President-elect Donald Trump has said he would conduct mass deportations in the millions of people. Some have wondered whether he will follow through on this campaign rhetoric, and that is admittedly an open question. In a recent Meet the Press interview, the president-elect aligned himself with the stated views of his senior aide, Stephen Miller, in saying his administration would prioritize criminals but then also focus on anyone who is in the country illegally. If the Trump administration intends to follow through on truly mass deportation, they will have to overcome the enormous legal, political, and logistical challenges associated with arresting, detaining, and processing many millions for deportation.
To achieve any such result while maintaining public support, the Trump administration will be pressured to rely on deceptive representations of what exactly its deportation programs entail. In this article, we detail specifically the most likely methods of framing the mass deportation policy, as reflected in recent remarks by Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and incoming White House “border czar” Tom Homan.
In recent weeks and months, many commentators have focused on efforts the administration may pursue to reduce mass deportation costs-—mostly by using U.S. military resources and relying on highly contested legal maneuvers to expedite bureaucratic processing. Less discussed is the way in which the feasibility of mass deportations hinges on which groups of noncitizens are targeted for deportation. Who is targeted matters politically, because public support for “mass deportations” hinges crucially on who is being deported (as we detail below). Who is targeted also matters logistically, because some groups are much easier to identify, arrest, and deport in large numbers.
In Part I, we explain those core political and logistical obstacles. In Part II, we identify the methods the administration may adopt in an effort to overcome those obstacles, if it sticks with the agenda of historically unprecedented mass deportations. At bottom, the basic method is for administration officials to claim publicly that they are targeting groups whose deportations the public most supports, while actually targeting immigrant groups whose deportation is easiest to accomplish. Indeed, the policies of the first Trump administration offer a guide, and recent statements by the most senior incoming White House officials suggest that they are already laying the groundwork for such public messaging about the nature of the “mass deportation” program.
Part I
Obstacles to Mass Deportation: Political and Logistical
One major obstacle to any mass deportation plan is political. American public support for mass deportation is much thinner than the incoming administration has claimed. Americans largely support stiffer border control. However, the most nuanced research and statistical analysis indicates that the American public will support only some limited versions of deportation policy—for example, a policy targeting “dangerous criminals.” Indeed, large majorities (including in the 2024 presidential election exit polls) favor offering large categories of other undocumented migrants a path to legal status if not ultimately citizenship.
Another major obstacle to any mass deportation plan is logistical. Efforts to deport large numbers of immigrants have long been hampered by the challenge of identifying, locating, and arresting large numbers of noncitizens who have violated immigration law. The government spent decades, starting in the 1990s, trying to address this challenge. Congress has, over time, poured ever more resources into federal immigration enforcement, and presidential administration after presidential administration has built up bureaucratic infrastructure to facilitate the identification and arrest of immigrants who are deportable. Perhaps most famously, the Bush II and Obama administrations created the Secure Communities program to ensure that every person arrested by any law-enforcement agency anywhere in the country would have their fingerprints screened through a federal database designed to identify deportable noncitizens.
Even with such programs, however, U.S. immigration authorities have never in modern times deported more than 250,000 non-citizens from the interior of the country during a single year. And even deportation rates near 250,000, achieved for a few years in the middle of the Obama administration, appear not to have been sustainable. In recent years— including during the first Trump administration—interior deportations have generally been much lower.
President-elect Trump has promised interior deportations in the millions. Increasing deportations by roughly an order of magnitude will take a lot more than just additional resources. The Trump administration will have to find additional ways to identify, locate, and arrest noncitizens for deportation.
Part II
Overcoming the Dilemma Posed by Political and Logistical Obstacles
The Trump administration will face a dilemma if it tries to sustain general public support for any mass deportation effort while at the same time pursuing a policy that makes it feasible to identify and arrest large numbers of noncitizens.
If the Trump administration limits deportations to noncitizens with serious criminal records, this will help sustain public support for deportation efforts. But it would require the administration to give up on the promise to deport dramatically larger numbers of noncitizens than have been removed by previous administrations. That is because there are simply not enough such noncitizens.
Noncitizens with serious criminal records have always been deportation priorities for Republican and Democratic administrations, and there are not that many to deport. This important fact was recently confirmed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency long tasked with targeting immigrants with criminal records. In a September 2024 letter responding to congressional inquiries, ICE provided a letter stating that ICE’s deportation docket currently includes 435,719 noncitizens with criminal convictions. The numbers convicted of a violent crime are considerably lower–under 285,000. That is a tiny fraction of the nearly 4 million noncitizens currently in deportation proceedings, let alone of the approximately 11 million living in the country without authorization.
To drive deportation numbers much higher than past administrations, Trump officials will have to cast a much wider net, targeting noncitizens without criminal records. But such an approach risks a public backlash of the sort the Trump administration faced during its first term when it implemented its family separation policy. After all, polling makes clear that the public doesn’t support a dragnet deportation operation that tears apart families or one that targets long-term residents with deep ties to this country.We believe these dilemmas explain why Trump and incoming senior White House administration officials have already begun to mislead the public about who will be among the many people deported. Deception around immigration policy is not a new tactic for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Here such tactics can be used to make it more feasible to remove very large numbers of immigrants while sustaining political support for such initiatives.
We discuss the most likely methods for misleading the public as the new deportation policy unfolds.
Method I: New Definitions of “Criminal Immigrants”
Bottom line: Target immigrants with no criminal convictions while labeling them dangerous “criminal aliens”
There are two primary ways in which the administration may try to paint the picture that far more immigrants are criminals. Statements by incoming senior White House officials have pushed both ideas:
A. Falsely impute crimes to entire classes of immigrants
One tactic is to rely on false claims to tar entire subgroups of immigrants as criminals. The disinformation campaign supported by Trump and Vance around Haitian migrants (legally present) in Springfield, Ohio is a preview for this kind of initiative. In that case, the underlying allegations of crimes were completely false, including debunked claims about the Haitians being responsible for increased murder rates. On the unsupported claim that some members of the Haitian community had committed offenses, Trump promised to revoke the legal status of the Haitian population and “deport” them. This move from assertions of individualized conduct to collective blame of migrant populations can easily exploit xenophobic and racist fears.
What’s even more astounding about this approach is that empirical studies consistently show that immigrants in the United States, including undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at far lower rates than U.S.-born citizens. Moreover, research by one of us has shown that even the largest effort to date in American history to target criminal offenders for deportation—the Secure Communities program mentioned above—did not reduce crime rates in the communities where it was implemented. Given these facts, the mass deportation of whole classes of immigrants on the collective-blame approach could actually lead to more crime per capita, not less, in American communities.
B. Distort the connection between criminal law and immigration law
There’s another way for the administration to advance the idea that large numbers of immigrants should be deported as criminals: pushing the idea that any immigrant who has violated immigration law has committed a crime. Homan said the administration will focus first on immigrants with a criminal record. However, he readily pivots, and recently made clear that the incoming administration considers every “illegal immigrant” to be a criminal who should be a priority for deportation.
This is false. Being present in the United States without legal authorization is not a crime: it is a civil offense, not subject to criminal punishment. Thus, it is wrong to claim that every noncitizen who has violated immigration law has committed a crime. But labeling such immigrants “illegal immigrants”—a pejorative term that has no meaning in federal immigration law—makes it easy to mislead many members of the public into believing that every unauthorized immigrant has committed a crime.
To be sure, since 1929 federal law has made it a misdemeanor for noncitizens to cross the U.S. border without permission. Thus, a person who enters the country by evading inspection at the border has committed a federal offense. (This immigration offense becomes a felony when a person re-enters the country unlawfully after previously being deported.) Many Dreamers who entered the country as young children with their parents could potentially be categorized as “criminals” on this definition–even though they have never committed any other crime. (In some states, Dreamers who are recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program may themselves be serving law enforcement officers.) So too could noncitizens who have lived in the United States for decades, who are married to U.S. citizens, who have U.S. citizen children, and who have never had any run-ins with law enforcement. The fact that these immigrants have never been arrested, charged, or convicted of any crime–not even the misdemeanor offense of illegal entry–can’t stop someone from trying to label them as criminals.
Indeed, Homan was recently caught exaggerating the number of “convicted criminal aliens in this country with orders for removal.” In response to a CBS News inquiry, “Brian Hughes, a Trump-Vance transition spokesman, told CBS News that Homan was considering the number of migrants who have crossed illegally into the U.S. who evaded border patrol.”
Method II: New Definitions of “Illegal Immigrants”
Bottom line: Target immigrants with official permission to be in the country while labeling them “illegal immigrants”
Alongside the specter of “criminal aliens” threatening communities, incoming senior administration officials have pushed the idea that hordes of “illegal immigrants” are invading America. Trump and his surrogates have also pitched mass deportations as a response to that “invasion.” Key to sustaining public support for this response is the idea that those who will be deported are “illegal immigrants.”
Again, however, sustaining public support is at odds with facilitating the deportation of millions of noncitizens. Most of the 11 million undocumented individuals living in the United States have been here for more than a decade and are blended into society much like other long-term residents. The federal government has no ready way to generally identify or locate these unauthorized immigrants.
If the past is prologue, these facts will likely lead the Trump administration to target groups of immigrants who are easier to identify and locate. That means focusing on immigrants who are already “in the system.” While many such immigrants have lawful permission to be in the United States, the administration will assert they are “illegal aliens” as well as make their presence unlawful by rescinding the very permission to remain that they currently hold. Trump, Vance, and Homan have already started articulating this approach.
A. Labelling lawfully present noncitizens as “illegal immigrants”
Trump, Vance, and incoming border czar Homan have begun laying the groundwork for claiming that people who have entered the country with the explicit permission of the U.S. government, as well as people who have have been granted a congressionally authorized protection from deportation known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), are actually “illegal aliens.” Here is Vance doing so on the campaign trail:
Here is Homan doing so just this week in a Fox News interview following the election (time stamp 3:20):
How can they possibly make this assertion? As Vance explained, the Trump position is that previous democratic administrations–Obama and Biden–exceeded their legal authority under U.S. immigration laws when they gave people permission to enter or remain in the United States. Because government officials went beyond their authority, the argument appears to be, the immigrants themselves never really had permission to be here and so are actually illegal immigrants.
Even if Vance and Homan were right that the Biden and Obama administrations exceeded their authorities under immigration law–and one of us has written a book about the president’s immigration power which explains why they are almost certainly incorrect–they are still wrong to label immigrants who benefited from these programs as “illegal immigrants.” To see why, just ask yourself: if a person applies in good faith for, say, a drivers license, and a government official awards the license when, under the law, it turns out they should not have, should we label the person who applied for the license a lawbreaker? That would seem bizarre, and yet that is exactly what Vance and Homan say the United States should do for the immigrants who have participated in these programs. Only in this way can they describe as an “illegal immigrant” a person who quite literally filled out U.S. government forms from their home country seeking permission to come to the United States, waited until they were approved by U.S. officials for entry to travel to the country, and have been living here since then in accordance with the terms of their entry.
B. Rescind discretionary relief from deportation and parole into the United States
Turning all these legally present noncitizens into “illegal immigrants” would mitigate both the political and logistical obstacles to mass deportation faced by the Trump administration.
The lowest hanging fruit include immigrants allowed into the United States on TPS programs, Dreamers who received deportation relief under Obama’s DACA program, and others who applied for parole and were admitted through the “lawful pathways” programs. As we noted above, Vance and other incoming officials have said repeatedly in recent months that TPS holders and parolees are all “illegal,” should have their status rescinded, and should be targets for mass deportation.
As was true during his first administration, Trump has been cagier about Dreamers who received relief under DACA–almost certainly because he recognizes that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans support legal status for this group. In a recent interview on Meet the Press, Trump suggested he would be willing to make a deal with Democrats on protection of Dreamers. Trump said similar favorable things about the Dreamers last time around (indeed those favorable remarks were part of the prompt by anchor Kristen Welker). Nonetheless, during his first term Trump then turned around and tried to rescind the DACA program, which at the time protected nearly three-quarters of a million noncitizens from deportation. He also attempted to rescind TPS for more than 400,000 noncitizens from Haiti and a number of other nations. Both efforts failed only because they were temporarily blocked by the courts and time ran out. But it is highly likely that Trump will try again, adding to the chopping block this time any or all of the “lawful pathways” parole programs created by the Biden administration. He may also choose a less legally vexed method of simply refusing to renew discretionary relief when various groups’ deadlines for their stay expire.
Rescinding (or refusing to renew) these programs would facilitate the administration’s mass deportation efforts by stripping millions of immigrants of the permission they currently have to be present in the United States. These immigrants would all then become potential deportation targets. And because these noncitizens are all people who affirmatively applied for permission to remain in the country, their identities and locations may be well known to the government.
How many people are in these groups? While the number of DACA holders is down from its peak of roughly 800,000, today there are still more than 500,000. The number of TPS holders reached nearly 900,000 at the end of March 2024, and with nearly a half-million initial or renewal TPS applications pending at that time, the number may well exceed a million today. Those who have been paroled into the United States as part of Biden’s “lawful pathways” programs may constitute the largest group of all. As of the beginning of 2024, the administration had already paroled into the country more than 1 million people as part of CBPOne asylum application process or the large parole programs like CHNV (for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans). By October 1, 2024, that number was closer to 1.5 million.
All told, therefore, when Trump retakes office there will be at least 2.5 million and potentially as many as 3 million or more noncitizens who currently have official permission to remain in the United States but could lose that status and become targets of mass deportation under new administration policies. This helps explain why Homan, for example, has targeted those who came into the country under measures like CBPOne in his public remarks.
* * *
At bottom, these tactics boil down to a potentially profound betrayal of the American public. These approaches fail to reflect the public’s expressed preferences for immigration policy, and mislead rather than try to reason with or persuade Americans toward a more aggressive deportation policy. Some of the rhetorical tactics are familiar, and, indeed, have been practiced by both Democratic and Republican administrations. But not in the context of trying to legitimize the displacement of potentially millions of people. The remaining question is whether such tactics can succeed in the coming period, that is, whether deceptive framing of actual underlying deportation policies can win out.