s most recent estimates.

Estimates of the undocumented population include people who have temporary protections from deportation, such as people who are applying for asylum (even if they crossed the border without authorization), people with so-called “temporary protected status,” recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or “DACA,” and people applying for certain visas from within the United States. This group with temporary protections accounts for almost 30% of the undocumented population, according to Pew.

The undocumented population estimates do not include naturalized citizens, green card holders, approved refugees, people who’ve been granted asylum, and people with temporary lawful status like students with visas.

Nearly two-thirds of the undocumented population has lived in the United States for over a decade, and a third of those 15 and older reside with at least one U.S.-citizen child under 18, according to a Migration Policy Institute analysis of 2019 figures. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants live in “mixed status” households. Some 8.5 million undocumented people live alongside U.S. citizens, or, in some cases, noncitizens with legal status, the Center for Migration Studies reported, based on 2022 data. In all, 5.5 million U.S.-born children live in households with at least one undocumented resident, according to CMS.

All told, about 1 in 12 U.S. residents will be at risk of either deportation or family separation — the result of deporting a member of a mixed-status household — in 2025, FWD.us, a pro-immigration-reform group, recently estimated.

Defining the various kinds of groups considered “undocumented” is important because these distinctions get to the heart of Trump’s “mass” deportation campaign promise. Trump won’t be able to deport everyone immediately.

Some people have received what are known as “final orders of removal,” meaning an immigration judge has determined they can be deported. Recent reports citing unnamed officials put the figure at between 1.4 and 1.5 million people. Only a fraction of that number is currently in ICE custody, or part of an “alternative to detention” program like wearing an ankle bracelet. This group will be a top priority for the Trump administration, as will detaining people with final removal orders who aren’t in ICE custody. This is where ICE’s cooperation with local law enforcement agencies is key.

“I think what’s most likely is that the main pathway to deportations will be people who have local criminal justice involvement and then get transferred to ICE,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told HuffPost. “We could see expansion of that pathway led by localities that are eager to cooperate with ICE.”

“If ICE found recent contact information on someone, even if that person wasn’t a high priority [during other administrations] because they didn’t have criminal involvement or anything, but they were known to be removable, and ICE has fresh location information, they might go arrest that person,” Gelatt added.

Others have been ordered removed from the country “in absentia” — meaning after they missed an immigration court date — though these orders can be reversed in some cases, for example if the affected person did not receive proper notice of their hearing. In all, there are millions of cases currently pending in immigration court.

Even if Trump vastly expanded the scale and pace of the immigration legal system — a tall order — he’d still need the cooperation of other countries to accept people deported from the United States. The “repatriation” flights that Miller hopes will “constantly” churn between U.S.-based detention facilities and countries around the world depend in part on diplomacy. Trump has not laid out any details for how he’d make this happen. But as things stand, the United States considers many countries “recalcitrant” or “at risk of noncompliance” when it comes to accepting back their own citizens.

Trump’s also likely to target those allowed into the United States via parole programs, which offer a legal pathway into the country without conferring long-term legal status.

Then there’s “expedited removal,” or the process by which people who’ve just crossed the border can be deported without a hearing. Expedited removal is a common method for expelling people newly arrived on U.S. soil. Presidents of both parties have used it extensively, particularly the Biden administration in recent months. In fact, Biden’s extensive use of practice is one of the reasons fiscal year 2024 surpassed previous years’ combined numbers for returns and removals — the terms used for expulsions that occur without a court order along the border, and those that take place after immigration hearings, respectively — going back to at least 2010.

“Whereas President Barack Obama was labeled by some as the ‘deporter in chief,’ this new trend may earn President Joe Biden the title of ‘returner in chief,’” the Migration Policy Institute observed in June. But Trump wants to vastly expand the use of the practice himself, potentially also applying it to any inadmissible immigrant who can’t prove they’ve been in the country for more than two years — regardless of where in the country they were arrested. This maximalist view of the law could dramatically expand the pool of people facing deportation in Trump’s second term.

Trump tried this more aggressive use of expedited removal in his first term, but it was blocked in court.

So were other moves he’s likely to try again, including revoking DACA — which was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2020 — and removing deportation protection from those with temporary protected status, or TPS, which protects hundreds of thousands of people whose home countries are affected by natural disasters or political strife.

The homeland security secretary is responsible for designating TPS countries, though when the Trump administration tried to end TPS protections from the vast majority of people in the program, the move was held up in court and later reversed by Biden.

Trump has said he’ll target TPS again in his second term, though he and Vice President-elect JD Vance haven’t provided specifics — aside from threatening people from Haiti, hundreds of thousands of whom are currently covered by TPS, and whom Trump and Vance lied extensively about during the campaign.

Immigrants are less likely to win favorable decisions this time around, if only because Trump added three conservative Supreme Court justices during his first term, and scores of conservative judges in district and appeals courts.

The goal of mass deportation will be slowed by so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions, an umbrella term referring to cities, localities and even a few states that prohibit various kinds of cooperation with immigration authorities — especially coordination between local and federal law enforcement to turn over people in local jails over to ICE. Trump attempted to withhold funding from sanctuary jurisdictions in his first term, and will likely do so again once in office. Homan, the incoming border czar, also suggested ICE will “double the workforce” in sanctuary cities.

Also, as Homan told Fox News, “some sheriffs [in sanctuary jurisdictions] have been coming forward, working [with ICE] behind the scenes.”

The battle over sanctuary jurisdictions — particularly large blue cities in otherwise red areas — will be a crucial battleground in Trump’s mass deportation effort. During his first term, “Trump failed to increase removals because local jurisdictions refused to cooperate with his administration, continuing a trend begun during the Obama administration in response to their deportation efforts,” Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote in 2021.

But perhaps the greatest barrier to mass deportation is due process. Of the millions of cases pending in immigration court, around 1.5 million are people seeking asylum in the United States, a process that can take years. And that number would only grow as people facing deportation file defensive claims for asylum and other types of legal relief as a way of attempting to stay in the country.

Miller’s goal of establishing mass detention camps for undocumented people — as with the backlog of asylum cases, and the potential surge of ICE officers to sanctuary cities — also depend on resources. Trump needs officers, detention space, supplies, translators and judges.

Republican control of Congress will help. But the incoming president may look for money and resources elsewhere, too. Trump on Monday responded “TRUE!!!” after a conservative activist claimed the incoming administration is “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

In his first term, Trump used an emergency declaration to divert military funding to build part of his desired U.S.-Mexico border wall. Miller has suggested Trump could use military funds this time to build mass detention camps. (Private prison contractors were ecstatic at Trump’s election in part because of the potential “need for some soft-sided facilities around the country,” as the founder of GEO Group put it.)

On a call Thursday, attorneys with the ACLU called on the Biden administration to pause efforts to potentially expand immigration detention, and to shut down facilities with “abusive” conditions. They pointed to their own research that the vast majority of dozens of deaths in ICE detention between 2017 and 2021 were likely preventable. They also called on states and localities to legislate against private immigration detention, and to rule out allowing their local government detention facilities to be used to detain immigrants.

“We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these massive detention and deportation machines,” said Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project. “We know that the anti-immigrant policies in the second [Trump] administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become, perhaps, the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations, unless we do all we can to put a stop to them.”

Trump and Miller have also spoken about the potential for using National Guard and even U.S. military personnel as part of the effort — though U.S. law would complicate this. Immigration enforcement is generally reserved for domestic federal law officers, not the military, and efforts to cross that line would likely end up in court.

There is bipartisan practice that service members can carry out support and logistical tasks, as long as they don’t engage in immigration law enforcement. Thousands of National Guard soldiers currently do this as part of a federal mission; a separate National Guard deployment called Operation Lone Star, launched in 2021 by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), has pushed this concept to the extreme, leading to troubling allegations of abuse.

Trump’s nominee for homeland security secretary, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), has sent five deployments of South Dakota National Guard troops and other assets to the border since 2021, funded in part by a billionaire Republican donor, and in part by the state’s Emergency and Disaster Fund, South Dakota Searchlight reported. She has referred to the situation at the border as an “invasion” and a “war zone” — though Guard members’ emails tell a different story.

In a speech to legislators in February, Noem complained that South Dakota soldiers had been “hampered by federal restrictions when they’ve been deployed to the border,” and that the state was reviewing “rules of engagement.” When South Dakota Public Broadcasting asked Noem what she meant, she said soldiers “need to be able to stop people” and “turn them around,” essentially describing state military personnel taking on federal immigration duties.

Homan himself said the scale of the deportation operation depended on resources, including bed space, transportation contracts, and officers working the operation.

“Everybody always asks me, ‘How many people can you remove?’ I don’t know. What do our resources look like?” he told Fox News. “How many beds are we going to have? What’s the size of the transportation contract? How many resources do I have? How many officers do I have? Can I bring back retired officers? Can [the Department of Defense] help, with a lot of the stuff that doesn’t require arrest, where you don’t have to have a badge and a gun and immigration authority? There are a lot of things — whether it’s transportation, or logistics, or infrastructure-building — that DOD can do.”

Regardless, Homan said, Trump had given the “green light” for mass deportation. “And, of course, the secretary of homeland security — that’s where he has the power to reprogram money for other areas.”

Perhaps the most potent weapon Trump wields when it comes to speeding deportations is the fact that open-ended stays in detention facilities, which are jails in all but name, will lead many to put an end to their misery by agreeing to their own deportation without waiting for a judge’s order.

That is likely one of the motivations behind Miller’s effort to build vast detention camps for migrants — they would constitute an extreme attempt to pressure people to leave the country without exercising their right to appeal.

“If they put a lot of non-citizens in really crappy conditions — in tent camps in the desert — the conditions will be so abysmal and so dehumanizing that people will give up their meritorious claims for relief,” said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, a professor at Boston University School of Law who specializes in immigration. “There is a process, but there are also a number of ways to undercut that process.”

Trump applied such pressure in his first term with the “zero tolerance” or “family separation” policy, which Miller and Homan played key roles in crafting. The practice involved criminally charging every adult who crossed the border without authorization, meaning they would be briefly held in jail and their children would be considered “unaccompanied” minors, as detention rules differ for children. The Trump administration acknowledged the policy was a deterrent. Also, some affected immigrants reportedly felt pressured to voluntarily sign deportation orders in order to be more quickly reunited with their children; attorneys at the time rang alarm bells that such deportations would be “obtained under duress.”

“Human rights violations happen when nobody is watching, so it’s really important for you, if you’re in this situation, to not sign away your rights,” Angelica Salas, executive director of CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, told HuffPost. Among other work, CHIRLA hosts know your rights workshops about what to do in interactions with immigration officers. Like anyone else, immigrants have a right to request an attorney, decline to admit anything to law enforcement officers, and decline to sign any paperwork, she said.

“People are very, very scared, and they’re coerced into signing a voluntary departure, because [immigration officers] tell them they’re going to be in detention for years if they don’t sign it.”

Instilling that fear is itself the broadest goal of Trump’s mass deportation policy, said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which preceded the Department of Homeland Security.

“Even if it isn’t millions, if it is significantly larger numbers than is the case now, they will have created a significant climate of fear and hostility toward migrants,” Meissner said. “And that’s a policy end in itself.”