In order for President Trump to keep his pledge to deport “millions and millions” of immigrants, his administration would need to move beyond the border.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. focused enforcement on the record numbers of people who had recently crossed the southern border and used expanded emergency powers under Covid to conduct four million deportations during his tenure. Mr. Trump conducted 1.9 million during his first term.
Although Mr. Trump entered office in 2017 with similar promises to deport millions, he initially conducted deportations at a slower pace than under President Barack Obama.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and Mr. Trump used powers unlocked by the Covid health emergency, known as Title 42, to immediately expel border crossers from the country. Mr. Biden continued the practice until the end of the public health emergency in May 2023.
Title 42 expulsions made up a vast majority of removals during the pandemic years, but their totals can be misleading. Because these expulsions carried fewer penalties than a formal removal order, many people who were expelled simply attempted to cross again. (Those who were caught could be expelled repeatedly — the proportion of people who were arrested by Border Patrol again within a year rose to nearly 30 percent in 2021.)
During the pandemic, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported fewer people from the interior of the country. That type of deportation did not return to previous levels under Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden was able to deport more people in part because there were more new arrivals to deport. The number of people trying to cross the border skyrocketed after he took office.
Despite Mr. Biden restricting the rules on who could qualify for asylum and expanding the use of expedited removal to deport more people after the end of the public health emergency, far more people crossed the border than immigration enforcement agents were able to deport each month.
Many of the rest were paroled or released into the country to await a hearing in immigration court. They may have made an asylum claim or sought another legal pathway to stay in the country.
When ICE sent many of its agents to the border to work with Customs and Border Protection on removing recent arrivals in 2021 and 2022, deportations of convicted criminals dropped.
“It’s easier and cheaper to focus on recent border crossers when they are high because it is just quickly returning people,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
Deportations of criminals rose again in the last two years, and Mr. Trump has said they would be a focus of his enforcement efforts. About 655,000 people with a criminal conviction or pending charges are on ICE’s docket.
Declining state and local law enforcement cooperation with ICE has made it harder to deport people since the first Trump administration, Ms. Bush-Joseph said.
“The way that ICE deports most people is encountering them by picking them up after jail,” she said. “When you have less cooperation, it’s harder for ICE to go out and find people on an individual basis.”
Mr. Trump has said that in addition to strengthening border enforcement by building a wall and deploying the military, he wants to increase raids in the interior of the country. The administration on Tuesday rescinded a policy blocking ICE raids at schools, churches and hospitals. And the Justice Department ordered investigations of officials who block immigration enforcement efforts in so-called sanctuary cities.
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