The full scope of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan – which has been evident in theory – is only just starting to come together in practice, and its scale has come as a surprise to many Americans.
This week, the Supreme Court blessed, for now, the administration’s effort to deport people from countries such as Cuba and Venezuela to places other than their homeland, including nations halfway around the world in Africa.
In Florida, construction began on a migrant detention center intended to be a sort of Alcatraz in the Everglades.
And CNN reported exclusively that the administration will soon make a large universe of people who had been working legally after seeking asylum eligible for deportation.
I went to the author of that report, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, and asked her to explain what we know and what we’re learning about how the different stories are coming together.
One thing that stuck out to me is how the totality of the administration’s actions is turning people who had been working legally in the US into undocumented immigrants now facing deportation.
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The plans that the administration has been working on are targeting people who came into the US unlawfully and then applied for asylum while in the country.
The plan here is to dismiss those asylum claims, which could affect potentially hundreds of thousands of people and then make them immediately deportable.
It also puts the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency responsible for managing federal immigration benefits, at the center of the president’s deportation campaign, because not only are they the ones that manage these benefits, but they have also been delegated the authority by the Department of Homeland Security to place these individuals in fast-track deportation proceedings and to take actions to enforce immigration laws.
This is a shift that is prompting a lot of concern. As one advocate with the ACLU put it – and I’ll just quote her – “They’re turning the agency that we think of as providing immigration benefits as an enforcement arm for ICE.”
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You’re right to say that coming into this administration, Trump officials repeatedly said their plans were to target people with criminal records.
That is a hard thing to do. It requires a lot of legwork, and their numbers in terms of arrests were relatively low compared to where they wanted to be.
The White House wants to meet at least 3,000 arrests a day, and you just cannot do that if you are only going after people with criminal records.
