President Donald Trump is enlisting an unlikely ally in his mass deportation crusade—the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service, The Washington Post reports.
Trump, who has vowed to deport “millions” of immigrants, has roped in the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to assist the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with its tracking, detaining, and deporting efforts, the newspaper reported, citing two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.
It’s a jarring pivot for the agency, whose usual duties—according to its own website—include investigating mail theft and violent crimes, not immigration crackdowns.
The escalation comes just weeks after DHS data revealed that Trump—despite his fiery anti-immigrant rhetoric—is actually deporting people at a slower pace than his predecessor Joe Biden. According to Reuters, the Trump administration deported 37,660 people in its first month in office. That’s below the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns during Biden’s final year of presidency.
The sources told The Post that immigration officials are looking to gain access to the Postal Inspection Service’s vast surveillance systems—such as online account data, package and mail-tracking, credit card and financial information, IP addresses, and even photographs of the exterior of envelopes and packages, known as “mail covers.”
One source familiar with the matter described the pairing as a “complete overreach.”
“The Inspection Service is very, very nervous about this,” the source said. “They seem to be trying to placate Trump by getting involved with things they think he’d like. But it’s complete overreach. This is the Postal Service. Why are they involved in deporting people?”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the DHS for comment.
A senior DHS official told The Post the collab was “a key part of ensuring law enforcement has the resources they need to fulfill President Trump’s promise to the American people to remove violent criminals from our streets, dismantle drug and human trafficking operations and make America safe again.”
Meanwhile, immigration experts are doubting that the Trump administration has deported as many people as it says it had during the president’s first 100 days in office.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said on April 28 that the White House was on track and had deported 139,000 people since the president’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
“The numbers are good,” he told reporters during a press briefing.
According to USA Today, data from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement suggests that 57,000—less than half the figure provided by Homan—have been deported.
Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University researcher who regularly compiles and analyzes immigration data, told the publication he thinks the administration is “either engaging in a highly creative accounting scheme to inflate the perception of deportations or simply pulling these numbers out of thin air.”
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