During President Donald Trump’s first week in office, he signed 10 executive orders on immigration and issued a slew of edicts to carry out promises of mass deportations and border security. Some actions were felt immediately and others are being challenged in court.
During an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation on Reddit, U.S. immigration news editor Elliot Spagat discussed The Associated Press' latest coverage with Rebecca Santana, who covers the Department of Homeland Security, and Christopher Sherman, who is the news director for Mexico and Central America. They answered questions about Trump’s immigration announcements, including what’s been done already, what might happen in the next few months, and what might take longer to happen, if it ever does.
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This Q&A has been adapted from the AMA on Reddit and edited for brevity and clarity. Read the full AMA in its entirety on Reddit.
AMA question: Is Trump’s “plan” to deport every single undocumented migrant logistically feasible with Immigration and Customs Enforcement's current size? What are some of the new tactics he promised in the campaign we can expect ICE to deploy in the coming years against the undocumented?
Santana: Good question. It will be logistically challenging. About 1.4 million people have final orders of removal, meaning a judge ruled they can’t prove that they have the right to stay and has ordered them removed. About 660,000 people under immigration supervision have been convicted of a crime or are facing charges. Those two groups are the people that Trump officials have indicated are going to be early targets for deportation.
ICE has about 6,000 ERO officers. That stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations. They are the ones responsible for finding and removing people not eligible to stay here. So just comparing the numbers of cases to officers highlights the challenge for ERO. The government has tried to bring in other agencies like FBI, IRS, DEA to help with immigration enforcement, and they’re encouraging cooperation from state and local law enforcement to basically beef up their ranks. But immigration law is complicated and ERO officers are ultimately the ones most knowledgeable about it.
AMA question: Can you discuss the status of the agreement with El Salvador, and how this might affect refugees?
Sherman: First, a note on terminology — Rebecca shared this helpful distinction between refugees and asylum seekers: Refugees are a distinct category under U.S. law, different than asylum-seekers and other migrants who come directly to the U.S. border hoping to be admitted into the U.S. Refugees have to be located outside of the U.S. when they apply to come to the country. They have to demonstrate that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
Deals were worked out during the first Trump administration with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to send asylum seekers to those countries from the U.S. to apply for protection. But deals reached on U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip last week appear to go beyond that to include any deportees, not just asylum seekers.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said during Rubio’s visit that El Salvador will take convicted prisoners from the United States, including U.S. citizens, for a fee. That extraordinary offer got most of the attention, but Rubio also said El Salvador agreed to accept deportees of any nationality and hold them in its prisons.
Beyond that, few details have been released. El Salvador is of particular concern to human rights organizations, because it remains under a state of emergency that suspended some fundamental civil rights, including access to a lawyer.
AMA question: What kind of legal challenges to ICE overreach can we expect to see and from whom? How long could it take for judges to restrict ICE’s flexibility?
Spagat: It’s a general rule that almost every immigration policy is challenged in court. On the question of ICE “overreach,” more than two dozen religious groups representing millions of Americans sued Tuesday over Trump’s policy to make it easier for immigration officers to make arrests at places of worship. This refers to the “sensitive locations” policy that ICE had in place since 2011 to generally prohibit arrests at schools, hospitals and places of worship.
The American Civil Liberties Union has sued over the expansion of fast-track deportations, also known as “expedited removal,” an authority that has been in widespread use for people stopped at the border since 2004 but used nationwide only briefly and in a very limited way during Trump’s first term. The new policy allows ICE officers to deport people without appearing before an immigration judge unless they claim asylum.
ICE runs long-term immigration detention centers, which will probably be a major focus of litigation. We should note that many other agencies are getting involved in immigration detention, most recently the Bureau of Prisons and the military.
Speaking generally, I would expect all immigration litigation to reach the Supreme Court. The stakes are seen as too high for either side to settle for defeat on any of these issues. The big question is whether the policies will be enjoined, or put on hold, while litigation takes years.