Donald Trump has made some controversial campaign promises lately –
including vows to monitor certain mosques, track Syrian refugees and
bring back waterboarding – but the debate is still raging over perhaps
his biggest-scale proposal: mass deportation of the country’s illegal
immigrants.
The plan remains short on specifics, yet the current
state of the backlogged immigration enforcement system demonstrates just
how difficult it could be. As it stands, deporting a relatively tiny
fraction of the total illegal immigrant population has clogged U.S.
immigration courts.
According to
TRAC (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse),
there are 459,219 cases pending, with most of them in California, Texas
and New York. The vast majority are immigrants who either overstayed
their permission to be here, or came into the country illegally. A
smaller number involve criminal, terrorism or national security charges
-- 25,561 as of September.
“To say you could just go and pick up 11 million or
12 million individuals and in just a couple of years deport them is just
illogical, it’s just not possible,” said Maurice Goldman, an
immigration lawyer in Tucson, Ariz., which according to TRAC has over
1,000 pending cases in its immigration court. TRAC is a project by
Syracuse University that compiles up-to-date federal law enforcement
records.
Politically speaking, Trump’s proposal continues to
get mixed support, at a time when candidates and voters are focused
largely on security issues in the wake of the Paris attacks.
In a recent Fox News poll,
52 percent said they favor Trump’s idea of deporting illegal
immigrants, while 40 percent opposed it. But when specifically asked how
they felt about “identifying and deporting millions of immigrants who
are living in the U.S. illegally,” just 41 percent called it a “smart
idea” that should be “seriously considered.” Thirty percent called it
“silly” and “impossible,” while 24 percent said the idea is “wrong and
shouldn’t be done even if it were possible.”
Trump may have mastered the art of the deal – but on
the matter of mass deportation, the adage that politics is the art of
the possible can’t be overlooked.
The government still is deporting thousands -- according to the
latest DHS data,
the government deported 438,000, 418,000 and 387,000 in 2013, 2012, and
2011 respectively -- but each case typically takes a long time to
process.
Today, the average wait time for a case in the
immigration court -- which can end in deportation -- is 643 days. In
2008, it was 438 days. Goldman, describing one of his own clients, a man
who came to the U.S. illegally in 1992 and was brought before the court
in 2010, said wait times can be much longer. It was five years before
his client’s case was “administratively closed,” meaning he won’t be
deported this time but his charge is still “pending.” He can be put back
before a judge at any time.
The backlogs, too, have been steadily rising since
1998, the first year represented in the TRAC assessment. At that time,
during the Clinton administration, there was a backlog of 129,505 cases.
In 2008, a year before President Obama took the Oval Office from
President George W. Bush, there was a backlog of 186,108.
Trump, though, has been resolute about not only
building a U.S.-Mexico wall but the deportation plan. During the Nov. 10
presidential primary debate, Trump advocated mass deportations like
those pursued by President Dwight Eisenhower, otherwise known as
“Operation Wetback,” in 1954.
According to historians, hundreds of thousands of
people were removed under that operation, including Mexican-American
citizens, who were forcibly rounded up and sent over the border to
Mexico. The months-long federal operation has been described as inhumane
and generally ineffective in stopping the number of Mexicans coming
over the border.
Still, Trump defends his plan, recently telling Fox News he would do it humanely.
"I've heard it both ways. I've heard good reports,
I've heard bad reports," Trump told "The O’Reilly Factor" earlier this
month about the mass deportations under Eisenhower. "We would do it in a
very humane way."
Speaking with Fox News' Bret Baier, Trump dismissed the logistical concerns.
"If we do this job right, there shouldn't be a big
court situation. Nobody knows legal situations better than Trump," he
said. "They have to go back."
But critics say that while Trump could tweak federal
regulations to streamline the process, he would have to change the law
to pursue a strategy to avoid the immigration courts entirely.
Currently, the government can fast-track deportations for violent
criminals, but most immigrants, illegal and legal,
have a constitutional right to due process as upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
There’s where the trouble lies in mass deportation.
“The immigration courts are so underfunded, and that is why there is
such a terrible backlog,” said Wendy Feliz, spokeswoman for the American
Immigration Council. “[Judge positions] go unfilled, and even if they
were filled, they still wouldn’t be sufficient.”
Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action
Forum, a fiscally conservative policy group that assessed the cost of
mass deportation
in a study earlier this year, told FoxNews.com that sending 11 million people home would “harm the economy in ways it would normally not be harmed.”
His group estimates it would cost upwards of $620
billion to apprehend, detain and deport every illegal immigrant. “We
would need more courts, more detention facilities, more police -- it
would change the climate of America.”
“I am 100 percent sympathetic with those who do not
like illegal immigration,” he said. “But what strategy you have for
dealing with illegal immigrants is important. I’m not a fan of this
one.”