On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised a “mass deportation” program if he were elected, and with the votes counted and Trump the winner, such a plan appears to be in the offing. Ignore the hype and dire predictions about the fiscal and economic costs of such a scheme: “Mass deportation” is just another term for the sort of immigration normalcy that’s been in short supply of late, and that voters demanded on November 5.
The Removals Rollercoaster. Take a look at removal and return statistics from the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), and you find a “removals” rollercoaster over the past 11 years.
In FY 2014, ICE’s Enforcement and Removals Operations (ERO) directorate removed or returned nearly 316,000 aliens, a figure that dipped down to just over 59,000 in FY 2021 before rising to more than 227,000 in the first 10 months of FY 2024.
Even those figures are misleading, however, because they elide even larger variations in ICE removals from the interior of the United States during that period.
Nearly 111,000 aliens initially apprehended by ICE from the interior were deported in FY 2014, a figure that dropped to fewer than 65,000 two fiscal years later in FY 2016. Interior removals rebounded to nearly 95,000 in FY 2018, only to plummet again to 31,380 in FY 2021 (more than half of which occurred in the first four months of the fiscal year, before Trump left office) and then crater at 28,200 in FY 2022.
ERO interior removals did rebound to more than 44,250 in FY 2023, but that was only an improvement compared to the prior two fiscal years, not compared to historical norms.
There are many reasons for this topsy-turvy, nausea-inducing ride, but they all come back to policy.
Obama and Trump. The Obama administration initially left ICE alone to enforce the law, before making the volitional choice days after the 2014 mid-term elections (the last elections of the Obama presidency) to restrict the number of interior deportations by “prioritizing” certain criminal cases for removal.
Trump also announced his own priorities for immigration enforcement in the interior five days after taking office for the first time when he issued Executive Order (EO) 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States”.
Critically that EO didn’t place any aliens whom ERO officers came across off-limits to enforcement — it just didn’t put most non-criminals at the top of the list. A burgeoning “sanctuary” movement in cities and states across the country, however, impeded ICE’s ability to identify, apprehend, and deport many otherwise removable criminal aliens.
In that vein, it’s important to note that the vast majority of ERO’s administrative arrests in the interior under Trump involved criminal aliens. For example, 66.3 percent of the 158,581 aliens ERO took into custody in FY 2018 had criminal convictions, and 20.7 percent had pending criminal charges. Less than 13 percent of those aliens were removable on immigration charges alone.
Despite that, many in the media painted a picture of a “reckless hyper enforcement system” under Trump that was wildly out of line with what ERO was actually doing. That portrayal set the stage for what happened next.
Biden Administration’s Enforcement Restrictions. On his 2020 campaign website, then-candidate Joe Biden peddled that “reckless” and “hyper” Trump immigration enforcement trope, contending it was “a moral failing and a national shame” for the 45th president to “threaten[] massive raids that would break up families who have been in this country for years and target[] people at sensitive locations like hospitals and schools”.
Most tellingly, Biden argued that “Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants”. Objectively, as the foregoing reveals, none of that was true.
But once in office, now President Biden weaponized those canards by again using so-called “priorities” as a proxy for non-enforcement, with his appointees and officials issuing not one but three separate memos restricting ICE’s ability to operate on that basis in the first eight months of his administration.
The last of those was issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in late September 2021, captioned “Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration Law” (Mayorkas memo).
The Mayorkas memo hobbled ICE’s ability to enforce the immigration laws by requiring ERO officers and ICE attorneys (who represent the government in immigration court) to consider irrelevant “mitigating factors” before investigating, apprehending, detaining, prosecuting, and removing any facially removable alien (collectively known as “enforcement action”).
Among those mitigating factors were the alien’s “advanced or tender age”; any “mental condition that may have contributed to the criminal conduct, or a physical or mental condition requiring care or treatment”; “the impact of removal on family in the United States, such as loss of provider or caregiver”; and even whether any member of the alien’s immediate family works for the government.
Those factors may be relevant to an alien’s eligibility for discretionary relief (like asylum or cancellation of removal), but they are wholly immaterial to the issue of whether ICE should subject that alien to enforcement action, and most critically they waste the enforcement resources they purportedly are conserving.
Mayorkas coupled those restrictions with an expanded “protected areas” policy that placed large swathes of major cities “off limits” to ICE enforcement.
As my colleague Jon Feere noted in November 2021, that policy “turned countless locations across the country into safe spaces for criminal aliens”, and ironically made playgrounds “sanctuaries for illegal-alien sex offenders”.
Public Opinion. Few in the media either noticed or cared about the Mayorkas enforcement guidelines and his protected areas regime, but the voters plainly did.
In a September 2024 poll by HarrisX for the George Washington University Society of Presidential Pollsters, 64 percent of registered voters disapproved of Biden’s immigration performance and 63 percent stated that ICE was “not working as an institution” (including nearly half of Democrats).
Most tellingly, respondents placed ICE at the top of the list of 16 governmental entities in that poll (which included the U.S. military and CBP) they believed should be given “more power”.
Trump’s opponents may argue that his contentions about alien crime and lawlessness under the Biden-Harris administration are overblown, but American voters knew what they were seeing in their own cities and towns and wanted a change.
“Homan Outlines Enforcement Priorities as Trump’s ‘Border Czar’”. And with Trump’s appointment of Tom Homan to head up the incoming administration’s immigration enforcement efforts, those same Americans are likely to get it.
In a November 14 NewsNation article headlined “Homan Outlines Enforcement Priorities as Trump’s ‘Border Czar’”, the former acting ICE director explained that immigration enforcement for the next four years will “focus on criminals and security threats rather than indiscriminate roundups”.
That doesn’t mean that aliens illegally in the country should get too comfortable, however: “If you’re in the country illegally, you’re in violation of law, so you’re not off the table, but we’re going to prioritize what we do”.
If that policy sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same policy the first Trump administration pursued, and for what it’s worth the same policy Homan implemented during most of the time that he served the Obama administration as ERO chief.
As his boss under Obama, ICE Director Sarah R. Saldaña, explained in a 2016 statement: “Tom and his team are dedicated to enforcing the law every day in order to protect national security, border security and public safety.” That’s more or less what Homan is pledging to do starting in January.
While the press is ginning up fears about the mass deportation plan Homan is promising to implement, ICE really won’t be doing much differently than it did under not only the first Trump administration, but Obama as well. Joe Biden’s limited immigration enforcement regime was the outlier, so Americans were really just voting for a return to normalcy.