President-elect Donald J. Trump has said little about the specifics of how he would carry out the promised largest deportation effort in American history. But immigration experts say it would be nearly impossible to execute without some critical assistance, particularly from jails and prisons.
Mr. Trump’s promises have provoked fears of wide-scale roundups across cities and states. Yet the more efficient path might be persuading — or forcing — far more of the people who run the nation’s jails and prisons to open their doors to federal immigration agents to find and deport undocumented prisoners.
Thomas D. Homan, a senior immigration official in Mr. Trump’s first administration who will now be the “border czar” in charge of the nation’s borders, has a well-documented preference for picking up migrants in jails. It takes just one officer, he has explained, to pick up multiple immigrants each day inside a county or state lockup.
In recent weeks, Mr. Homan has tried to draw attention to areas known as sanctuary cities that refuse to hand over certain immigrants detained by the local police or allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement into their jails and prisons.
“New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the major cities in this country are still sanctuary cities, and either President Trump’s got to reissue the lawsuit,” he said last month. “And look, if they’re not going to help us, then we’ll just double the manpower in those cities.”
Mr. Trump said on Sunday that ICE would be “starting with the criminals.”
Expanding deportation beyond jails presents a host of complications. Mr. Trump would also need personnel, airplanes, immigration agents and far more than four years to find 11 million undocumented immigrants, take them into custody and transport them back to their home countries.
The conditions for a successful mass deportation are far from guaranteed, setting up what could be a protracted fight over an extensive immigration crackdown that has become central to Mr. Trump’s political identity and to the success of his presidential campaign.
While Mr. Trump’s plan for sweeping deportations has raised fears of indiscriminate raids on homes and even entire neighborhoods, experts caution that the way ICE operates in communities is inefficient at best.
“We have limited resources that really kind of restricts the amount of people we can put on the street to go out there and find people first, which is the hardest part,” said Corey Price, a former senior official with the agency.
Arrests by ICE in communities require extensive legwork: tracking down immigrants’ addresses, surveillance to find out their daily habits and whom they live with, and analysis on whether they should even legally be deported. Then, there are the hours it takes for ICE officers to stake out homes and try to detain people.
Jails and prisons have long been a significant source of immigration arrests and deportations in the United States. Anytime immigrants are arrested and jailed, their fingerprints are automatically transmitted to ICE, giving officers their location.
The number of undocumented immigrants in detention fluctuates; during two years in the Trump administration — the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years — ICE requested immigrants from jails and prisons more than 342,000 times. But federal authorities would need the cooperation of local authorities to raid the jails and prisons — something the agency struggled with during Mr. Trump’s first term.
“A major reason that the first Trump administration deported far fewer people than President Obama was resistance from state and local officials in so-called sanctuary jurisdictions,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said in an email.
Sanctuary cities limit how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration agents, with the goal of ensuring that immigrant communities feel safe to talk to local law enforcement.
Over the past four years, as the politics of immigration have lurched to the right, Democratic governors and local leaders have taken a tougher line on the issue. In recent interviews, some Democratic governors, governors-elect and candidates for the office have told The New York Times they were willing to consider areas of potential cooperation with Mr. Trump, even as they expressed defiance toward his expected crackdown.
Still, even assuming that cooperation happens, it is unlikely to be enough for Mr. Trump to reach the deportation numbers he is promising.
“For the entirety of ICE’s existence, the agency’s primary means of finding and arresting people has been through cooperation with local enforcement,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
The rules in sanctuary jurisdictions, like California, where many immigrants live, make it incredibly difficult for ICE officers to quickly pick up immigrants from local lockups. Instead, the agency must rely on publicly available information on when an inmate might be released and is sometimes not allowed into nonpublic areas of the jail to detain immigrants.
The first Trump administration tried to force sanctuary states and cities back on board. It sued California over the state’s sanctuary law and tried to withhold funds from cities with policies blocking cooperation with immigration officials.
Some former ICE officials believe the Biden administration did not do enough to bring those cities and counties back to cooperating with federal law enforcement.
“That’s the difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration,” said John Fabbricatore, a former ICE official who backs Mr. Trump’s efforts and ran for Congress as a Republican this year. “There was no effort by the Biden administration, and there will be an effort by the Trump administration.”
Mr. Homan has floated reviving the lawsuit and blocking federal funding for jurisdictions that are not cooperative. When asked recently on Fox News whether the administration would block federal funds to sanctuary states, or those that refuse to cooperate, he said, “I guarantee President Trump will do that.”
He has also said that if ICE is unable to get into those jails, the agency will double officers in search of targets in those cities. But that effort, in the first administration, did not amount to a dramatic blitz of arrests or deportations.
There is no doubt that the Trump administration will once again target such areas to force them into cooperation. The administration could also turn to friendly states, like Texas, to help beef up and expand local programs that deputize local law enforcement officials to help ICE find undocumented immigrants in jails and hold them for deportation officers.
If Mr. Trump does turn to arrests in communities to get the numbers he desires, he will need to significantly increase the number of officers sent into the field (ICE employs 20,000 people), expand the detention capacity to record levels and bring on more planes to deport people.
Deportations also carry another wrinkle: Countries across the globe must agree to receive immigrants. Certain countries, like Venezuela, have stopped taking deportation flights while others, like China or Cuba, have historically limited the number of their nationals they are willing to take.
One effort that could help increase numbers will be the resumption of the practice known as collateral arrests, or the apprehension of immigrants in the same place as an ICE target. Immigrant activists have said the practice lends itself to racial profiling and should be curtailed. The effort was a staple at the agency during the first Trump administration but was stopped after President Biden took office.
Mr. Trump has already indicated a willingness to use the military’s assistance. Mr. Homan told The New York Post that the military could be used to transport immigrants to free up ICE officers to arrest and pick up people.
Mr. Trump could also rely on expanded use of quick deportations historically employed at the southern border.
The Trump administration was given the go-ahead to try to quickly deport anyone who has been in the United States for less than two years at the end of its tenure in late 2020. Those deportation powers are expansive but also have their own bureaucratic and logistical issues.
In the end, no matter what happens, Mr. Trump will most likely need local cooperation.
“Cooperation with local law enforcement officials will be absolutely critical to Trump’s mass deportation plans,” Ms. Bush-Joseph said. “Without the criminal-justice-to-deportation pipeline, it will be much more difficult for D.H.S. to approach the high targets set,” she said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security.
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