Inside the deportation machine

To deliver on President Trump’s campaign promise to deport millions of people, his administration is pushing new approaches to immigration enforcement across much of the government.

By RAJ SAHA, ZACH LEVITT and ALBERT SUN

To deliver on President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to deport millions of people, his administration is pushing new approaches to immigration enforcement across much of the government.

Officials have closed the border to asylum-seekers. They have unleashed immigration officers, often wearing masks, to make arrests on city streets. They have revoked legal status from recent arrivals. They have built tent camps and reopened prisons to hold immigrant detainees. They have pushed foreign leaders to accept deportees and local officials to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into their facilities and databases.

As the crackdown progresses and the border remains essentially closed, both the people targeted for deportation and their journeys through the system now look very different, a New York Times analysis of government data shows.

Most people who were deported during President Joe Biden’s administration were among the millions of recent arrivals arrested at the border. They were detained and quickly deported through a process called expedited removal.

As border crossings dried up, Trump lifted restrictions on whom immigration officers could target elsewhere in the country. More deportees are now drawn from this wider pool. People are typically held in detention until they can be removed, and far fewer people are released.

The data, which includes every arrest, detention stay and deportation conducted by ICE, was obtained through a lawsuit and made available by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group.

It shows in great detail the impacts of Trump’s policies, including which communities have been most affected and the sometimes complicated paths people must travel as the government tries to remove them.

Many of the people targeted by ICE entered legally in recent years under special programs created by Biden. Trump canceled those programs and has tried to revoke the legal status of their participants.

Where ICE makes arrests

The Trump administration has said it would prioritize deporting the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”

Historically, ICE detained immigrants who had committed crimes through “custodial” arrests — picking up people who had been arrested by other law enforcement agencies from jails and prisons.

While custodial arrests still make up half of all immigration arrests, ICE has increasingly gone after anyone who may be in the country illegally, whether they have a criminal record or not.

Most ICE arrests at jails and prisons take place in Republican-led states such as Florida, Georgia and Texas.

The rest are “at-large” arrests in the community, which are more common in states led by Democrats, such as California and New York, where many local agencies do not cooperate with ICE.

More people who have been in the country for years or decades are being swept up and removed. More than 3,000 adults who entered before the age of 16 — potential “Dreamers” — have been deported, as have more than 4,000 children.

Where they are held

In the past, most people who were arrested were released to await their day in immigration court. Illegal immigration is a civil — not a criminal — offense, and detention was designed to hold only those deemed a flight risk.

But the Trump administration told ICE to hold people indefinitely and told immigration judges that most people are no longer eligible for bail. The Laken Riley Act, passed last January, further narrowed who can be released.

Immigrant detention centers are filling up, even as the Trump administration has opened dozens of facilities to expand the capacity and reach of this network.

The detained population has nearly doubled, to more than 68,000 people in December, a record high.

People detained by ICE have described unsanitary and unsafe conditions in some detention centers — including rotten food, a lack of access to showers and toilets, and the use of solitary confinement. At least 32 people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office, more than the number in Biden’s four years in office.

Officials have denied claims of poor conditions and mistreatment of detainees.

Because detention facilities are concentrated in the South, people arrested elsewhere are often quickly transferred long distances to places where there is space, often in Texas and Louisiana, far from family and lawyers.

People are moving around the system more frequently — passing through an average of three different facilities over seven weeks before they are deported. Immigration lawyers say the process has caused some people to give up their asylum cases and to agree to be deported.

Where deported people go

The Trump administration has deported people to almost every country in the world, including those that had resisted taking back their citizens. It has sent people to repressive regimes, including Afghanistan, Iran and Russia, and it has pressed countries such as South Sudan and Uganda to accept deportees from distant places who have no ties to those countries.

Detailed data on ICE removals was available only through the end of July, but it showed that the monthly pace of deportations had more than doubled compared with the previous year for people from more than 100 places.

China, India, Russia, Panama, Turkey and Vietnam were among the countries with the largest increases. The pace of deportations to the Northern Triangle of Central America has slowed somewhat because fewer people from those countries are crossing the border.

An analysis of less detailed data on deportations shows that their pace accelerated after July; as of December, ICE was on track to deport about 390,000 people in Trump’s first year.

The Trump administration has redrawn the map of immigration enforcement. Under pressure to expand further — and mounting backlash from the public — these patterns may change again.