• Problems associated with enlisting local police for immigration enforcement

    As a candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has described undocumented immigrants as a threat to public safety and has promised to create a “deportation force” to remove millions of immigrants from the country. Through his words and actions, President Trump has indicated that he aims to enlist state and local law enforcement in this deportation force through both inducement and coercion, by aggressively promoting the 287(g) program and threatening to cut federal funding of so-called sanctuary jurisdictions. Law enforcement personnel already face enormous challenges with limited resources. In the coming months, many state and local officials and local law enforcement agencies will face a choice: whether and how to assume a greater role in enforcing federal immigration laws.

  • Recent raids drive immigrant families to passport scramble

    Two weeks ago, ICE arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants across the nation in what they said was a routine action. But the immigrant community was already on edge because of rising anti-immigrant rhetoric during the presidential campaign, and the ICE actions sent many undocumented families into a panic. Fearing deportation, immigrant families are crowding passport lines across Texas as undocumented parents seek U.S. passports for their American children.

  • Mexico, rejecting Trump’s scheme, will only accept deportees who are Mexican nationals

    A key element in President Trump’s deportation scheme is the deportation to Mexico of everyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, regardless of the deportee’s nationality. The deportation scheme indicates that the United States expects Mexico to build detention facilities for the hundreds of thousands which will be deported. Mexican officials, in meetings with Rex Tillerson and John Kelly last Thursday, said that Mexico would not, under any circumstances, agree to accept and hold deportees who are not Mexican nationals.

  • Mexicans worry Trump's deportation plan will see refugee camps emerge along border

    There are growing worries in Mexico that Trump’s aggressive deportation scheme would lead to refugee camps popping up along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trumps plan called for an immediate start of deportation to Mexico not only of Mexicans – but of all Latin Americans and others who crossed into the United States illegally through Mexico. Earlier U.S. policy called for deportation to Mexico only of Mexican citizens, while “OTMs” – Other Than Mexicans – were flown back to their home countries.

  • Trump administration directs Border Patrol, ICE to expand deportations

    The Trump administration on Tuesday moved one step closer to implementing the president’s plans to aggressively rid the country of undocumented immigrants and expand local police-based enforcement of border security operations.

  • Details of Trump’s policy of massive deportations emerge

    A couple of memos signed by DHS secretary John Kelly late last week offer details of the administration’s plans for what both current and former government officials describe as a massive roundup of undocumented immigrants. Immigration experts note that many of the ideas in Kelly’s two memos are already part of a bill passed by Congress in 1996 — but which policy makers from both parties, law enforcement agencies, and ICE officials disregarded because they considered these clauses in the bill as either unenforceable or absurd. The Kelly plan calls for hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers who are not Mexicans  — they are Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, and Haitians – to be forced back into Mexico, and those among them who wish to apply for asylum in the United States would do so via videoconference calls with U.S. immigration officials from facilities in Mexico.

  • DHS considering using National Guard to round up unauthorized immigrants

    A document obtained by the Associated Press show that the Trump administration is considering the option of mobilizing as many as 100,000 national guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living in states far from the U.S.-Mexico border. The AP reports that the 11-page memo, written by assistants to DHH secretary John Kelly, calls for the unprecedented use of national guard troops for immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as New Orleans, Louisiana. The document notes that most of the round up would take place in four states which border on Mexico – California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas – but that round ups would also occur in seven states which are contiguous to those four: Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

  • Immigrants picked up, but no massive raids, authorities say

    U.S. and Mexican authorities are pushing back against reports of widespread raids that have sown panic in immigrant communities. But the “targeted operation” appears to be the largest of its kind since President Trump took office.

  • Trump’s policies will affect four groups of undocumented immigrants

    President Donald Trump is expected to order the deportation of millions of “criminal aliens” this week. Administrations prioritize the removal of some immigrants over others because immigration enforcement resources are limited. Since the mid-1990s, previous administrations have focused on removing immigrants with criminal convictions, regardless of whether they have legal residency. Trump’s focus on deporting “criminal aliens” and his suggestion that he might offer reprieve to certain immigrant youth suggest there could be some continuity between his enforcement priorities and those of Obama. But the new president’s emphasis on mass deportation promotes fear. This, in turn, may make noncitizens less likely to apply for naturalization, attend school, seek medical care or challenge violations of labor laws.

  • Nearly 500,000 immigrants deported from U.S. in 2016

    The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency reported that nearly half million immigrants were deported in 2016. The agency did not offer details about the nationalities of the deported immigrants. In all., 530,250 individuals were apprehended across the United States in 2016 – of which 450,954 were removed.

  • Trump’s immigration policies will pick up where Obama’s left off

    In 2017, the Trump administration will likely continue and expand the Obama administration’s focus on removing immigrants convicted of crimes. Whether Trump will break ground for a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico is far less certain. To increase crime-based removals, the Trump administration will probably seek greater state and local assistance in federal immigration enforcement, but Trump is likely to encounter the same resistance that Obama did in working with state and local governments on immigration enforcement.

  • How Trump’s deportation plan threatens America’s food and wine supply

    Mass deportations of up to three million undocumented immigrants are expected to begin in January, when President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office and begins to turn his campaign promises into government policy. While Trump claims criminals are his primary target, reports suggest there aren’t enough of them to actually reach his goal. A prominent migration think tank estimates that only 820,000 undocumented immigrants have been convicted of a crime. So that means Trump would have to deport several million immigrants without criminal records to reach his goal. These people work in a range of industries, accounting for about 16 percent of those employed in agriculture, 12 percent in construction, 9 percent in hospitality, and 6 percent in manufacturing. So while kicking felons out of the country is justifiable, it seems to us that deporting the law-abiding undocumented workers who help drive our economy by undertaking jobs that Americans refuse to do is not.

  • Mexicans are migrating, just not across the U.S. border

    Mexican migration to the U.S. is in decline. The Pew Hispanic Research Center has found that since 2009, more than one million native-born Mexicans living in the U.S. returned to Mexico. But many other Mexicans never crossed the U.S.-Mexican border in the first place. Why are some Mexican migrants choosing to stay home? What does it mean for the U.S. border with Mexico? The decline in migration to the U.S. is not simply linked to building more barriers at the border. Changing demography, economy, the difficulties of living in the U.S., and a growing sense of opportunity at home, among many other factors, are shifting Mexican migration to the U.S. Migrants balance risk and opportunity as they decide to move. Fostering the continued growth of those possibilities within Mexico, and the continued strengthening of the Mexican economy can help build a future without building a wall.

  • Ending DACA would wipe away at least $433.4 billion from U.S. GDP over a decade

    Amid talk that the incoming administration could make good on a campaign promise to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Center for American Progress estimates that ending DACA would wipe away at least $433.4 billion from the U.S. gross domestic product, or GDP, cumulatively over a decade.

  • “Alt-right” leader calls on Trump to freeze immigration for fifty years

    One of the leaders of the alt-right movement has called for a 50-year freeze on immigration to the United States, saying the country needs to “take a break” in order to “become a nation again.” Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” in 2008, spoke at a weekend Washington, D.C. gathering of alt-right followers, saying the proposal was a “fundamental policy” the movement would put forward for the Trump administration to adopt. “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us,” Spencer said.