Trump Allies Fear Watered Down Deportation Efforts

Donald Trump ran for president on a bold promise: to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.

Now, a little over a month before he takes office, some allies are worried that a shift in rhetoric from the president-elect could portend a watered down removal effort and are urging him not to scale back his plans.

In the weeks since the election, and even in some rally speeches toward the end of the campaign, Trump and his incoming advisers have alluded to a mass removal effort of immigrants with a criminal record, a far narrower set of people than the 15 million to 20 million Trump pledged to deport earlier in the year. Tom Homan, the president-elect’s incoming border czar, has said Trump’s team isn’t planning to perform mass raids in immigrant enclaves—the worst fear of immigrants-rights activists.

“This isn’t going to be neighborhood sweeps and military vehicles going through the city,” Homan said in an interview with Dr. Phil McGraw on Thursday after meeting with New York Mayor Eric Adams. “I told him, you know, President Trump and myself have committed that this is going to be a targeted enforcement operation.”

The emphasis on criminals reflects not only what Trump considers to be the highest priority but a practical understanding of the complexity of rounding up millions of migrants, a person familiar with the matter said. While Trump remains committed to a deportation effort, his team is mindful of those realities and wants to set expectations.

The decision also reflects some concern over economic impacts to key sectors such as housing and agriculture, the person said. Through it all, a focus on criminals has been the animating force of Trump’s message, as he repeatedly highlights instances of migrants committing crimes such as sexual assault or murder.

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Homan pushed back on the notion that the deportation has been vastly narrowed. “I have not taken anyone off the table,” he said. “We just need to be smart.”

Trump’s hard-line immigration backers say they have noticed a retrenchment. They say they are holding their fire to attempt to influence the incoming president before they criticize him openly.

Any deportation, these Trump backers say, must be on par with the scale of the illegal migration into the country under the Biden administration, and shouldn’t be limited to specific classes of people. The risk, they said, is that Trump’s narrowed threats will effectively become a carte blanche for migrants wanting to come to the U.S., knowing they would most likely be allowed to stay.

“There is concern that it’s going to be limited, and that those who otherwise have not committed crimes beyond being in the country illegally may be allowed to stay,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at Numbers USA {snip}

The president-elect’s allies also are concerned by the Trump team’s willingness to exclude some categories of migrants. Trump said in a recent interview with NBC, for example, that he wanted to work with Democrats to come up with legislation to protect Dreamers, immigrants in the U.S. illegally who were brought as children, from deportation. Backers of hard-line immigration policies view an exemption for Dreamers, who often have bipartisan support, as a slippery slope.

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One frustrated Trump ally said: “When you keep excluding people from mass detention and deportation and saying ‘we’ll get the worst of the worst first’—well, guess what, that also happens to be Biden’s immigration policy.”

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