Some parts of Trump’s deportation plan may be ‘Obama-esque.’ There’s a reason for that

By Priscilla Alvarez, CNN

Washington (CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump promised mass deportation on the campaign trail, and while the scale of it remains vague, the elements of the plan are an unlikely call back to former President Barack Obama who was billed the “deporter-in-chief” by Democrats and immigrant advocates.

While Trump’s allies have floated draconian measures to detain and deport people residing in the US illegally, the plans are, in many ways, consistent with the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement has often carried out operations. And the person at the helm is Tom Homan, a veteran of immigration law enforcement who served under the Obama administration and has been tapped by Trump to serve as border czar.

“A lot of the same tactics are being dusted off. What Tom is talking about are Obama-esque things,” said John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director under Obama, cautioning that it’s likely going to be a “harsher version” of what was done in the Obama-era.

“He’s going to have to do more draconian things to do a million deportations in a year,” Sandweg said.

Trump has previously cited the Eisenhower administration’s wide-scale deportation program, an aggressive and unprecedented sweep that resulted in the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A program like that would mark a dramatic shift in interior enforcement compared to recent years.

But publicly, Trump aides have described a plan that emulates previous administrations.

Homan has repeatedly said that he plans to target public safety and national security threats, focusing efforts on removing those individuals first. ICE has generally been instructed to follow that protocol, including under President Joe Biden.

But Homan warned that if other undocumented immigrants are encountered, they might also be picked up. That occurred during the Obama administration.

“We’re gonna concentrate out of the gate on public safety threats. What mayor or governor does not want public safety threats taken out of their communities? So again, help us or get out of the way,” Homan told television personality Dr. Phil McGraw in a recent interview.

“If you force us into the community, we’re gonna find a bad guy. There are probably others we’re gonna find, which means they’re gonna be arrested too,” he added.

Trump’s plans also include bringing back family detention, which has been widely criticized by immigrant advocates and a practice that Biden ended. Obama, however, expanded family detention during his administration, responding to an increase in families and children crossing the US southern border.

Obama and Biden also had to resort to military bases to temporarily detain migrants amid border surges. Trump has vowed to do the same – though it’s unclear how that would unfold and whether the bases would be used for immigrants detained in the US.

“They’re not doing anything new. None of these the ideas that are being tossed about are new,” said Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, arguing that the key difference would be the scale and volume.

Immigrant advocates also argue the rhetoric around mass deportation has sparked additional fear in the immigrant community.

But Trump and his team are already grappling with the realities that stymied his first term and that of his predecessors when addressing the undocumented population in the United States: Limited resources and personnel.

During his first term, Trump deported more than 1.5 million people, according to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

That’s about half the 2.9 million deportations undertaken during Barack Obama’s first term and fewer than the 1.9 million deportations during Obama’s second term. It’s on par with Biden’s 1.49 million deportations, according to updated calculations shared with CNN. Those figures do not include the millions of people turned away at the border under a Covid 19-era policy enacted by Trump and used during some of Biden’s term.

Trump conceded in an interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired earlier this month that the task of detaining and deporting immigrants is challenging.

“It’s a very tough thing to do,” he said, adding, “you know, you have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally.”

Trump said his administration’s mass deportation efforts will target people with criminal histories, but indicated it could go beyond deporting criminals – without specifying who the “other people outside of criminals” would be.

There are around 1.4 million people in the US with final orders of removal, according to an ICE official. But many of them can’t be sent back to their home countries because they won’t take them or there’s still some sort of potential relief available to them through the immigration system.

Obama deported around 400,000 in one year, but a large number of those were recent border crossers. Trump faces a steeper challenge in targeting those already in the country.

“There’s a difference between arresting people and deporting people. We’ve been focused on ICE’s ability to arrest people but unless they make a significant change in the immigration process, the act to get somebody deported does require some form of process,” a former Homeland Security official told CNN.

CNN previously reported that Trump’s team is reviewing regional capability for housing migrants – a process likely to lead to consideration of the construction of new detention facilities in larger metropolitan areas. Homeland Security officials have previously identified multiple cities in which to build up detention capability in preparation for border surges.

ICE is currently funded for around 40,000 detention beds.

Trump’s team has also been preparing a potential national emergency declaration to unlock Pentagon resources – which was done during Trump’s first term and faced lawsuits – and tailoring that declaration to pave the way for expanding detention space.

Trump reiterated his plan to use the military to deport migrants who entered the US illegally in an interview with Time magazine, and said he will push his use of the military “up to the maximum level of what the law allows” for deportations.

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