President Donald Trump took a moment on Monday to send shockwaves through immigrant communities with a threat meant to rally his base – but one that is not actually logistically possible.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” he tweeted. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.”
An administration official later told the Associated Press that the effort would target people who have received final orders of deportation. There are more than 1 million people living in the United States with final deportation orders, among an undocumented population of about 11 million. “He obviously wants everyone to believe he’s talking about some mass round up, which is just not possible,”immigration attorney Matt Cameron said of Trump, “both because of resources and because of due process.”
The genuine fear, coupled with the artificial threat, coming at a time of maximum insecurity for the immigrants in the United States, has put immigrant rights’ groups in a bind. They are being careful in their responses to Trump’s tweet, trying to avoid creating panic, while also trying to equip people with resources needed to defend themselves legally. Adonia Simpson, the director of the Family Defense Program at the Miami-based Americans for Immigrant Justice, said her group was considering whether to host a Know Your Rights training, noting that, in her experience, immigrants tend to be afraid to go out and access legal resources at times like this. The National Immigrant Justice Center, for its part, has been circulating Know Your Rights information online.
Simpson described people with final deportation orders as the “lowest hanging fruit” of the immigration system. ”The easiest population to go after would be individuals that have final orders of removal and are perhaps going to check in at their local ICE offices,” she said. (People with final orders of removal are sometimes allowed to stay in the United States as long as they periodically check in with ICE, often because the agency lacks the resources to deport them, they have strong family ties in the country, or there is no other country that is willing to take them in.)
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Trump linked his announcement of a mass roundup to recent talks with Mexico and Guatemala to keep asylum seekers from reaching the United States, which is vastly different from removing people with final deportation orders from the country. This is yet another indication that Trump’s tweet – issued the night before his official 2020 campaign launch – was about appealing to a nativist base rather than an actual policy.
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