The Trump administration has its flashy mass deportation campaign underway, but beneath the surface, the strategy includes convincing millions of immigrants to choose to leave without government assistance by making their lives too uncomfortable to stay in the United States.
While the White House has touted its intentions to remove immigrants who illegally entered the U.S., it has faced significant logistical, legal, and financial constraints over the past 2 1/2 months.
Running parallel to the government’s deportation effort is a more subtle one that immigrant rights advocates and those who advocate restrictions to immigration both agreed in comments to the Washington Examiner is being waged to pressure immigrants to depart on their own accord.
Mark Krikorian, executive director at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said it will take time for immigrants to come to terms with the fact that they cannot wait out his four years and that things may only become more difficult for that population in the coming days.
“What you’re trying to do is change people’s expectations. In three months, it’s hard to do,” said Krikorian, whose organization advocates reducing immigration. “The longer it persists, the more plausible it will be to illegal immigrants that this is the new normal. That is the key. … It’s not just a flurry of activity upfront that peters out over time.”
Trouble getting off the ground
President Donald Trump celebrated his accomplishments, including those on immigration, with supporters at a rally in Michigan on Tuesday, his 100th day in office.
“We are delivering mass deportation, and it’s happening very fast, and the worst of the worst are being sent to a no-nonsense prison in El Salvador,” Trump told attendees.
The White House is attempting to deport at least 1 million illegal immigrants in the first year of Trump’s second term, a figure higher than the number of removals undertaken during any of his first four years in office.
Since Jan. 20, the government has removed 61,000 illegal immigrants from the U.S., as opposed to immigrants encountered at the border.
The Trump administration is also in talks with roughly 30 countries about their willingness to accept immigrants who are not originally from there. Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua will not take back their deported citizens, causing delays with the removal of those citizens.
Nearly 50 of the Department of Justice’s immigration judges were fired or resigned shortly after Trump took office, resulting in a roughly 10% cut in total immigration judges nationwide, further delaying the millions of cases before them.
Federal authorities at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement do not always have the cooperation of local jurisdictions, some of which have explicit “sanctuary” policies that prevent cooperation with federal officials. It means suspected criminal illegal immigrants in sanctuary city jails will not be turned over to ICE.
The Trump administration must have adequate space to detain people being arrested, as all must go before a judge for removal proceedings before being removed, except for the case of the Alien Enemies Act removals. ICE only has funding at present to detain roughly 50,000 people at a time.
David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the biggest factor in whether Trump would achieve his goal is whether he has the money to do it.
“Whether the administration achieves its goals of record deportations will depend primarily on Congress and, to a lesser extent, the courts,” Bier wrote in an email. “If Congress appropriates the roughly $300 billion that the GOP budget reconciliation bill calls for, ICE will have literally decades of funding to carry the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history. The courts may slow deportations to some extent, but ‘much more’ than a million is certainly achievable when money is no obstacle.”
This week’s House Homeland Security Committee proposal for border funding included more than $60 billion, but it must first pass through Congress.
Register with the government, then depart
On Trump’s first day in office, authorities disabled a government phone app, CBP One, which the Biden administration used to parole hundreds of thousands of people into the country. Weeks later, U.S. Customs and Border Protection debuted the CBP Home app, allowing immigrants to alert the agency of plans to leave the country.
The administration also relies on the Alien Registration Act of 1940, known as the Smith Act. While it has been in effect for over 80 years, the Department of Homeland Security re-upped the requirement following Trump’s executive order in January, directing the department to restore order and accountability to the immigration system.
The directive requires immigrants 14 or older who were not previously fingerprinted or registered when obtaining a visa or being released into the country from the border to do so now. Parents must also register children under 14, but they will not be fingerprinted.
Immigrants will then be given registration cards, which they must always carry.
At last count, 47,000 immigrants had registered with the government, though the DHS declined to share how many had departed.
Failure to register or carry the registration card comes with the risk of criminal and civil penalties, a new addition compared to years past. Offenders could face a maximum $5,000 fine and six months in federal prison. The government gave immigrants a registration deadline of mid-April.
The results of the self-deportation strategy remain to be fully seen. DHS declined multiple requests for government data, and the last public estimate, one month ago, suggested just 5,000 illegal immigrants of the roughly 11 million population nationwide had informed the government of plans to self-deport.
Global Refuge President and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah affirmed that the pressure on immigrants to depart was being felt.
“There seems to be a pattern of pressuring some immigrant families to leave on their own,” Vignarajah wrote in a statement. “Whether it’s revoking legal protections, allowing enforcement in churches and schools, deportations without due process, or multimillion-dollar ad campaigns, we’re seeing what feels like deterrence through despair.”
Making life uncomfortable
Meanwhile, the administration is leveraging nonimmigration federal agencies to target immigrants with the hopes that, in time, it will become too much and trigger people not to hold out and leave.
In a slew of executive orders and other actions, this administration has tried to stop sending federal dollars to cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration agencies, unearth the home addresses of immigrants by getting the U.S. Postal Service to turn over images of all mail, and ordered the IRS to share information about immigrants.
“This isn’t about terrifying illegals or whatever it is,” Krikorian said. “This is the resumption of normal law enforcement. The point here is changing people’s expectations because people got used to being here illegally.”
Trump rescinded the Social Security numbers given to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were paroled into the country and given those documents to be able to work, listing those numbers as deceased and ineligible for benefits.
“One of the main points of immigration law is that it’s supposed to be difficult to live here as an illegal alien. That’s the point to making it hard to get a job,” Krikorian added.
The Trump administration is pressuring the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to hand over immigrants’ personal information as the Department of Government Efficiency steps up Trump’s deportation efforts.
Officials at ICE and DOGE, which is led unofficially by X owner Elon Musk, asked CMS in the past month to provide access to data systems that include home addresses and the health information of Medicare enrollees.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer mentioned during a Cabinet meeting this week that the department was working with governors to stop issuing unemployment benefits to immigrant workers.
The DHS has released 30- and 60-second ads that lay out the retribution illegal immigrants will face if they do not heed the government’s orders.
“If you are here illegally, you’re next. You will be fined nearly $1,000 a day, imprisoned, and deported,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in the video. “You will never return.”
U.S. PARTNERS WITH UZBEKISTAN ON PAID DEPORTATION OPERATION
At the DHS agency U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, workers are not law enforcement, but 450 staffers have been detailed to ICE to help federal police. Additionally, immigrants who show up to USCIS appointments for standard check-ins are being reported to ICE in real time, which has led to 369 arrests at USCIS field offices since Jan. 20.
“The impact on immigrant communities has been significant,” Vignarajah said. “We’re seeing honest, hardworking people with deep roots in their communities — parents, essential workers, students — living in daily fear that a knock on the door could mean permanent separation from their families.”