Trump got elected twice riding the immigration issue...hard. He'll continue to make headlines and paint the Dems into a corner. Will he actually deport a large percentage of Biden's new friends? Nope.
Does Voldemort care? Nope. It's good theater.
The Five Biggest Roadblocks to Trump’s Immigration Agenda
President-elect’s advisers will confront funding issues and legal challenges to turn campaign rhetoric into policy
ByMichelle Hackman and Tarini Parti, WSJ
Updated Jan. 1, 2025 12:10 am ET
President-elect Donald Trump has promised a crackdown on illegal immigration and significant changes to immigration laws. Now his advisers will contend with long-existing headwinds to turn Trump’s campaign rhetoric into policy.
Here are five major roadblocks the incoming administration will face:
Immigration-court backlog
Most immigrants in the U.S. illegally can’t be deported without a hearing in immigration court, where they have a chance to ask for asylum or another avenue to stay in the country. But immigration courts are so backlogged that hearings are being scheduled as far into the future as 2029.
While immigrants wait for their hearings, they are given work permits, allowing them to find legal employment inside the U.S. Trump and his allies argue this process is an important factor attracting migrants to come to the U.S. to seek asylum—even if they don’t win their court cases.
Outside experts estimate that Congress would have to hire about 5,000 immigration judges—the system now has roughly 500—to efficiently sort through all existing cases as well as new ones.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of immigrants in what would be the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. Photo: DVIDS, Getty Images
Barring a large infusion of cash to hire more judges, the Trump administration could shuffle around whose hearings happen first, giving priority to people from certain countries or those with criminal histories. They could make it tougher for immigrants to delay their final hearings, which judges sometimes allow in some cases, to give immigrants more time to find lawyers to represent them.
Without a change in the law, most of the migrants who entered the country illegally during President Biden’s term won’t be legally deportable for years.
Lack of ICE agents
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is responsible for arresting immigrants in the country illegally, detaining them and deporting them. It has roughly 6,000 agents on staff and funding to jail about 40,000 immigrants at any given time. It doesn’t have nearly the fleet of planes needed to deport millions of migrants back to their home countries.
The government is also having trouble recruiting new border-patrol agents and doesn’t have enough asylum officers to hear claims made outside of court.
Republicans are hoping to use a budget process known as reconciliation to pass billions of dollars in spending for ICE as well as Trump’s border wall without needing Democratic votes. Even if the money comes, it will take the government time to recruit and train new ICE officers and make new detention space available.
Trump plans to declare a national emergency soon after taking office, which could unlock additional money taken out of the Pentagon’s budget for projects such as border-wall construction. Members of the National Guard or other troops won’t be allowed to perform immigration arrests, however; at best, they could be used for ancillary tasks, such as transporting immigrants. Trump’s designated border czar, Tom Homan, told The Wall Street Journal that military bases and planes could aid a deportation campaign.
Blue-state resistance
Immigrants living in the country illegally are often concentrated in big, Democratic-led cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a CNN interview recently that he wouldn’t be cooperating with federal immigration authorities. “The law is very clear,” he said. “Local police officers are not federal agents.”
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has expressed support for limited deportations for migrants who crossed illegally and have committed violent crimes, but he is strongly opposed to mass deportations. Johnston has said he was prepared to go to jail to resist Trump’s plan and encouraged others to protest.
While it is still possible to arrest people living illegally in blue-led cities, it is far more challenging without local cooperation. One of the most common ways ICE makes arrests is by picking people up as they are released from jail, even on a minor violation. But blue states have broadly barred local authorities from informing ICE when they plan to release someone. Such legal approaches, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, are known as “sanctuary-city” policies.
Without local cooperation, ICE would need to post officers on watch outside of jails for hours or days to catch a release. They can also conduct neighborhood raids, but immigration officers—unlike regular police—don’t have warrants to make an arrest, meaning they can’t enter a person’s home to arrest them.
Trump’s immigration advisers, including Homan, have publicly discussed cutting off federal grants and even pursuing criminal prosecutions of the officials enforcing sanctuary policies.
Lack of cooperation from foreign countries
Among the reasons President Dwight Eisenhower was able to pull off a broad deportation program in the 1950s, which Trump cites as a model, was that everyone he sought to send out of the country was from Mexico. But over the past few years, immigrants crossing into the U.S. illegally have come from record numbers of countries, such as China, India, Mauritania and Uzbekistan.
The U.S. today can’t simply push migrants back across the border or even load them all onto a flight heading to the same place. It must now orchestrate a complex dance of flights, choosing where to send its limited number of planes and fighting with other governments about when—and whether at all—they are willing to receive the flights.
Many of the newly arrived migrants in the U.S. come from countries where diplomatic relations are frayed or even nonexistent, such as Venezuela.
U.S. immigration law allows immigrants to be deported to third countries if their home countries won’t take them back, but getting a third country to agree is rare. Trump has pledged to strike safe-country agreements with countries in Latin America and even Africa. He managed to reach an agreement with Guatemala during his first term to send asylum seekers from elsewhere in Central America there, but the agreement was short-lived. Only about a thousand people actually were sent.
Legal challenges
Many of the changes proposed by Trump and Stephen Miller, his incoming deputy chief of staff and longtime immigration adviser, can only be done through Congress—or perhaps even through a constitutional amendment.
A core issue they have attempted to surmount is that under existing law, migrants can legally ask for asylum even if they have entered the country unlawfully. Trump, and even Biden, sought to get around this by making asylum seekers live in Mexico while their claims were being weighed, jailing them, or coming up with new rules to make asylum seekers otherwise ineligible. As long as the law remains on the books, however, the government will struggle to find legal ways to narrow that right.
Trump has said he also wants to eliminate certain visa categories, such as one that allows U.S. citizens to sponsor their foreign adult siblings, or the diversity visa lottery, which randomly awards green cards to people from countries with low levels of immigration to the U.S. But only Congress can create or eliminate visa categories, and it hasn’t done so to a significant extent since 1990.
Trump’s pledge to end birthright citizenship, the practice of designating any baby born in the U.S. as a citizen no matter their parents’ immigration status, likely can’t be changed by Congress—let alone the executive order Trump has proposed. Most legal scholars say it would require amending the Constitution, a rare and difficult process.
Trump’s allies say that birthright citizenship is a misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, which dates to the 19th century and in part granted full citizenship to former slaves. The most recent amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1992, more than 200 years after it was first proposed.
In all these cases, Trump’s advisers have said that he hopes to test the limits of the law by issuing policies he knows to be unlawful, or even unconstitutional, in a bid to persuade the Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservatives, to come to different decisions.
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