Immigrants who took advantage of a Biden-era program to enter the U.S. are now being targeted by the Trump administration, including people who fled the Russia-Ukraine war. WSJ’s Michelle Hackman explains how the program came to be and how Trump cancelled it. Further Reading: - They Thought They Came to the U.S. Legally. Now They’re at Risk for Deportation. - What Green Card and Visa Holders Need to Know About Recent Deportations Further Listening: - Trump's Immigration Overhaul Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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When President Trump was on the campaign trail, he made a lofty promise. He said he was going to deport millions of illegal immigrants.
And on day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.
And specifically, he said he was going to deport immigrants who had committed crimes.
We are going to crack down on the gangs, the drug dealers, human traffickers, and criminal cartels.
And I think the way that it was portrayed was, we're going to go after people who knowingly came here illegally, knowingly broke our laws. And so I think a lot of people were led to believe that that is what the crackdown was going to look like. And now it looks really different.
That's our colleague Michelle Hackman, who covers immigration. And she says that since Trump took office, the mass deportations have not yet been as mass as he promised.
His mass deportation isn't going so well so far, and that's a huge source of frustration for Trump, for people in his administration. Deportations actually aren't that much higher than they were under Biden.
So to increase the number of deportations, the Trump administration is targeting a new group of people, people who came to the United States legally under certain programs.
They're broadening the aperture of who we would think of as deportable. So it's a whole new scale that we're seeing.
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