During his campaign, Donald Trump promised moms like Jackie Medina he would deport millions of illegal immigrants, including criminals like the man who killed her 16-year-old daughter Lizbeth last year.
But can he even do it?
There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., and Trump has vowed to deport “all” of them. The vast majority aren’t dangerous, and many have lived and worked in the U.S. for years. Does the president-elect really plan to deport such a massive number, even those who don’t pose an immediate threat to society? While border security needs to be tightened, most Americans surely don’t wish to see grandmothers being pulled from their apartments and sent back south of the border.
Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who was named Trump’s “border czar” last week, is the man who has to answer these questions. In an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Homan said the priority is “public safety threats and national security threats.”
And yet, even targeting safety and security threats presents problems. The murder of Lizbeth Medina is an example of this. She was stabbed to death in her family’s apartment in Edna, Texas, last December. Five days later, Rafael Govea Romero, then 23, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, confessed to the crime. At the time of Romero’s arrest, he was on probation for burglary, and his visa had expired.
Jackie Medina says Edna Police told her Romero was able to stay in the U.S. because the Biden administration decided in a 2021 memo to prioritize apprehending illegal immigrants who are deemed to be a “threat to national security.” Burglary didn’t meet that standard.
And Medina’s story is just one case—what does mass deportation look like on a larger scale? Homan acknowledged it’s not going to happen all at once. The first step is finding immigrants who have criminal backgrounds.
Homan said that ICE has a “state-of-the-art data system” they’ll use to locate them. “We won’t be able to find everyone,” he said. “Some people just don’t have an electronic footprint. But we’re pretty good at locating them.”
Homan added that ICE will need more resources due to the sheer number of immigrants involved. He foresees asking the Department of Defense to help transport and temporarily shelter immigrants while providing intelligence support. “With the DoD’s help, we can take our armed law enforcement officers out of those administrative duties and put them on the streets,” said Homan, who told The Free Press that he’s received thousands of emails and texts from retired military, police officers, and ICE agents who offered to come out of retirement and help.
“They know how to speak Spanish, and they know the processes and the systems we have to run people through, so it would be great to have some of them back to do that,” Homan said.
Any plan to repatriate millions of people, mainly to South and Central America, will, of course, run much more smoothly if countries agree to take back their citizens. Mexico’s new left-wing president, Claudia Sheinbaum, recently tried to assuage the fears of Mexican immigrants living in America, telling them that even after Trump’s election, “there is no reason to worry” and Mexico would maintain good relations with the U.S.
However, Homan told The Free Press that Trump wouldn’t hesitate to raise tariffs on goods from Mexico, which is America’s top trading partner. And he said he wouldn’t be opposed to revoking visas for visitors from other countries if they don’t cooperate either. “We’ll cancel the visas, including visas for government personnel,” said Homan. “We’ll send everyone home.”
Homan also suggested that closing the 27 land ports of entry along the southern border could be an option as a matter of national security. He gave the example of Kiki Camarena, a Drug Enforcement Agency officer who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the Mexican Guadalajara Cartel in 1985. After Camarena was taken, President Reagan abruptly shut down nine ports of entry at the southern border to pressure the Mexican government to find the missing DEA agent. It was a controversial move, and it was criticized by Mexican government officials, but ultimately deemed a success. Camarena’s body was found in a plastic bag near the home of a known drug trafficker in southwestern Mexico a month after he disappeared.
The last time the U.S. ran a mass deportation program, with the unfortunate name of “Operation Wetback,” in 1954, it was a cooperative effort with Mexico. Eight hundred border patrol agents conducted raids and repatriated over a million mostly Mexican immigrants, thousands of whom decided to return to Mexico on their own to avoid being swept up in a raid. According to a paper written by UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, Mexico had a vested interest in bringing its citizens back from the U.S. because the country needed laborers to work on cotton farms.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit immigration advocacy group, says that deportation plans must involve diplomacy to work properly. That’s difficult to do with countries like Venezuela and China. “There are hundreds of thousands of undocumented Chinese immigrants in the United States, but China only takes about one deportation flight per year,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Similarly, with Venezuela, Reichlin-Melnick said he believes that new threats from Trump won’t work since the previous Trump administration and the current Biden administration imposed sanctions on the country’s socialist leader, President Nicolás Maduro, with little to no success. “There are many countries where deportations are virtually impossible or could only be done so slowly that they would not be described as ‘mass’ deportations,” he said.
Another obstacle to Trump’s mass deportation goal is the huge backlog of 3.7 million immigration cases tied up in court with only 734 immigration judges to hear them. “It’s very likely that a person arrested by ICE on January 22, 2025, might not actually see a judge for the final hearing in his case until after Trump has already left office,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that aims to lower immigration, says that changes will have to be made about how immigration courts treat asylum requests. “For example, changing the policy to say that living in a place of gang violence does not qualify someone for asylum,” said Krikorian.
Krikorian said it’s unlikely border control agents will be arresting many grandmothers wearing their pajamas. “Obviously, if they get a tip and they go somewhere to get a fugitive, and it turns out there are other illegal aliens there, they’ll take them into custody as well,” he said. “But it’s a waste of effort to focus on maximizing the number of ordinary illegal immigrants. The main place that you would get a noncriminal, non-terrorist illegal immigrant would be worksite enforcement.”
It’s unclear what Trump plans to do about the 531,000 migrants who flew to the U.S. from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela on a two-year sponsorship parole program designed by the Biden administration to reduce the number of people crossing at the southern border. The program was temporarily paused in August after an internal investigation by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service found evidence of rampant fraud. The Biden administration has already announced that they won’t extend the legal status of migrants who were flown in under the program, which means those immigrants will have to find other avenues to stay in the country legally.
“There are thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who are here on the parole program. Will they have their parole terminated immediately? Or will the Trump administration just let their parole expire?” said Reichlin-Melnick. Terminating parole immediately would be “the crueler and more chaotic of the strategies.”
And what about the potentially 300,000 unaccompanied children the government effectively lost track of? Homan says Trump wants to find them. “I’m telling you, based on my three and a half decades of doing this work, some of these kids are being forced into labor and sex trafficking,” said the new border czar, who defended the separation during Trump’s first term. “President Trump is committed to reuniting these children with their parents.”
The cartels running human and drug smuggling operations at the southern border have benefited from Biden’s lax border enforcement, Homan said. “President Trump is going to designate them as terrorist organizations, and he’s going to wipe them off the face of the earth.”
For Jackie Medina, whose daughter, Lizbeth, dreamed of becoming a nurse, it’s all too little, too late.
But Homan hopes that Medina can take comfort in knowing that Trump’s border policies will hopefully make a difference. “My heart breaks for her loss. But President Trump is coming to office, and by ending the catch-and-release program and actually enforcing immigration law, we are going to save many lives in the future.”
Madeleine Rowley is an investigative reporter. Follow her on X @Maddie_Rowley, and read her piece “Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking.”
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