Trump wants mass deportations. A ride-along with immigration officers shows the challenges
BY REBECCA SANTANA
Updated 10:17 PM GMT+5, December 23, 2024
NEW YORK (AP) — The immigration officers sat in their vehicles before dawn near a two-story building. A New York subway line rumbled overhead, then an officer’s voice crackled over the radio.
After watching for about two hours, he said, “I think that’s Tango,” using a term for target. “Gray hoodie. Backpack. Walking quickly.”
The immigration officers surrounded and handcuffed a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor.
Kenneth Genalo, head of Enforcement and Removal Operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York, said a popular misconception is that officers can sweep into a community and pick up a wide swath of people who are in the United States illegally and send them to their home countries.
“It’s called targeted enforcement,” Genalo said. “We don’t grab people and then take them to JFK and put them on a plane.”
With Donald Trump returning to the White House, there is intense interest in how the Republican will carry out his immigration agenda, including a campaign pledge of mass deportations. His priorities could run into the realities faced by agents focused on enforcement and removals, including the unit in New York that offered The Associated Press a glimpse into its operations: The number of people already on its lists to target eclipses the number of officers available to do the work.
The Biden administration had narrowed deportation priorities to public safety threats and recent border crossers. Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, says officials in the new administration also will prioritize those who pose a risk, such as criminals, before moving on to immigrants whom courts have ordered removed from the U.S.
But Homan also has signaled that enforcement could be wider: “If you’re in the country illegally you got a problem,” he said recently on Dr. Phil’s Merit TV.
It’s a tall order.
Deportation orders far outnumber staff
About 1.4 million people have final orders of removal, while about 660,000 under immigration supervision either have been convicted of crimes or are facing charges. But only 6,000 officers within ICE are tasked with monitoring noncitizens in the country and then finding and removing those not eligible to stay.
Those staffing numbers have largely remained static as their caseload has roughly quadrupled over the past decade to 7.6 million. About 10% of that workforce was pulled from their regular duties last year to go to the U.S.-Mexico border at times when immigration spiked.
Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff earlier in the Biden administration, said the number of officers needed to pursue those deemed a public safety threat are at direct odds with the goal of deporting people in large numbers.
“You’re not going to be able to do both of those with the resources you have, with the deportation officers you have,” Houser said. “Just the arithmetic, the time-intensive nature of those sort of arrests will overwhelm any ability to get to those large scale numbers.”
Genalo said the officers in charge of individual cases have to get a lead, ensure they have the legal authority to arrest someone and then track the person down. They generally aren’t allowed to enter a residence, so they want to catch people outside.
How immigration removals work in the field
On this recent operation, about a dozen officers gathered before 5 a.m. at a White Castle parking lot in the Bronx. After putting on their body armor and checking their equipment, they circled around for a briefing.
Besides the 23-year-old Ecuadorian man, they were going after a 36-year-old Mexican man convicted of forcibly touching a young girl and another Ecuadorian also convicted of sexual abuse of a minor.
The first target, the 23-year-old man, who pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old girl, was believed to usually leave the apartment building around 7 a.m. or 7:30 a.m. Sometimes he was with a woman and child.
“Light came on in the first floor of the apartment,” an officer waiting outside said over the radio. Then later: “Someone came out of the basement, but it’s not our target.”
They finally spotted him, swept him into the back of a vehicle and quickly left the neighborhood.
Inside, the man’s 22-year-old wife didn’t know what had happened until he called later from detention.
In an interview, she said they met in Ecuador and had a child — a bubbly 3-year-old girl with braids — and she was pregnant with their second. He worked construction while she was a manicurist.
She said she knew why her husband had been arrested but felt there were important mitigating factors. She said they knew it was possible her husband could be sent back to Ecuador after his criminal case wrapped up but that it was still a shock.
ICE deported more than 270,000 people over a recent 12-month period, the highest annual tally in a decade, the agency said in a recent report. But it