U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has had a very productive trip abroad, reaching agreements with both El Salvador and Guatemala to serve as “safe third countries” for migrants who have been deported from the United States. Those pacts are key to President Trump’s “mass deportation” plans because many countries won’t live up to their obligations to take their deported nationals back.
According to its annual report, officers at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were keeping track of more than 7.6 million removable aliens who were not in the agency’s custody at the end of fiscal year 2024, a nearly 25 percent increase over the year before.
Almost 1.427 million of those aliens—more people than live in New Hampshire, the 41st largest state—are under final orders of removal. All of them have received their full due process rights, and the only thing left for ICE to do is physically remove them from the United States.
By law, those aliens were supposed to be taken into ICE custody and held until they could be removed, but two factors impeded their detentions.
First, the previous administration failed to ask Congress for sufficient detention space to hold them. Second, the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that immigration authorities could not indefinitely detain any alien under a final order of removal whose physical deportation is not “reasonably foreseeable.”
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