Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
It’s a really tricky question, because right now we are seeing ICE go after people who have lived in the United States for a long time, not just recent migrants. Plenty of these people have already developed ties to communities here, applied for relief, or may even have gotten married to US citizens or have children who are citizens.
We have already seen huge sums thrown at the border in the past. In the post-9/11 era, we see the largest growth of the border patrol in history, nearly doubling in size under the Bush administration from about ten thousand agents to just over twenty thousand. That level of hiring was really chaotic. They were just trying to get warm bodies out there, and they ended up hiring a number of cartel double agents that took some years to be found out.
Right now the Trump administration wants to conflate what’s happening in the interior with the border, even though the border is quieter than it has been in fifty-plus years. Migrants are taking a wait-and-see approach, in part because they’ve observed that this administration doesn’t have any red lines regarding its treatment of people. They are happy to send people to South Sudan or Libya or to CECOT in El Salvador so that people get the message.
Right now the Trump administration wants to conflate what’s happening in the interior with the border, even though the border is quieter than it has been in fifty-plus years.
But ICE is not going to hit Trump’s one million deportations quota this year. It will probably not hit it next year. And they will probably not hit it the year after either. Even with this additional funding they will struggle to hit one million deportations a year because that is a staggeringly high number.
The highest number of deportations from the interior in history was 238,000, in fiscal year 2009, at a time when ICE was at…
Auteur: Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
