Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh
Appearances
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
What's much different about this administration versus the Biden administration and when Biden came into office is that the border looked a lot different.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
And under the Biden administration, the majority of the shares of people who are being deported were actually coming from through the border. So it wasn't that ICE stopped interior arrests altogether, but it was that those arrests were happening at a far slower rate rate than they are currently.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
But also the Trump administration came into a border that was much slower and much less busy than the Biden administration inherited. And so those two differences have somewhat skewed the numbers in that now the Trump administration is focusing more on the interior, but those deportations are a lot harder to carry out than when people have just recently crossed the border.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So having this large kind of public relations campaign around the arrests that are happening, the deportations that are being carried out, the previous use of military planes, for example.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
These are all part of a larger campaign to basically meet two critical needs of the Trump administration. To one, show the base of people that are supportive of this that they are doing what they promised. They are intending to increase arrests and increase deportations. Whether or not the numbers are adding up, the intent is there.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
One of the very first actions by the Trump administration was to rescind something called the sensitive locations memo, which did not allow ICE to go into schools.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
That can mean that people just aren't gonna go to work or they might not go to a doctor's appointment or they might not send their kids to school that day.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
Part of the deportation system is also the detention system. The Trump administration has made a lot of efforts to essentially bend the US government towards trying to increase the resources across detentions and deportation. And so that means that they're deputizing all different areas of the government, including ones that had never been working on immigration
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
before, but also calling agents from Department of State, from DEA, from ATF, from U.S. Marshals, and asking people to be reallocated to work on immigration enforcement. And we're also seeing that they are targeting certain areas that work with immigrants. So for example, the Trump administration has launched
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
several investigations into so-called sanctuary cities, which has resulted in a litany of different lawsuits.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
We're also seeing that the Trump administration is trying to compel states and localities to use their own law enforcement agencies to also carry out immigration enforcement. So the Texas National Guard has signed a memorandum of understanding with Texas. DHS so that Texas National Guard can now kind of carry out the functions of an immigration enforcement officer where they previously couldn't.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So there's a lot of different areas in which they're trying to sort of bend various aspects of both the U.S. government but also state resources all towards this singular goal of carrying out mass deportations.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
My full name is Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, and I'm an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
Right now, we don't have the current numbers of deportations from the government, but we do know that the Trump administration is quite frustrated with where deportations are at. We have some inferences that show that the deportations have not kept pace with what the Trump administration had hoped.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
It's a type of infrastructure that can't be built overnight. And so right now, the deportations are just not keeping pace with what the Trump administration had hoped to reach that goal of one million per year.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
These spreadsheets from ICE offer us really concrete information about ICE detention, and then they also allow us to make some really great inferences into what might be happening with deportations, especially when we don't have that data. And so since Trump took office, we can see that the average number of people in detention has gone up.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So in December, that last full month of the Biden administration, there are about 39,000 people in detention. And then in February, the first full month of the Trump administration, there were about 42,500. So a small increase, but an increase nonetheless.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
And then we can also see that more of the people who are in ICE detention right now are coming from ICE arrests rather than arrests conducted by Customs and Border Protection, which would typically be those arrested on the border. So Under this administration, we are seeing an increase in arrests. And so the interior arrests that are happening by ICE are higher than under the Biden administration.