“TRUMP DEPORTING PEOPLE AT SLOWER RATE THAN BIDEN’S LAST YEAR IN OFFICE,” ran the gloating headline on Reuters yesterday. I bet there were laughs galore in the office.
According to the story, “US President Donald Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office… far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.”
During Trump’s first three weeks in office, ICE arrested about 14,000 people, or an average of 667 a day. Arrests spiked during the first week, at between 800 and 1,200 a day, but fell off as detention centers filled up and officers who had been brought in for special raids on cities like Chicago returned home.
These figures come from the Department of Homeland Security itself.
In response to the obviously embarrassing news, a DHS spokeswoman said the Biden deportation figures appeared “artificially high,” because of far higher levels of illegal immigration then. This is probably true, a point I’ll come back to.
I’m not here to make excuses for Trump. At present rates, Trump will deport less than two million people across his full four-year term, or one tenth of the number he promised to deport during the election campaign. This isn’t what the American people voted for. It’s barely—barely—even “the largest mass deportation campaign in American history.” Eisenhower, in his poetically named “Operation Wetback,” managed to deport a million and a half we- I mean, illegals, and he did that with about ten mean-ass-lookin’ dudes, some billy clubs and pump guns, and a couple of Ford pickup trucks.
Just what is going on?
It’s clear, at least, that Trump himself is frustrated, and so is his Border Czar Tom Homan. (I saw a picture of Homan on Twitter the other day, looking extremely grizzled and red-eyed—or, as I said at the time, like an English pikeman who’s been on campaign in France for three months and slaughtered dozens of French knights with his bare hands and just wants to get home to his Bessie, a hot steaming beef pie and a tankard of ale.) Both men are reported to have expressed their anger, on multiple occasions, behind the scenes. Homan, it’s said, checks in daily with senior immigration figures and barks his displeasure at them. That’s a phone call I’d look forward to about as much as my yearly check-in with my accountant…
In a more public display of his dissatisfaction, on Friday President Trump reassigned Caleb Vitello, his top official at ICE. Vitello will oversee enforcement but will not have an administrative role. His replacement is Madison Sheahan, who worked with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem while she was governor of South Dakota.
So here’s my first point: Don’t doubt that the will is there. I don’t think, on the basis of all the incredible, scarcely conceivable things the new Trump admin has done over the last month—do I need to list them one by one?—that Trump’s promise to deport 20 million illegal immigrants is an empty one.
The will isn’t currently lacking: It’s the way.
Be in no doubt: deporting 20 million people is not an easy thing to do. Currently, after four insane years under the Biden Oligarchy, the machinery of government is still set up to do the exact opposite to Trump’s intention: to import millions of people, indiscriminately, without any adequate checks or oversight. To flood the country, not drain it.
A contributor to the Reuters piece put it nicely. “It’s going to be like turning a supertanker for the first few months. The civilian part of the US government can only do so much.” In case you didn’t know, supertankers take a very long time to turn around. You can’t turn a supertanker on a sixpence—sorry, a dime.
Personnel are an issue. ICE need more officers. Military units are already being roped in to aid with deportations and given special powers, which seems practical and wise. It’s likely that this policy will have to be extended, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. After all, who else should repel an invasion of the homeland but the military?
Detention space—that’s a significant limiting factor, too. At present, ICE has around 41,000 detainees, with funding to hold 41,500. That’s not anywhere near good enough.
Thankfully, the Senate just passed a bill committing $340 billion over the next four years to be spent exclusively on border security, deportations and additional military expenditure. This money must be used properly, to address the real issues that are slowing down the pace of deportations and jeopardizing Trump’s flagship campaign promise.
Other important things are happening. Legal impediments are being removed. It’s being made easier to arrest illegal immigrants without criminal records and to detain more people with final deportation orders. ICE officers are now allowed to arrest immigrants at immigration court hearings, something the Biden administration largely forbade.
Border crossings, as I reported for INFOWARS today, are down 94%. Ninety-four per-cent. This really does make a huge difference when it comes to deportation statistics—it’s easier to deport people when more of them are there to grab—but it also helps to underline the message: You are not welcome. Migrants aren’t coming any more, because they know this. Migrants who are already in the US know this too, and some of them are already packing to leave.
The atmosphere should be made even more hostile, in the hope that many illegals will self-deport before Tom Homan can get his huge mitts on them. On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order aimed at eliminating federal benefits for illegal immigrants in the US. Remove the incentives to be in America illegally. All of them.
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll see whether this multi-pronged approach works. At present, I still see no reason to believe it won’t.
So don’t blackpill about deportations just yet. Pay attention, of course, keep up the pressure and make sure your elected representatives and Trump himself know what you want to happen—but don’t give in to despair because the number of deportations is currently lower than it should be.
It’s only been a month. Four weeks. 30-something days. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and America won’t be rebuilt in a month either.