LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump's first week in office saw him giving immigration authorities the power to sidestep the courts to expel migrants without legal documentation more quickly, and workplace immigration raids began in cities like Chicago and Newark, New Jersey. Newark's mayor, Ras Baraka, told reporters last week that a raid in his city was unconstitutional.
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RAS BARAKA: Some ICE agents raided a business in our city without a warrant. We believe that there were three people who they say were undocumented that they detained, but they also detained folks that were, in fact, citizens.
FADEL: John Sandweg served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, during the second Obama administration. He's a partner now in the law firm Nixon Peabody, where he leads the Cross-Border Risks team. Good morning. Thank you for being on the program.
JOHN SANDWEG: Yeah, my pleasure.
FADEL: So in your experience as a former ICE director, if a migrant loses the chance to plead their case in an immigration court, how will this support President Trump's goals of deporting en masse people without documentation?
SANDWEG: Sure. Probably the biggest challenge he faces to executing a mass deportation plan is the backlogs in our immigration courts. Most of the migrants who have been present in the United States cannot be deported unless and until an immigration judge issues a final order of removal. The challenge has been over the last, you know, eight years, we've had these massive numbers of asylum cases that have added to the backlogs in the immigration courts, creating more than 3 million cases for 900 judges.
I mean, kind of planning this, you could tell that they were looking at, how do we get around the immigration courts entirely? And he's done that by labeling this a foreign invasion, which I think he hopes will allow him to use the Alien Enemies Act.
FADEL: Well, that's a wartime authority, and the U.S. is not at war. What's the argument to invoke this?
SANDWEG: You know, again, he's characterizing this as an invasion. So he's trying to draw on the military authorities, which would then give him his unilateral discretion as commander in chief to say, we're going to bypass these courts entirely, allowing us to fast-track the deportation.
FADEL: Who are the likely targets of these raids?
SANDWEG: Well, the problem is this - we don't - you know, he's saying they're going to focus on criminals. They're saying the focus is going to be on individuals that pose a threat to public safety. But the reality is there just aren't enough of those individuals in this country. So I think as this thing goes forward and we start filling, you know, the hundreds of thousands of deportations he's looking for, we're going to start drawing on the population that's been here a long time. And all the demographics suggest that most migrants living in this country for more than 10 years are the undocumented. There are 4.4 million mixed-status families.
FADEL: Four point four million mixed-status families.
SANDWEG: That is U.S. citizen children who have an undocumented parent. And so as you go forward and you start looking to deport hundreds of thousands, you run out of the people who have a nexus to the public safety. You know, ICE - in 2019, ICE arrested only 123,000 people who had any nexus to the criminal justice system. So what happens as you start doing these worksite raids, you start looking for people who are undocumented in this country. You just run out of those targets that have the nexus to the criminal justice system or who pose a threat to public safety.
What you start getting are these people who've been in this country a long time, who have developed ties to this country, who started, you know, had married U.S. citizen spouses or had U.S. citizen children. You just - again, there's just not enough of a population here to say we're going to do a mass deportation and focus exclusively on the criminal population.
FADEL: What about capacity? I mean, does ICE have the capacity and the funding to carry out these mass deportations?
SANDWEG: Historically, ICE only has the capacity to remove about 250,000 people from the interior of the United States. So what the president has done here is drawn on the full resources of the federal government in order to handle this, right? So by declaring it a foreign invasion allows him to tap into military resources. We saw that this weekend with the military flights, which boost ICE's transportation capacity. He's also directed the Department of Defense to bolster detention space inside military bases. ICE is funded to detain about 40,000 migrants on a given day. This would increase potentially. I mean, we'll see what he's planning on doing, but dramatically ICE's detention capacity.
And then the arrest capacity. You know, ICE has the - you know, can arrest traditionally about 150 to 200,000 migrants in the interior of the United States annually. So the president has directed the Department of Justice, you know, deputizing all the federal agents - ATF, DEA, the FBI - to also bolster that arrest capacity. I expect in the next couple of weeks, we're going to see a number of state and local authorities, you know, sheriff's offices, maybe police departments also start getting the authority to arrest migrants as well. So you can see, you know, he's leveraging the entire resources of the federal government in order to make mass deportation a reality.
FADEL: John Sandweg was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the second Obama administration. Thank you for your time.
SANDWEG: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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