November 18, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump has outlined his policy on dealing with illegal immigrants—and it sounds surprisingly like President Obama’s policy.
In an interview on “60 Minutes,” Trump said he would plan to initially deport 2 million to 3 million illegal immigrants, with an emphasis on those with criminal records.
Since Obama took office in 2009, he has deported 2.5 million illegal immigrants, with the majority being those with criminal records.
In the interview broadcast Sunday, Trump adopted a softer tone on immigrants than he did during his campaign, when he called many of them rapists and criminals. He instead referred to them as “terrific people,” saying they would be dealt with only after the border had been secured and criminals deported. There are altogether an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.
On Monday,”President Obama said he would urge Trump to consider leaving in place his policies that have blocked the deportation of immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.
Trump said his priority would be to remove criminals, a change from his campaign rhetoric, when he attacked all illegal immigrants, saying they took jobs away from Americans.
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records — gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million. We are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump said.
The Obama Administration has estimated that 1.9 million “removable criminal aliens” live in the United States.
But Trump may not be able to deport them quickly any more than Obama was able to because of US laws. In many cases, convicts would have to go through immigration courts before they could be deported. Those courts are overwhelmed with huge backlogs, so obtaining deportation orders from judges can take many months — if not years.
Thousands of immigrants are serving jail sentences that under current law cannot be curtailed. According to official figures, as of June only about 183,000 immigrants had been convicted of crimes and also had deportation orders so they could be detained and removed quickly.
In 2014, the Obama Administration issued guidelines instructing immigration agents to make criminals the highest priority for deportation. In 2015, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) figures, the majority of the 235,413 people deported — 59 percent — were convicted criminals, while 41 percent were removed for immigration violations.
“Under the Obama Administration, we have already managed to calibrate our policy with heavy emphasis on criminal aliens,” Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the New York University School of Law office of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, told The New York Times.
Since taking office in 2009, Obama has presided over the deportation of about 2.5 million illegal immigrants, prompting sharp criticism from immigrant groups. He did so in part to build political support for a broad revision of immigration laws that would have provided a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.
In the campaign, Trump opposed any path to citizenship and said he would deport all 11 million illegal immigrants—a goal no one who deals in immigration issues took seriously. In his “60 Minutes” interview, Trump did not drop his goal of deporting all illegals, but shifted the focus to criminals.
One problem carrying out mass deportations is that there are not enough federal police to do that. The federal police would require the help of far more numerous local police and sheriff’s deputies to detain illegal immigrants in large numbers. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement employs only 20,000 people, including those without arrest authority. State and local law enforcement agencies employ 800,000 sworn officers with arrest powers.)
But many cities object to being used as an arm of the federal government to enforce immigration law. For one thing, they aren’t paid to do that work. More importantly, local police argue that if they enforce immigration law they will lose the cooperation of immigrant groups in their cities—cooperation they need to penetrate criminal groups within those immigrant communities.
Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago are among the many cities that have stayed away from enforcing federal immigration laws.