President Trump’s administration faces challenges but has made progress in these early months to fulfill his mass deportation mandate.
Immigration expert Todd Bensman told OAN’s Garrett Ziegler about the difficulties an attenuated ICE faces in targeting, arresting, detaining and deporting millions of illegal aliens who don’t want to be deported.
For the short term, Bensman said, “one thing that is going to be necessary, for really high numbers of deportations, is you’re going to have to employ, or somehow induce, state and local law enforcement officers — county constables, sheriff’s deputies, small police departments, large police departments, highway patrols — to be certified to arrest and detain illegal immigrants. And even to run operations to find and apprehend them, and turn them over to ICE.”
In his work for the Center for Immigration Studies, Bensman draws on his two decades of experience as a journalist and his nine years with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), where he worked as a counterterrorism intelligence manager within a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Fusion Center.
In Bensman’s book Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, Bensman documented how the Biden administration dismantled ICE’s deportation infrastructure and kept ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers “shackled to their desks” with regulations.
As Bensman’s book explains, Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas “issued internal policy memos sharply restricting ICE’s arm responsible for interior deportations,” prioritizing terrorists and ignoring legions of other aliens with final removal orders.
In 2021 a group of states, led by Texas, sued DHS and Secretary Mayorkas over the policy, but in June 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the states lacked standing to challenge DHS’s discretion.
Now that Trump is back in office, rebuilding ICE detention capacity and hiring more officers is a top priority. But in the short term, “there just simply aren’t enough officers to do the work that’s necessary,” Bensman said. “You have to force-multiply in different ways.”
How Can Trump’s ICE Overcome Sanctuary Policies?
Sanctuary policies prohibit state and local jurisdictions from partnering with ICE. “The problem is, sanctuary jurisdictions will withhold cooperation in order to satisfy local political sentiment,” Bensman said. “And for those areas, I think you have to go in and find the pockets of red police departments and get them on board to work in the blue areas. Go under, around, over and through them, to catch illegal immigrants in blue districts.”
Florida has passed statewide legislation that requires all jurisdictions — including the blue ones — to cooperate with ICE by invoking Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). This 1996 amendment authorizes DHS to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies to perform certain immigration enforcement functions under the supervision of ICE.
According to Bensman, state legislatures requiring all state and local law enforcement agencies to observe Section 287(g) would be ideal. “Blue states aren’t going to pass legislation like that, but red states should be able to be induced to do that,” he said. “You can fill a lot of planes just from the red states.”
Florida is already seeing results. On May 1 the Miami ERO office reported on the success of Operation Tidal Wave, which it called the largest joint immigration operation in Florida’s history — netting 1,120 criminal illegal aliens. According to a press release, “Officers arrested various violent offenders, gang members, sex offenders, fugitives from justice and those who pose significant public safety threats,” including members of MS-13, Tren de Aragua, 18th Street Gang and other transnational criminal groups.
In January, President Trump designated both MS-13 and Tren de Aragua as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs). These designations unlock additional law enforcement tools to address transnational crime and terrorism.
In Texas, more than three dozen law enforcement agencies have adopted 287(g), and the Texas National Guard has signed an agreement that it has not yet put it into practice. But the GOP-led state legislature is struggling to pass statewide legislation. At a hearing before the state legislature on March 5, Lt. Col. Jason Taylor, Deputy Director for Law Enforcement Operations for Texas DPS, testified that in his view, employing 287(g) might stretch law enforcement resources too thin. “It’s more of a people problem, that, in my opinion, you don’t want to tie up a lot of enforcement action with,” Taylor said.
What Resources Does ICE Need?
ICE needs funding in the fiscal year 2026 budget for hiring more agents and expanding detention facilities. But for now, a State of Emergency declared on January 20 authorizes the use of Department of Defense (DOD) resources, including military aircraft for deportation flights. “We have plenty of those,” Bensman said. “Until we get civilian fleets online, a lot of money that’s going to come from the quote-unquote big beautiful budget bill, in the next little while, is going to go to rebuilding the deportation infrastructure. And I think they can do that pretty quickly. But if not, we can use military facilities to hold them as well. Right now, they’re filling up.”
Trump’s ICE also seeks to expand detention facilities necessary to hold deportees until they can be deported, usually a few days. A version of the budget bill released by the House on April 28 would provide just over $81 billion for interior enforcement, including 100,000 detention beds and 10,000 additional ICE ERO officers, bringing the total number of officers to around 15,000.
“They’re going to have to use the big-beautiful-budget-bill money to go on a hiring binge. Which takes time,” Bensman said. In the meantime, DHS has been using DEA agents, FBI agents and U.S. Marshals, in addition to state and local cops, to help.
On Due Process and the Immigration Courts
The immigration courts are facing a multi-year backlog of asylum claims. But according to Bensman, “once we actually closed the border off to new incoming torrents of humanity, the backlog immediately began to shrink. We’re three months in, now, and we’re — for the first time in ten years! — seeing the number of cases shrink.”
On the “due process” controversy, Bensman identified the administrative nature of immigration proceedings — distinguished from criminal court — as the reason for confusion over how much process is due in the deportation context. Due process considerations provided for in the U.S. Constitution, such as the right to cross-examine witnesses, do not come into play because there is no deprivation of life, liberty or property at stake.
“The biggest misconception, or conflation, that I’m seeing out there has to do with the fact that illegal immigrants are not being imprisoned, they’re being sent home. They’re free, at home. We’re not taking liberties away,” he said.
“Right there, you have cognitive dissonance with — yes, there is due process, you have to have immigration judges involved, adjudicators stamping things, and looking at things, and you can appeal. But the worst thing that can happen, really, is that you just go home.”
Detention is necessary, and usually brief. “We aren’t depriving you of your liberty — other than for a short period of time,” Bensman said. “So they don’t run.”