If the Department of Homeland Security is serious about increasing deportations, something some 77 million Americans presumptively voted for, the path forward isn’t new laws or even more immigration officers. Both would help, but neither addresses the core problem: DHS is not fully using the tools Congress has already built into the immigration system across its components. One of the most powerful and least understood involves the Visa Waiver Program, a reciprocal travel program Congress created that would enable some of the fastest, cleanest, and least contestable removals allowed by the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Travelers admitted under what immigration officers colloquially call “transit without visa” fall into narrow, short-term-purpose categories — waiver-business and waiver-tourism — admissions never intended to serve as a springboard to long-term presence.
The central challenge in immigration enforcement involves turnover: removing immigrants faster than new arrivals enter illegally and existing legal entrants remain, so the illegal migrant population does not continue to grow. Funding helps, but it doesn’t change the math. The illegal population is dynamic: some leave, some obtain legal status, some die, and yet still, new members arrive, and others don’t leave. Real progress would come from prioritizing categories where removals are legally straightforward and impose minimal procedural drag.
That begins with a basic fact: most illegal immigrants didn’t cross the border. For the two decades before 2021, at least half — and likely a majority — of new additions to the illegal population entered legally. Millions overstayed visas or visa-free admissions. And among them, VWP overstays are among the most legally streamlined groups under the INA.
Created in 1986, the VWP allows nationals of 42 (as of January 2026) trusted countries, including nearly all of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, to enter the United States for 90 days without a visa. In exchange, entrants must waive their right to a removal hearing. That single statutory feature makes VWP overstays the cleanest removal category in federal law: no immigration judge, no immigration court backlog, no multi-year appeals, and no asylum claim unless they can show changed circumstances — a standard almost never met by nationals of stable democracies, which all but two participating countries are.
The numbers are modest but meaningful. Roughly 102,000 VWP entrants overstay each year. That’s a small share of total admissions, but a large pool of people who can be removed with minimal processing and minimal cost. And because their home countries reliably issue travel documents — failure to do so would threaten continued program participation — the operational burden is negligible.
In practice, VWP overstays are the fastest and least resource-intensive removals DHS can execute. They entered with a paper trail. They rarely present flight risk or public-safety concerns, and airlines are legally obligated to return them at no cost to the U.S. government. In many cases, an officer can simply escort them to the gate and remain until the aircraft departs. This is the opposite of the current enforcement model, which devotes disproportionate resources to the hardest removals: long-term criminal immigrants who entered without inspection and who are more often than not entitled to lengthy immigration court proceedings, often involving asylum claims unlikely to succeed and frequently used as stalling tactics.
The consequences of ignoring the easiest cases are predictable: wasted resources, an increasingly hostile segment of the populace, clogged dockets, and avoidable failures. The case of Anna Delvey (Anna Sorokin), the heiress-scammer, is a textbook example. Delvey, a VWP entrant who had waived her hearing rights years earlier, was routed into full removal proceedings by the Biden-Harris administration after her release from prison — an outcome Congress never intended for someone from this travel category.
A serious enforcement strategy should quietly ramp up enforcement against this category of illegal immigrants that requires minimal detention, imposes nominal cost on taxpayers, faces no diplomatic resistance, and produces fast, visible results. VWP overstays meet every one of those criteria. Prioritizing them would immediately increase deportation numbers while likely modestly reducing the immigration court backlog, though there is no data on how many VWP overstays are currently in it, and restoring credibility to a system that has drifted toward performative rather than effective action.
The barriers are not legal. Congress built this authority into the INA in 1986. The obstacles are institutional: a lack of awareness, operational focus, and strategic prioritization. Even U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which has the discretion to deny immigration benefits to TWOV entrants precisely because of their narrow admission categories, has historically failed to use that authority in any meaningful or strategic way. The agency does not need new statutes, new regulations, or changes to its existing operational manuals to implement this; it can simply instruct adjudicators to treat having overstayed a VWP admission as a negative discretionary factor — something fully supported by existing regulation and policy.
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Using that discretion would also have a secondary effect: it would broaden the demographic profile of enforcement encounters in a way that reflects the actual composition of the total illegal immigrant population. The Visa Waiver Program draws primarily from Western Europe, East Asia, and Oceania — regions far removed from the public’s mental image of immigration enforcement. During the first Trump administration, the group most concerned about strict enforcement wasn’t Latino at all, but the illegal Irish, statistically none of whom crossed the southwest border.
Mass deportations do not require new laws or new powers. They require using the existing system intelligently. If DHS wants high-volume, streamlined removals, it should start where the law is strongest — not with the worst of the worst, but quietly with the people who voluntarily waived their right to contest removal and cannot plausibly claim fear of persecution to prolong the inevitable. Asylum is humanitarian relief, not a prize owed to an illegal immigrant — and, like most other giveaways, the migrant must be present to win.
“Hart Celler” is the pen name of a long‑career federal employee working in immigration on issues with a nexus to national security. He writes under this name to analyze statutory authorities and operational enforcement frameworks. He can be found on X at @8USC12.