Trump Administration Bends U.S. Government in Extraordinary Ways towards Aim of Mass Deportations

Good analysis by MPI:

Invoking the specter of “invasion,” the Trump administration has set out to build a fundamentally new, all-of-government machinery to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations of resident unauthorized immigrants and new irregular arrivals.

To carry out this enterprise, the administration has enlisted federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that have previously never played significant roles—or any, in the case of the IRS—in immigration enforcement. It also has directed other federal law enforcement entities, including prosecutors, to prioritize deportations. And it has significantly increased the military’s involvement by deploying sizeable numbers of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, for the first time using military aircraft to carry out deportation flights, and, also in a first, detaining noncitizens arrested inside the United States at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Reaching beyond the federal ambit, the administration is also doubling down on its pressure on state and local authorities to conduct immigration enforcement actions traditionally reserved for federal agents, and is seeking or threatening to penalize those that offer resistance. And it has made cooperation on immigration a high priority in foreign affairs, taking an iron-fist approach to negotiations with foreign counterparts. Facing U.S. threats to impose tariffs, end foreign assistance, and take over the Panama Canal, Mexico and a number of other Latin American countries have agreed to implement migration controls, with some also agreeing to hold third-country nationals removed from the United States. So far, these countries have sought to appease the Trump administration, but policy implementation has been measured and strategic. Mexico, for example, has refused to accept deportees arriving on military planes and has also threatened reciprocal tariffs on U.S. imports should the Trump administration impose tariffs as early as March 4.

Finally, the administration has achieved something that several of its predecessors could not: Getting Congress to act on immigration legislation. The White House scored a victory when, within a few days of the inauguration, Congress in a bipartisan fashion passed the Laken Riley Act, the first stand-alone immigration legislation in nearly two decades. The law dramatically increases mandatory detention of noncitizens accused of certain criminal offenses.

The orchestrated, whole-of-government machinery displayed by this administration in its first month—accompanied by a muscular, carefully crafted messaging campaign—has the closest parallels with the actions that occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when broad swaths of the federal government were repurposed to serve the national security mission. The fundamental difference is that post-9/11 actions were a response to an actual attack on U.S. soil, whereas today’s rhetoric of “invasion” and the arrival of foreign “military-age” men intent on building an “army” is not matched by reality. While encounters of asylum seekers and other migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border reached record levels in fiscal year (FY) 2021 and FY 2022, there is no evidence so far of a significant threat to national security or general public safety. And, in fact, irregular crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border significantly declined during 2024, and in particular during the latter half of the calendar year….

Source: Trump Administration Bends U.S. Government in Extraordinary Ways towards Aim of Mass Deportations