Photo: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg/Getty Images
While the second Trump administration has attempted many power grabs, immigration enforcement is clearly the area in which most legal commentators fear a constitutional crisis. That’s because the president himself, with the full-throated support of his entire administration and without any notable dissent from Republican politicians, is defying federal court efforts to impose due-process requirements on the initial stages of Trump’s mass-deportation initiative.
District courts have ordered that deportees being grabbed off the street and sent to a sinister prison in El Salvador at least receive a hearing to determine if they are who ICE says they are. But instead of quietly complying, the administration is essentially saying that illegal immigration is such a dire threat to national security that simple safeguards against official misconduct or remedies for “administrative errors” (as they admit happened in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case) are intolerable. Indeed, in and out of court, Trump and his allies argue that judges seeking to enforce due process are outlaws interfering with urgent presidential powers.
How this collision between the executive and judicial branches of government develops is important not just to the people immediately involved in the cases being litigated, or because it represents a theoretical “red line” for an administration widely feared to be aspirationally authoritarian. It’s also the beginning of what’s expected to be a vastly larger series of roundups and deportations. Despite all the heat and noise surrounding current ICE operations, we haven’t seen anything yet. Team Trump is working to secure a massive increase in funding for “border enforcement,” as Nick Miroff explained at The Atlantic:
Using the budget-reconciliation process, Republican lawmakers are now preparing to lavish ICE with a colossal funding increase — enough to pay for the kind of social and demographic transformation of the United States that immigration hard-liners have long fantasized about achieving …
The funding surge — which Republicans could approve without a single Democratic vote — would allow ICE to add thousands of officers and enlist police and sheriff’s deputies across the country to help arrest and jail more immigrants. It would funnel billions to private contractors to identify and locate targets, jail them in for-profit detention centers, and fast-track their deportations.
Had Senate Republicans prevailed over their House counterparts with their preference for two reconciliation bills, the first focused narrowly on border enforcement, the money might already be on its way to ICE and its many contractors. But ultimately the president sided with Mike Johnson’s plan to put virtually all of Trump’s legislative agenda in “one big, beautiful bill,” so mass-deportation needs are in a queue along with tax cuts and Defense-spending increases. When the new money is infused into the system, things could begin moving fast. Presidential policy adviser Stephen Miller, “border czar” Tom Homan, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, and acting ICE director Todd Lyons have big plans, as Miroff observes:
Paul Hunker, who was formerly ICE’s lead attorney in Dallas, likened Trump’s deportation campaign to a gathering wave. “It seems intense now, but wait until five months from now when the reconciliation bill has passed and ICE gets a huge infusion of cash,’’ he told me. “If that money goes out, the amount of people they can arrest and remove will be extraordinary …’’
This was a theme of ICE’s message to industry leaders at a border-security expo in Arizona last week …
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,’’ said Lyons, who added that he wanted a deportation system that would work like Amazon Prime “but with human beings.’’
A key issue going forward is how ICE agents will identify their targets. Ideally, they’d like access to immense quantities of federal-government and private-sector data on undocumented immigrants, their backgrounds, their activities, and their whereabouts. Getting hold of such information, in fact, has been one objective in DOGE’s data raids on federal agencies, and a big breakthrough occurred when the IRS was pressured into “sharing” data on non-citizen tax filings. If ICE can develop vast lists of deportees, it won’t have to rely as much on expensive and politically risky wholesale harassment of immigrant communities or random steps like traffic stops. But without question, securing the maximum legal “space” for aggressive tactics like those being deployed with respect to alleged gang members or politically active student-visa holders would make life easier for those running the vast apparatus involved in ejecting as many as 10 million people.
Theoretically, a smoother deportation effort operating “like Amazon Prime” might make fewer “administrative errors” and involve less enforcement overkill. But once the machine gets revved up by both funding and legal clearances, it’s going to change the country in unmistakable ways, if only because of the vast scale of deportations, which will have significant economic implications. Some will be unquestionably negative, particularly in industries heavily dependent on immigrant labor, like agribusiness, construction, and health care. On the other hand, America will have a grim new deportation industry, including a $45 billion project Homan is planning to expand immigrant-detention facilities. Maybe all those sweet prison dollars won’t have to go to El Salvador after all.
