Trump’s Mass Deportations Have Officially Begun
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests surged the week after President Donald Trump took office, with arrests Sunday totaling nearly 1,000 in a coordinated operation with other federal law enforcement agencies.
The highly publicized spike in ICE arrests marks the beginning of Trump’s efforts to create a deportation machine of unprecedented magnitude in the modern era, and a profound shift from his predecessor’s more lenient approach toward deportations from the interior.
White House Border Czar Tom Homan oversaw operations personally in Chicago, accompanied by celebrity talk show psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw, who interviewed an arrested Thai migrant he identified as Sam Seda.
Homan said that Seda was convicted of sex crimes involving children. HuffPost could not immediately confirm what charges the man had faced, and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for details about his case.
A tired-looking McGraw slowly questioned the man about his history and place of birth, with long pauses between questions. The man said his mother was a citizen and that he was born in Thailand. When McGraw asked what he had been charged with, the man said he wanted to speak with his lawyer.
“You’re Dr. Phil?” the man asked at one point. “I’ve seen ‘Dr. Phil’ on TV.”
The coordinated series of arrests, carried out with assistance from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, targeted people accused of serious crimes, according to ICE, which throughout the week posted a series of profiles of arrestees and their convictions or charges to its X account.
ICE noted Sunday that it targeted Chicago specifically. Other ICE operations also targeted Atlanta, Puerto Rico, Colorado and Austin, Texas, according to CNN. Homan has repeatedly criticized Democratic-led cities and states like those targeted for attempting to limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The ratcheting up of arrests marks a major shift in ICE tactics since former President Joe Biden took office.
Over the four years that Biden held the White House, deportation of unauthorized migrants from within the United States fell to their lowest levels in at least 15 years, at 151,748 over his four years in office, according to agency statistics. Interior removals under Trump’s first administration were 2.5 times higher, topping 390,000.
One of the major reasons why such a wide gulf separates the two presidents’ interior deportation figures is that Biden generally followed prosecutorial discretion guidelines that prioritized deporting people who presented a national security risk, those with serious criminal records and those who had a history of prior immigration offenses.
Prosecutorial discretion was responsible for reducing interior removals from a peak of 871,901 under Barack Obama’s first term to 370,585 in his second.
Trump did away with prosecutorial discretion during his first term, however, leading interior removals to creep back up again until the COVID-19 pandemic slowed them down. Trump did away with prosecutorial discretion policies again last week shortly after taking office.
Homan told ABC News in an interview televised on Sunday that he intended for immigration authorities to focus primarily on people with serious criminal records but to expand arrests to more people over time.
“We’re going to do this on a priority basis, as President Trump has promised, but as that aperture opens, there’s going to be more arrests nationwide,” Homan told ABC News. “If you’re in the country illegally, you’re on the table, because it’s not OK to violate the laws of this country.”
Residents of some targeted areas, however, suspected that the rising number of arrests included migrants who had lived there for years without running afoul of the law.
A man named Jesus Gonzalez, interviewed by local station Fox 32 Chicago, said that he voted for Trump, but disagreed with some of the arrests he was seeing in his neighborhood.
“They’re targeting the wrong people,” he said. “People are afraid to go out. People are afraid to go to work. That’s not right — that’s not what America’s about. America’s about living the dream.”
At the same time, the Trump administration has pressed aggressively for Latin American countries to accept flights of deportees. On Sunday, Trump threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro with emergency tariffs of 25% on all imports for refusing to allow flights to land in his country. Trump said those tariffs would rise to 50% by the end of the week if Petro continued to block deportee flights.
Petro unconditionally agreed within hours to Trump’s terms, presaging the president’s likely strategy when confronting opposition from other countries to his treatment of deportees. The logistical challenge of returning people to an increasingly diverse group of far-flung countries presents one of the biggest obstacles to Trump’s mass deportation agenda.