Analysis: Trump is creating a new universe of people to deport

CNN

15 hours ago

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.
Our conversation, edited for length, is below:
WOLF: You have this exclusive report about a large universe of new people the Trump administration might be trying to deport. What did you find out?
ALVAREZ: 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.'
WOLF: This is certainly not the criminal population that President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan said during the campaign that they would target first for deportation, right?
ALVAREZ: 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.
Now we've seen that aperture widen to include anyone who's in the United States illegally.
The administration's perspective on this is that these are individuals who crossed the border unlawfully, therefore they are eligible for deportation.
But there has been consternation even among the president's allies about who exactly they're going after.
In fact, there was recently a letter from Republican lawmakers to the administration asking for a breakdown of who they were arresting.
WOLF: It's hard to keep track of the different buckets of people the Trump administration has targeted, like those with temporary protected status (TPS) versus asylum-seekers. How should we distinguish between them?
ALVAREZ: Temporary protected status only applies to people who are currently residing in the US. It's a form of humanitarian relief. The United States acknowledges that the conditions in your country are not ones that they could send you back to.
The Trump administration has started to peel that back and said that the conditions are sufficient, therefore we can send you back.
There's certainly a debate for many of these countries as to whether or not that is true, but that has been a long criticism of temporary protected status. What is supposed to be temporary for some countries has been extended so many times that it is no longer temporary.
Parole is another existing legal authority. The United States has frosty relations, for example, with Cuba and Venezuela, and it's very hard to deport people to those countries because they might not accept repatriation flights.
The Biden administration argued that creating a parole program would give people the opportunity to legally migrate to the United States without coming to the US-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of that opportunity, and it was very specific to certain nationalities, particularly Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
There are two more buckets I'll mention: Refugees are people who seek protection in the United States from abroad. Asylum-seekers are those who do it from the United States.
All those buckets have been targeted under the Trump administration, and there have been moves to strip those protections from the people who have them.
A lot of this is still working its way through litigation. But the effect is that people who perhaps had protection in the United States – could work here legally, could live here, even if temporarily – don't have them anymore and are now eligible for deportation.
WOLF: So the Trump administration essentially created a large new population of undocumented people who were previously here with some sort of blessing from the government?
ALVAREZ: Yes. I've been talking to experts in industries that depend on migrant workers and there have been situations where someone had hired a migrant worker who had a work permit to legally work here while their applications are being adjudicated, while they went through their immigration proceedings, and they don't have that anymore. Those protections and benefits have been stripped.
That person who was hired legally is now suddenly undocumented. That can create an issue for industries that depend on the migrant workforce.
Someone mentioned that to me as an example earlier this week, as we were talking through how it can affect agriculture, construction and manufacturing.
We don't have a good sense of the numbers yet, but all indications are that by stripping protections consistently through various ways, the number of people who are undocumented in the United States is growing.
WOLF: The other thing that happened this week is the Supreme Court allowed, for now, the Trump administration to carry on with deporting people from countries that we've just discussed – Cubans or Venezuelans – to third-party countries such as South Sudan. What do we know about those people?
ALVAREZ: The people you're talking about are a group of migrants who were being sent to South Sudan. They're in Djibouti because of litigation, and they are now being interviewed to see if they have grounds for what we call 'reasonable fear.'
But just to broaden out from that group, this decision from the Supreme Court was a very big deal.
Being able to send people to a country that is not their own, but that is willing to take others – that's a huge deal for the administration to ramp up how many people that they are deporting at any one time.
There is the question of due process, which has sort of been a theme in this administration.
How much time do you have to provide notice to an individual that they are not going to be deported to their home country – they're going to be deported elsewhere?
How much time, if any, do you give for them to contest their removal to that specific country?
The overarching point here is that this decision gives the administration so much more runway to execute on their deportation plan.
WOLF: The thing that was interesting this week is the so-called Alligator Alcatraz and these efforts to create new detention facilities. How would those be used?
ALVAREZ: Let me actually tie these two points together, from your previous question to now. What we are seeing currently is the Trump administration trying to solve for existing hurdles in the immigration system for arresting and deporting people in large numbers.
ICE only has a limited number of detention beds. They're only funded for an average of 41,500 beds, but they work with local jails. They have community partners to detain people. Currently, there are more than 58,000 people in ICE custody. They are completely over capacity.
That means that they have to look for new ways to detain people, and 'Alligator Alcatraz' is an example of that, which is essentially building a facility very quickly to hold up to 5,000 people and using some FEMA funds so that the state can erect this facility.
It's called 'Alligator Alcatraz' because it is located in the Everglades, Florida. The idea is that it would be low-cost because they don't have to worry much about security, given that the surroundings are marshes and swamps full of alligators and pythons. So essentially, if one were to escape, they wouldn't make it very far.
It is perhaps a clue or the beginning of how we might see the administration strike more agreements with consenting states or with private companies or military bases to house detainees.
The White House imposed a goal of arresting 3,000 people a day. Well, there comes the next question of where do you put them, especially if you've maxed out ICE detention beds.
Now we're holding more than 58,000 people and deportations can't keep up. And so there comes the Supreme Court decision of allowing the administration to deport people to other countries.
You can start to see how the puzzle pieces are slowly coming together for the administration as they try to execute on this lofty campaign promise.
WOLF: You used two interesting words there – clues and puzzle pieces. Do you feel like we have a grasp of everything that the Trump administration is doing right now on the immigration and deportation front?
ALVAREZ: They've had four years to think about this. Stephen Miller (who is White House deputy chief of staff) knows the immigration system, there's no question about that, and is the architect when it comes to many of these policies.
I would say that over the last six months the administration has been quietly doing a lot behind the scenes that the average person was probably not paying attention to. It may have come in the form of regulations, or it may have come in the form of policy guidance, or diplomatic talks that are happening with countries to eventually take other nationalities. What's been interesting about this particular moment is that everything that they were quietly working on is starting to come to light.
The X factor is: Do they get the billions and billions of dollars from the massive package that's working its way through Congress? Because if they do that, it will be a game-changer for them, and it will eliminate so many resource issues, and we could really see this plan take off.