President-elect Trump's planned largest deportation effort in U.S. history has sent unease into immigrant communities. "To be honest there's a lot of fear," said Valeria Paz Reyes, who entered from Honduras as a child. She has become a U.S. citizen, but other family members remain undocumented. While Trump has said any one of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally may be deported, certain groups are at greater risk than others, Scripps News reports. "It's not going to be a massive sweep of neighborhoods," new border czar Tom Homan told Fox News. "It's not going to be massive raids. It's going to be a targeted enforcement operation." He said, "It's going to be public safety threats and national security threats (that) will be the priority,. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency says there are 662,566 non-citizens with criminal convictions or pending charges, largely for assault and drug offenses. The most common crime listed for undocumented immigrants was "traffic offenses," a category that includes driving under the influence.
ICE already prioritizes deporting immigrants who are in the country unlawfully and have been caught up in the criminal justice system. "Immigrants in general commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born," said Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute, "But our deportations tend to prioritize people who have criminal records. We don't want bad guys staying in this country." Homan says ICE will also zero in on the much larger pool of immigrants who've already been ordered out of the country by a judge but who have yet to leave.
About 1.3 million immigrants with final orders to depart remain in the country. Gelatt said it takes a lot of government resources and time to track down and remove people who are under orders to leave. "The U.S. government doesn't necessarily know where every single person in this country is living, or how to find them," Gelatt said. There is also the challenge of finding places to detain people who are located while arranging for their departure. ICE has funding for just 41,000 beds. Homan says he will bring back worksite raids that ended under President Biden, whose Homeland Security department focused on employers, rather than the undocumented immigrants they hire.
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