Trump Wants Mass Deportations. He Will Need Jails and Sanctuary Cities to Help.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has said little about the specifics of how he would carry out the promised largest deportation effort in American history. But immigration experts say it would be nearly impossible to execute without some critical assistance, particularly from jails and prisons.

Mr. Trump’s promises have provoked fears of wide-scale roundups across cities and states. Yet the more efficient path might be persuading — or forcing — far more of the people who run the nation’s jails and prisons to open their doors to federal immigration agents to find and deport undocumented prisoners.

Thomas D. Homan, a senior immigration official in Mr. Trump’s first administration who will now be the “border czar” in charge of the nation’s borders, has a well-documented preference for picking up migrants in jails. It takes just one officer, he has explained, to pick up multiple immigrants each day inside a county or state lockup.

{snip}

Expanding deportation beyond jails presents a host of complications. Mr. Trump would also need personnel, airplanes, immigration agents and far more than four years to find 11 million undocumented immigrants, take them into custody and transport them back to their home countries.

{snip}

Jails and prisons have long been a significant source of immigration arrests and deportations in the United States. Anytime immigrants are arrested and jailed, their fingerprints are automatically transmitted to ICE, giving officers their location.

The number of undocumented immigrants in detention fluctuates; during two years in the Trump administration — the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years — ICE requested immigrants from jails and prisons more than 342,000 times. But federal authorities would need the cooperation of local authorities to raid the jails and prisons — something the agency struggled with during Mr. Trump’s first term.

“A major reason that the first Trump administration deported far fewer people than President Obama was resistance from state and local officials in so-called sanctuary jurisdictions,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said in an email.

{snip}

The first Trump administration tried to force sanctuary states and cities back on board. It sued California over the state’s sanctuary law and tried to withhold funds from cities with policies blocking cooperation with immigration officials.

{snip}

If Mr. Trump does turn to arrests in communities to get the numbers he desires, he will need to significantly increase the number of officers sent into the field (ICE employs 20,000 people), expand the detention capacity to record levels and bring on more planes to deport people.

Deportations also carry another wrinkle: Countries across the globe must agree to receive immigrants. Certain countries, like Venezuela, have stopped taking deportation flights while others, like China or Cuba, have historically limited the number of their nationals they are willing to take.

One effort that could help increase numbers will be the resumption of the practice known as collateral arrests, or the apprehension of immigrants in the same place as an ICE target. Immigrant activists have said the practice lends itself to racial profiling and should be curtailed. The effort was a staple at the agency during the first Trump administration but was stopped after President Biden took office.

Mr. Trump has already indicated a willingness to use the military’s assistance. Mr. Homan told The New York Post that the military could be used to transport immigrants to free up ICE officers to arrest and pick up people.

Mr. Trump could also rely on expanded use of quick deportations historically employed at the southern border.

The Trump administration was given the go-ahead to try to quickly deport anyone who has been in the United States for less than two years at the end of its tenure in late 2020. Those deportation powers are expansive but also have their own bureaucratic and logistical issues.

{snip}