Trump 2.0 Deportations

Security experts Frank Gaffney and Todd Bensman on how the incoming administration should strategize messaging and actions on deportation

Because the Biden administration could not “abolish ICE” and eliminate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the Department of Homeland Security, some 6,000 federal law enforcement officers have been more-or-less “chained to their desks … by policy,” Todd Bensman, senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Frank Gaffney.

For the past four years, Bensman said, they were “not allowed to operate, anywhere.”

As Bensman explains in Chapter 10 of his book Overrun, ICE officers at the start of the Biden administration were given a list of mitigating factors they had to consider before targeting an alien for deportation — even those aliens who already had a final order of deportation from an immigration judge. The end result of these policies was to virtually end all deportations except for known terrorists.

There will probably be litigation “just in unwinding” those policies, Bensman said.

“The new administration is going to have to prioritize,” he said. “Because so many millions of people have been let in, and the infrastructure for deporting them, and detaining them, also was systematically contracted and eliminated, they set up the incoming administration at an extreme disadvantage.”

Bensman said the Trump administration can use Department of Defense assets for deportation efforts, and “they may have to repurpose some Border Patrol agents into ICE-type duties.”

Criminal aliens and aliens with final orders of removal will be sought first. “They’re going to have to go find them. They’re going to need intelligence, assets to figure out where they are,” Bensman said. “And they’re going to have to go get them, and bring them to a detention space for the days and weeks that it takes to put them on aircraft and fly them home.”

Bensman said we should expect to see “information war” and colorful rhetoric in the mainstream media over the deportations, potentially leading to a higher likelihood of civil disobedience and possibly violence.

“We’re also going to see a resurgence, probably, of the 1980s-era sanctuary movement,” where churches and individuals were hiding illegal aliens in their homes, he said.

Bensman and Gaffney also discussed whether Trump would fulfill his promise to secure the border on the first day of his presidency.

“I believe that the border is already securing itself, right now, just from the rhetoric of Trump and Tom Homan,” Bensman said.

Homan served as acting director of ICE during President Trump’s first term, and has been designated “border czar” for the incoming Trump administration. In recent weeks Homan has been rounding the media circuit, letting illegal would-be border crossers know that deportations are coming.

And, according to Bensman, “that has a very powerful effect down range. But you have to follow it with action. If you don’t follow it with actual removals, and pushbacks and deportations, they will figure that out very fast and start pouring in.”

But if migrants trying to reach the U.S. border see deportations are being carried out, along with pushbacks into Mexico, and if Trump suspends asylum using section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “people are going to stop coming on their own,” Bensman said.