How President Trump Can Carryout His Mass Deportation Agenda

[This is a synopsis of a two hour podcast. To see the podcast, click on this link.]

With Donald Trump’s inauguration a little over two months away, the time is nigh to discuss the practical measures that will need to be taken to implement his mass deportation agenda.

Mass deportations is a subjective term that can mean different things to different people. For MAGA supporters that probably means every person here illegally. They may also tend to either think of illegal immigration almost exclusively occurring at the Southwest Border between Ports of Entry by so-called Border Crossers.

However, most don’t realize that prior to the Biden administration, roughly half of the United States’ illegal immigrant population was made up of aliens who overstayed a lawful period of admission, colloquially known as Visa Overstaying.

To the far left and most MSNBC viewers, it means deporting all aliens whether they be convicted criminals or not. They take great umbrage with any government that would dare to enforce common sense immigration rules and regulations.

Somewhere in between these two groupings are average Americans who, when polled, indicated they supported deporting illegal and/or criminal aliens, but are typically gaslit into supporting amnesty in some fashion. The sad truth being most Americans are often too good natured to put a stop to the lawlessness.  It should also be noted that aliens in the country LEGALLY who commit certain crimes not only should but can be deported.

Notwithstanding the cost of conducting deportations at scale, Trump’s opponents have focused on what they think is its Achilles heel – “due process.” However, there’s a fatal flaw with them hitching their wagon to that particular horse as not every alien is entitled to due process.

Even for those who are, their immunity from it often has limitations, especially when an alien hasn’t been admitted, which in 1950 in Knauff v. Shaughnessy, the Supreme Court found:

“[w]hatever the procedure authorized by Congress is, it is due process…”.

Aliens entitled to complete due process includes naturalized U.S. Citizens and Green Card holders.

On the other end of the spectrum, Visa Waiver Program (VWP) Overstays, Border Crossers unlawfully present less than two years, parolees present less than two years, prior deportees, and aliens with outstanding orders of deportation are, absent a request for asylum, are not entitled to due process. Moreover, VWP participants expressly waived their right to it.

Most of the latter groups are subject to a process known as Expedited Removal, which allows certain aliens to be deported without referral to an Immigration Judge. This alone would negate DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ plan to overwhelm the Immigration Court system with record a number of backlogged cases. Mayorkas cynically thought that by releasing non-asylum seekers with no right to a hearing he could force a massive amnesty that would dwarf the one implemented by Reagan in 1986.

A long-held consensus among politicians, pundits, and think tanks, whether open border enthusiasts or proponents of restriction was the illegal alien population (at least before the Biden administration) was approximately 11,000,000. However, a 2018 joint study by Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that between 1990 and 2016, the upper end was approximately 39,000,000.

Between FY 2009 and FY 2020, ICE deported 3,685,052 aliens. Unfortunately, 2,116,906 weren’t arrested by ICE but by Customs and Border Protection, primarily the Border Patrol. Of those arrested by ICE during that period, only 1,975,440 were charged with or convicted of crimes. That means using the 39M figure, if no additional aliens entered illegally or overstayed at its current staffing level, it would take ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) 127 years to deport every illegal alien here.

Conversely, if each of ERO’s 6,000 Officers and 6,500 Special Agents of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) were to arrest an average of five aliens during each of their approximately 197 workdays per year, 12,312,500 could be detained annually, many of whom would be immediately deportable absent a need for travel documents.