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During his presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised to launch “the largest criminal deportation program in American history,” using the U.S. military and a 1798 law known as the name for Alien Enemies Act – a law that gives the president the power to detain immigrants in times of war.
Trump has not detailed his plan, but immigration lawyers, immigrant rights advocates and criminology professors say the Trump administration would not need to conduct widespread raids on the sites. work or to round up immigrants in the streets. Instead, it could immediately begin targeting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States – including 1.6 million in Texas – using the current deportation scheme used by local police, prisons and federal agents.
All immigrants, even if they have legal status, can be deported if they are accused of serious crimes such as murder, domestic violence, drunk driving, sexual assault or murder. Congress is currently considering a bill that would allow authorities to deport immigrants guilty of less serious crimes like shoplifting.
Over the past decade, at least 70 percent of arrests made by U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE — the federal agency responsible for deporting immigrants — were handled by local police or federal prisons, according to an analysis by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. , a nonprofit organization that provides legal education to people who work with immigrants.
“It is therefore states, and their internal law enforcement and criminal justice systems, that fuel the system of mass detention and deportation,” the group said in its analysis.
Here’s what you need to know about how evictions work in the United States:
How Federal Immigration Laws Have Evolved
Since the 1980s, Congress began to focus on deporting immigrants accused of crimes, passing a series of laws that expanded the U.S. government’s power to detain immigrants as part of America’s war on drugs. the Reagan administration, according to “Immigration Detention as Punishment,” a legal statute. article by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, immigration lawyer and law professor at Ohio State University.
Congress at the time created what has become a central part of immigration enforcement, known as a detainer – when federal agents check the immigration status of a person detained in a local or federal prison and decide to take her into custody with a view to her deportation. Federal agents initially issued detainers to immigrants accused of drug crimes, but have since expanded the types of crimes that could result in detention.
In 1986, President Reagan also signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to approximately one million undocumented immigrants, but also prohibited employers from hiring immigrants who did not have authorization. legal to work in the United States. allows federal agents to raid workplaces and ask employees to prove their immigration status.
Under the Clinton administration, Congress expanded the list of deportable offenses for undocumented and legal immigrants. This law created the 287(g) program which allows ICE to instruct local police to question detainees about their immigration status and to train certain local police officers to execute immigration-related warrants.
As of December 2024, ICE had entered into 287(g) agreements with 135 police departments, sheriff’s offices and jails in 21 states, including 26 in Texas, according to the ICE website.
During the George W. Bush administration, ICE piloted a program known as Secure Communities, beginning in Harris County. The data sharing program allowed local police to send the fingerprints of anyone arrested to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to verify their immigration status. ICE would then decide whether to issue a detainer if officers believed the detainee was deportable.
The Obama administration expanded the program to all 50 states, according to the ICE website. President Obama may earn the nickname “Deporter in Chief” for deporting the largest number of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history. About 34% of the more than 9 million deportations recorded between 1892 and 2022 took place during the Obama administration, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“Since the early 1990s, there have been a series of changes that have become more punitive toward immigrants — and more restrictive — that have led to an increase in deportations,” said Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine. .
Texas efforts could become model for mass evictions
Texas could serve as a model for how states could help Trump’s deportation efforts by finding ways to arrest more immigrants, said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at the Detention Watch Network.
Over the past four years, Texas has allocated more than $3 billion for immigration enforcement by sending state police and the National Guard to different parts of the Texas-Mexico border to arrest, detain and prosecute people crossing the Rio Grande – many of whom say they are seeking political asylum in the United States
The state also prosecuted thousands of migrants for crimes such as trespassing and then turned them over to the federal government for deportation.
In 2017, Texas lawmakers passed a law aimed at punishing local and state government entities and college campuses that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration agents or enforce immigration laws. And in 2023, the Senate passed House Bill 4, which would make illegal entry into the country a state crime. This law is currently suspended after the US Department of Justice sued to overturn it.
“What’s happening in Texas could become a model across the country, like how they’ve weaponized the Texas criminal justice system to target immigrants,” Ghandehari said.
Who could be targeted first?
Immigration attorneys have said that among those most vulnerable to deportation are those who currently have an order to leave the country and those whose immigration cases are pending.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, immigration judges ordered the deportation of 2.3 million people between fiscal years 2015 and 2024. About 35% of those cases involved people who failed to appear in court when a judge has issued an eviction order, making them likely. targets of Trump’s deportation efforts.
Approximately 3.5 million immigration cases were pending at the end of fiscal year 2024.
Some immigrants seek asylum; others seek to stay in the country for other reasons, such as having U.S. citizen family members who are economically dependent on them. Most did not have an attorney to help them navigate the complex federal immigration system.
Currently, nearly 3 million people have legal authorization to work and live in the United States under various federal programs that do not provide access to permanent legal status or citizenship. Programs may be renewed or terminated at the discretion of each new presidential administration.
For example, currently, more than 1.1 million immigrants from 17 countries are enrolled in Temporary Protected Status, a program created by Congress in 1990 that allows immigrants from countries hit by natural disasters or deemed too dangerous by the government to live and work in the country. United States This program has been renewed by every president since then and protects people from countries like Haiti, Ukraine, Honduras, Nepal, Syria and Venezuela, which has the largest share of enrollees with nearly of 600,000 people.
Immigrant rights advocates fear Trump could cancel the program, making registrants easy targets for deportation because the federal government already has their personal information.
But not all immigrants are deportable, even if they are in the country illegally or lose their legal protection. An immigrant’s country of origin must maintain diplomatic relations with the United States and be willing to accept deportations. Currently, Venezuela does not have diplomatic relations with the United States
Still, Tom Homan, Trump’s immigration adviser with the unofficial title “border czar,” said the Trump administration would overcome this challenge.
“We hope that President Trump will work with Venezuela, as he did with Mexico and El Salvador, and get those countries to take them back,” Homan said on a Sunday morning news show in early January. “If they don’t, they will still be deported.” They will simply be deported to another country.
The Laken Riley Law
Congress is currently debating the Laken Riley Act, which would require ICE to detain undocumented immigrants accused of less serious crimes such as burglary, theft or shoplifting – and significantly expand the deportation process.
The bill is named after a 22-year-old Georgian nursing student killed in February 2024 by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally via El Paso in 2022. Months before murder, Ibarra was arrested for shoplifting at a Georgia Walmart, but was later released.
The case received a lot of public attention, with many conservative lawmakers citing the case as an example of the country’s need to pass even stricter immigration laws.
It’s unclear how many people could be deported if the law were passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump.
But it’s just the latest example of Congress expanding the criminal justice system to enforce immigration laws, said Rocio Paez Ritter, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University. from Arkansas. Paez Ritter said many studies show immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens.
“But unfortunately the public thinks otherwise,” she said.
