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The full scope of
the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan, which has been evident
in theory, is only just starting to come together in practice, and its
scale has come as a surprise to many Americans.
This week, the Supreme Court blessed, for now, the
administration’s effort to deport people from countries such as Cuba and
Venezuela to places other than their homeland, including nations halfway
around the world in Africa.
In Florida,
construction began on a migrant detention center intended to be a sort
of Alcatraz in the Everglades.
And CNN reported
exclusively that the administration will soon make a large universe of
people who had been working legally after seeking asylum eligible for deportation.
I went to the author
of that report, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, and asked her
to explain what we know and what we’re learning about how the different
stories are coming together.
One thing that stuck
out to me is how the totality of the administration’s actions is turning
people who had been working legally in the US into undocumented
immigrants now facing deportation.
Our conversation,
edited for length, is below:
A new universe of
deportable people
WOLF: You have this exclusive report about a large universe
of new people the Trump administration might be trying to deport. What
did you find out?
ALVAREZ: The plans that the administration has been
working on are targeting people who came into the US unlawfully and then
applied for asylum while in the country.
The plan here is to
dismiss those asylum claims, which could affect potentially hundreds of
thousands of people, and then make them immediately deportable.
It also puts the US
Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency responsible for
managing federal immigration benefits, at the center of the president’s
deportation campaign, because not only are they the ones that manage
these benefits, but they have also been delegated the authority by the
Department of Homeland Security to place these individuals in fast-track
deportation proceedings and to take actions to enforce immigration laws.
This is a shift that
is prompting a lot of concern. As one advocate with the ACLU put it – and
I’ll just quote her – “They’re turning the agency that we think of as
providing immigration benefits into an enforcement arm for ICE.”
Widening the
aperture to deport more and more people
WOLF: This is certainly not the criminal population
that President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan said during the
campaign that they would target first for deportation, right?
ALVAREZ: You’re right to say that coming into this
administration, Trump officials repeatedly said they planned to target
people with criminal records.
That is a hard thing
to do. It requires a lot of legwork, and their numbers in terms of
arrests were relatively low compared to where they wanted to be.
The White House
wants to meet at least 3,000 arrests a day, and you just cannot do that
if you are only going after people with criminal records.
Now we’ve seen that the
aperture has widened to include anyone who’s in the United States
illegally.
The administration’s
perspective on this is that these are individuals who crossed the border
unlawfully; therefore, they are eligible for deportation.
But there has been
consternation even among the president’s allies about who exactly they’re
going after.
In fact, there was
recently a letter from Republican lawmakers to the administration asking
for a breakdown of who they were arresting.
What types of people
is the administration targeting?
WOLF: It’s hard to keep track of the different
buckets of people the Trump administration has targeted, like those with
temporary protected status (TPS) versus asylum-seekers. How should we
distinguish between them?
ALVAREZ: Temporary protected status only applies to
people who are currently residing in the US. It’s a form of humanitarian
relief. The United States acknowledges that the conditions in your
country are not ones that they could send you back to.
The Trump
administration has started to peel that back and said that the conditions
are sufficient; therefore, we can send you back.
There’s certainly a
debate for many of these countries as to whether or not that is true, but
that has been a long criticism of temporary protected status. What is
supposed to be temporary for some countries has been extended so many
times that it is no longer temporary.
Parole is another
existing legal authority. The United States has frosty relations, for
example, with Cuba and Venezuela, and it’s very hard to deport people to
those countries because they might not accept repatriation flights.
The Biden
administration argued that creating a parole program would give people
the opportunity to legally migrate to the United States without coming to
the US-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of
that opportunity, and it was very specific to certain nationalities,
particularly Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
There are two more
buckets I’ll mention: Refugees are people who seek protection in the
United States from abroad. Asylum-seekers are those who do it from the
United States.
All those buckets
have been targeted under the Trump administration, and there have been
moves to strip those protections from the people who have them.
A lot of this is
still working its way through litigation. But the effect is that people
who perhaps had protection in the United States – could work here
legally, could live here, even if temporarily – don’t have them anymore
and are now eligible for deportation.
People who were
working legally are now undocumented
WOLF: So the Trump administration essentially created
a large new population of undocumented people who were previously here
with some sort of blessing from the government?
ALVAREZ: Yes. I’ve been talking to experts in industries
that depend on migrant workers and there have been situations where
someone had hired a migrant worker who had a work permit to legally work
here while their applications are being adjudicated, while they went
through their immigration proceedings, and they don’t have that anymore.
Those protections and benefits have been stripped.
That person who was
hired legally is now suddenly undocumented. That can create an issue for
industries that depend on the migrant workforce.
Someone mentioned
that to me as an example earlier this week, as we were talking through
how it can affect agriculture, construction and manufacturing.
We don’t have a good
sense of the numbers yet, but all indications are that by stripping
protections consistently through various ways, the number of people who
are undocumented in the United States is growing.
An assist from the
Supreme Court
WOLF: The other thing that happened this week is the
Supreme Court allowed, for now, the Trump administration to carry on with
deporting people from countries that we’ve just discussed – Cubans or
Venezuelans – to third-party countries such as South Sudan. What do we
know about those people?
ALVAREZ: The people you’re talking about are a group of
migrants who were being sent to South Sudan. They’re in Djibouti because
of litigation, and they are now being interviewed to see if they have
grounds for what we call “reasonable fear.”
But just to broaden
out from that group, this decision from the Supreme Court was a very big
deal.
Being able to send
people to a country that is not their own, but that is willing to take
others – that’s a huge deal for the administration to ramp up how many
people that they are deporting at any one time.
There is the
question of due process, which has sort of been a theme in this
administration.
How much time do you
have to provide notice to an individual that they are not going to be
deported to their home country – they’re going to be deported elsewhere?
How much time, if
any, do you give for them to contest their removal to that specific
country?
The overarching
point here is that this decision gives the administration so much more
runway to execute on their deportation plan.
Where does
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ fit in?
WOLF: The thing that was interesting this week is the
so-called Alligator Alcatraz and these efforts to create new detention
facilities. How would those be used?
ALVAREZ: Let me actually tie these two points together,
from your previous question to now. What we are seeing currently is the
Trump administration trying to solve for existing hurdles in the
immigration system for arresting and deporting people in large numbers.
ICE only has a
limited number of detention beds. They’re only funded for an average of
41,500 beds, but they work with local jails. They have community partners
to detain people. Currently, there are more than 58,000 people in ICE
custody. They are completely over capacity.
That means that they
have to look for new ways to detain people, and “Alligator Alcatraz” is
an example of that, which is essentially building a facility very quickly
to hold up to 5,000 people and using some FEMA funds so that the state
can erect this facility.
It’s called
“Alligator Alcatraz” because it is located in the Everglades, Florida.
The idea is that it would be low-cost because they don’t have to worry
much about security, given that the surroundings are marshes and swamps
full of alligators and pythons. So, essentially, if one were to escape,
they wouldn’t make it very far.
It is perhaps a clue
or the beginning of how we might see the administration strike more
agreements with consenting states, or with private companies, or military
bases to house detainees.
The White House
imposed a goal of arresting 3,000 people a day. Well, there comes the
next question of where do you put them, especially if you’ve maxed out
ICE detention beds.
Now we’re holding
more than 58,000 people, and deportations can’t keep up. And so there
comes the Supreme Court decision of allowing the administration to deport
people to other countries.
You can start to see
how the puzzle pieces are slowly coming together for the administration
as they try to execute on this lofty campaign promise.
The picture comes
into focus
WOLF: You used two interesting words there – clues and
puzzle pieces. Do you feel like we have a grasp of everything that the
Trump administration is doing right now on the immigration and
deportation front?
ALVAREZ: They’ve had four years to think about this.
Stephen Miller (who is White House deputy chief of staff)
knows the immigration system, there’s no question about that, and is the
architect when it comes to many of these policies.
I would say that
over the last six months, the administration has been quietly doing a lot
behind the scenes that the average person was probably not paying
attention to. It may have come in the form of regulations, or it may have
come in the form of policy guidance, or diplomatic talks that are
happening with countries to eventually take other nationalities.
What’s been
interesting about this particular moment is that everything that they
were quietly working on is starting to come to light.
The X factor is: Do
they get the billions and billions of dollars from the massive package that’s working its
way through Congress? Because if they do that, it will be a game-changer
for them, and it will eliminate so many resource issues, and we could
really see this plan take off
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