President Donald Trump came into office promising “millions and millions” of deportations on his watch. So far, according to NBC News, he’s not happy with the pace of removals. “It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people,” one person familiar with Trump’s thinking said. But there’s no reason to interpret the relatively slow start as a sign that the promised immigration crackdown might not be so bad. The rising pressure to get deportation numbers up will likely yield increasingly sloppy and inhumane measures as the dragnet is thrown ever wider.
The rising pressure to get deportation numbers up will likely yield increasingly sloppy and inhumane measures as the dragnet is thrown ever wider.
The president’s frustration is reportedly shared by the Cabinet and White House staff members tasked with carrying out one of his cruelest campaign promises, who have pointed to new internal metrics for daily arrests. The Washington Post reported last month that senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been told that “each of the agency’s field offices should make 75 arrests per day and managers would be held accountable for missing those targets.” Given ICE’s 25 field offices, that would mean 1,200 to 1,500 daily arrests, a massive increase from the few hundred per day under former President Joe Biden.
Trump has also increased the number of people who can be targeted by ICE. The Biden administration granted more than a million migrants various forms of temporary legal status to allow them to work and potentially seek permanent residency. Since his first day back in the Oval Office, Trump has moved to strip many of them of those protections. They include 350,000 Venezuelans whose Temporary Protected Status will now expire in less than two months.
Also, The Associated Press reported last month, the administration has lifted previous restraints on ICE in terms of who can be swept up when making arrests: “Under Trump, officers can now arrest people without legal status if they run across them while looking for migrants targeted for removal. Under Joe Biden, such ‘collateral arrests’ were banned.” The White House has also moved to authorize wide-ranging powers for ICE to quickly remove migrants who were temporarily allowed into the country under Biden-era programs.
Taken together, the expanded powers ICE has received, attacks on legal immigration and quotas are a recipe for a humanitarian and civil rights disaster. Demanding that rank-and-file ICE officers hit an arbitrary number of arrests transforms the people being swept up into mere figures in a spreadsheet. Further, it’s impossible to achieve the numbers Trump wants without being indiscriminate. Administration officials may claim that the priority will be on arresting and deporting “criminals,” but we’re already seeing how unlikely that will be.
For example, ICE trumpeted on X that it made over 900 arrests in a single day last month. The final tally for the day was closer to 1,200, but, as NBC News reported, “just 613 of those total arrests — nearly 52% — were considered ‘criminal arrests.’ The rest appear to be nonviolent offenders or people who have not committed any criminal offense other than crossing the border illegally.”
What worries me most, then, is that Trump will continue to create new criminals for ICE to remove.
The changes are already causing a climate of fear and uncertainty even among legal residents. Several U.S. citizens were among those detained and questioned during a warrantless ICE enforcement action in Newark, New Jersey, last month, which resulted in criticism from the mayor and outrage from congressional Democrats. Native American leaders have warned tribal members to carry documents proving their identity with them.
Democrats, many of whom bet in the last election that voters want to see stricter immigration enforcement, are struggling with how to respond to this growing crisis. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., wrote on X at the end of Trump’s first week in office that Biden’s rate of removal was twice as high as his successor’s. I can see where the urge to show Trump is failing on his promises comes from. But I’m lost as to how it would help Democrats politically to claim that their party purges migrants more successfully.
The better focus for Democrats would be to hammer home how scattershot the removal efforts are likely to become as ICE expands its list of targets. Already polling has showed that while Americans in general like the idea of deporting undocumented immigrants, those numbers fall when they’re given the specifics of Trump’s plans. The only way favorability rises among those polled is if the policy is limited to focus only on deporting criminals — but if that’s the case, then Trump can’t fulfill his promise to deport millions.
What worries me most, then, is that Trump will continue to create new criminals for ICE to remove. At the top of the list are likely the millions of people whose TPS has been revoked, even though “unlawful presence,” or staying in the United States after authorization has expired, is a civil offense. From there, it isn’t hard to imagine the administration’s war on birthright citizenship becoming the next feeding grounds for an ever-hungry deportation machine, constantly on the search for new groups to expel from America in the name of MAGA.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.