Trump promised mass deportations. Here’s one way they could quietly happen.

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During his presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised to launch “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America,” using the U.S. military and a 1798 law known as the Alien Enemies Act — a statute that gives the president the power to detain immigrants during times of war.

Trump hasn’t elaborated on his plan, but immigration attorneys, immigrant rights advocates and criminology professors say the Trump administration wouldn’t have to conduct large workplace raids or round up immigrants in the streets. Instead, it could begin immediately targeting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. — including 1.6 million in Texas — by using the current deportation apparatus used by local police, jails and federal agents.

All immigrants — even if they have legal status — can face deportation if they’re accused of serious crimes like murder, domestic violence, drunk driving, sexual assault, or murder. Congress is now considering a bill that would let officials deport immigrants for less serious crimes like shoplifting.

In the past decade, at least 70% of arrests by U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE — the federal agency in charge of deporting immigrants — have been handoffs by local police or federal prisons, according to an analysis by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit that provides legal training to people who work with immigrants.

“It is therefore states, and their internal law enforcement and criminal legal systems that power the mass detention and mass deportation system,” the group said in its analysis.

Here’s what you need to know about how deportations work in the U.S.:

How federal immigration laws have evolved

Since the 1980s, Congress began to focus on deporting immigrants accused of crimes, passing a series of laws that expanded the U.S. government’s authority to detain immigrants as part of the Reagan administration’s war on drugs, according to “Immigration Detention as Punishment,” a legal article by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an immigration attorney and law professor at Ohio State University.

Congress at the time created what has become a central part of immigration enforcement, known as a detainer — when federal agents check the immigration status of a person being held in a local jail or federal prison and decide to take custody of them for deportation. Federal agents initially issued detainers for immigrants accused of drug-related crimes but have since expanded the types of crimes that can result in a detainer.

In 1986, President Reagan also signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided amnesty to an estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants but also made it illegal for employers to hire immigrants who didn’t have legal permission to work in the U.S. That provision allows federal agents to raid worksites and ask employees to prove their immigration status.

During the Clinton administration, Congress expanded the list of deportable crimes for both undocumented and legal immigrants. That law created the 287(g) program that lets ICE deputize local police to question jail inmates about their immigration status and train some local police to serve immigration-related warrants.

As of December 2024, ICE had 287(g) agreements with 135 police departments, sheriff’s offices and jails in 21 states, including 26 in Texas, according to ICE’s website.

Under the George W. Bush administration, ICE piloted a program known as Secure Communities, starting in Harris County. The data-sharing program allowed local police to send the fingerprints of anyone they arrested to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to check their immigration status. ICE would then decide whether to issue a detainer if agents believed the inmate was deportable.

The Obama administration expanded the program to all 50 states, according to the ICE website. President Obama would earn the sobriquet “the deporter-in-chief” for deporting the largest number of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history. About 34% of the more than 9 million deportations recorded between 1892 and 2022 happened during the Obama administration, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Since the early ‘90s, there's been a series of shifts that have gotten more punitive toward immigrants — and more restrictive — that has led to increased deportation,” said Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine.

Texas efforts could become a blueprint for mass deportations

Texas could serve as a model for how states could help Trump’s deportation efforts by finding ways to arrest more immigrants, said Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director at Detention Watch Network.

In the past four years, Texas has allocated over $3 billion to immigration enforcement by sending state police and the National Guard to different parts of the Texas-Mexico border to arrest, detain and prosecute people crossing the Rio Grande — many of whom say they are seeking political asylum in the U.S.

The state has also prosecuted thousands of migrants for misdemeanors such as trespassing, then handed them over to the federal government for deportation.

In 2017, Texas lawmakers passed a law to punish local and state government entities and college campuses that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials or enforce immigration laws. And in 2023 passed Senate Bill 4, which would make illegally entering the country a state crime. That law is currently on hold after the U.S. Department of Justice sued to overturn it.

“What’s going on in Texas could become a model around the country, like the way that they have weaponized the criminal justice system in Texas to target immigrants,” Ghandehari said.

Who could be targeted first?

Immigration attorneys said that among the people most vulnerable to deportation are those who currently have an order to leave the country and those with pending immigration cases.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, immigration judges ordered the deportation of 2.3 million people between fiscal years 2015 and 2024. About 35% of those cases were people who didn’t appear in court when a judge issued a deportation order, making them likely targets for Trump’s deportation efforts.

Roughly 3.5 million immigration cases were pending at the end of fiscal year 2024.

Some immigrants are seeking asylum; others seek to remain in the country on other grounds, such as having U.S. citizen family members who economically depend on them. Most did not have a lawyer to help them navigate the complex federal immigration system.

Currently, nearly 3 million people have legal permission to work and live in the U.S. under various federal programs that don’t provide a path to permanent legal status or citizenship. The programs can be renewed or scrapped at the discretion of each new presidential administration.

For example, as of now, more than 1.1 million immigrants from 17 countries are enrolled in Temporary Protected Status, a program Congress created in 1990 that allows immigrants from countries struck by natural disasters or deemed too dangerous by the government to live and work in the U.S. This program has been renewed by each president since then and protects people from countries like Haiti, Ukraine, Honduras, Nepal, Syria and Venezuela — which has the largest share of enrollees with nearly 600,000.

Immigrant rights advocates worry that Trump will cancel the program, making the people enrolled easy targets for deportation because the federal government already has their personal information.

But not every immigrant is deportable, even if they’re in the country illegally or lose legal protection. An immigrant’s home country must have diplomatic relations with the U.S. and be willing to accept deportees. Currently, Venezuela doesn’t have diplomatic relations with the U.S.

Still, Tom Homan, a Trump immigration adviser with the unofficial title of “border czar,” said the Trump administration will overcome that challenge.

“We're hoping that President Trump will work with Venezuela, like he did with Mexico and El Salvador, and get these countries to take them back,” Homan said during a Sunday morning news show in early January. “If they don't, they're still gonna be deported. They're just gonna be deported to a different country.”

The Laken Riley Act

Congress is currently debating the Laken Riley Act, which would require ICE to detain undocumented immigrants accused of less serious crimes such as burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting — and would significantly widen the deportation pipeline.

The bill is named after a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student killed in February 2024 by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border through El Paso in 2022. Months before the killing, Ibarra was arrested on a shoplifting charge at a Georgia Walmart but was later released.

The case received a lot of public attention, with many conservative lawmakers pointing to the case as an example of why the country needs to adopt even stricter immigration laws.

It’s unclear how many people could be deported if the act is passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump.

But it’s just the latest example of Congress expanding the criminal justice system to enforce immigration laws, said Rocio Paez Ritter, a sociology and criminology associate professor at the University of Arkansas. Paez Ritter said many studies show immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens.

“But unfortunately, the public believes otherwise,” she said.