The NPR Politics Podcast - How The Trump Administration Is Amping Up Immigrant Deportations

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

The big tax and spending bill President Trump signed into law earlier this month included $75 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Supreme Court recently told the administration it could deport people to countries with which they have no ties. We discuss these and other developments that are helping the president accelerate deportation efforts.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, immigration policy correspondent Ximena Bustillo, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On this week's Wild Card podcast, comedian Mark Maron reflects on being content-ish. I can honestly say there's never been a better time in my life. And I'm not even sure this one is that great. I'm Rachel Martin. Mark Maron's on Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. where cards control the conversation. O-H-O-K-O-Z-A-I-M-S We are the Oppenheims at the Osaka World Expo in 2025. It is 90 degrees and very humid.

You are listening to the NPR Politics Podcast, recorded at 1-22-PM Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday, July 16th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll still be in the hot summer sun in Japan enjoying all of the features of the Expo including every single country's pavilion studying the politics of each country around the world. Sayonara! Enjoy the show! Oh that was so cute. I loved going to expos as a kid. It is also 90 degrees and humid here.

Yeah, but we're not in Japan. I feel like I'm in a rainforest. I wish I was in a rainforest. Yeah, exactly. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Himena Bustio, and I cover immigration policy. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.

Today on the show, we are catching up on a number of recent immigration developments as President Trump aims to keep his promise of mass deportations. But first, I just want to start with a level set, Hemenna. What are the numbers looking like right now? Border crossings, detentions, deportations? So the latest figures from Customs and Border Protection show that in June there were just over 9,000 encounters at the southwest border. And that is continuing the downward trend of how many people are crossing the border

between ports of entry that Customs and Border Protection is needing to apprehend, that's been a really big talking point for the administration that those numbers are at record lows. Now, the Department of Homeland Security has also said that 57,800 people are being held in immigration detention. And that is at higher levels than we saw during the Biden administration

and even to kick off the start of the second Trump administration. You see DHS only has space for about 41,000 people in detention. And we've really seen them max out that capacity for several months now. OK, that is very helpful context. Mara, do you have any sense of what this means for

the president's promise to have mass deportations? Well, he promised mass deportations. He promised the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history. But he's also suggested that there would be some exceptions made for the agriculture field and hotels and restaurants that maybe there wouldn't be raids on those kinds of workplaces. That hasn't happened, although he has suggested that. And the other promise he made early on was that he was gonna focus on lawbreakers, on criminals.

The idea unsupported by evidence that the United States is the subject of an invasion of criminals from other countries is something that has been part and parcel of Trump's political message since he rode down the Golden Escalator. But now his deportations have gone way beyond that. 72% of the people who've been rounded up have no criminal convictions. So his promises have gone on the one hand unfulfilled and on the other, they have been surpassed. Okay, can we turn now to the enforcement side of the ledger?

You know, that big tax and spending law that President Trump signed earlier this month included about $75 billion for immigration and customs enforcement, known as ICE. So what is that money going to be used for? So part of that money for ICE is specifically going to immigration detention centers. So to be able to really increase that capacity to accommodate for the fact that they have maxed out what they've been allowed to fill so far in just the first few months of the

administration. The other chunk of that money is going to go to specifically hire more ICE personnel. So Immigration and Customs Enforcement is already one of the smallest divisions out of those that are tasked with doing immigration arrests. The number of people who are in that division tasked to carry out those arrests, the start of the administration was only about 6,000.

So it's a really small group and they need more people in order to be able to carry out more arrests. This is one of the reasons why we've seen so many other police forces, security forces, out of DOJ, out of IRS, out of some of these other alphabet soup agencies be brought in to assist ICE with this mission. And my understanding is this infusion of cash makes ICE the highest funded federal law enforcement

agency. It is pretty significant immediate funding, levels that have not been seen in recent years. Historically, the concern from different administrations, Democrats and Republicans, is that ICE and DHS are particularly underfunded. And so this boost of money is exactly what this administration and even other administrations have asked for in the past. Right. So you've been reporting on another new development, which is sort of the other side of the coin here, that the Trump administration has actually been firing immigration judges. And that seems

sort of counterintuitive for an administration that wants to speed up deportation proceedings and get people out of the country. So what do you know about who's being fired and why? So what we have seen when it comes to the different parts of the federal government that are tasked with enforcing immigration laws is that most of them were not allowed to take that fork in the road. That was the voluntary push to get people to leave the federal government, reduce the size of the federal workforce at the start of the year. Now, who was allowed to take it is the immigration judges who work out of the Department of Justice. And this is creating almost a bottleneck. So ICE will go out, they'll arrest someone, and then when they arrest them,

that person may get the opportunity to go into the immigration court system. The more people that ICE arrests, the more people that end up in that immigration court system. That immigration court system is already at a nearly 4 million case backlog. And we've at this point lost about 100 judges. Some of them have taken the fork in the road, but down about 100 judges out of an original 700.

So that's only increasing the backlog of cases that the Trump administration has said they want to alleviate. There have been directives from leadership in the courts to say judges need to go faster, that they're not managing their case dockets well enough. The backlog is too big, and yet we're seeing judges get dismissed. But kind of pivoting back to that tax spending bill that you mentioned earlier, Congress did mandate the Trump administration to hire more judges. They got about $3 billion to be hiring more judges as opposed to letting them go. So questions remain about how those positions will get backfilled, if at all, now that they actually have the money to do so.

So is there an end run? Like what's the plan? That's a really good question. I mean, what we have seen is that the administration is looking to do two main things. The first is increase the amount of people who could be subject to a thing called expedited removal, which is putting people in a deportation process that means they don't necessarily have the right to see a judge. Now, one thing that they're doing is ICE

officials are going to immigration court where people are coming for their court hearings or even mandated check-ins. And when they go in, particularly for a court hearing, ICE officers are motioning to dismiss the cases. But when that happens, they go to walk out and they're immediately re-arrested. And it's almost as if their case completely starts from scratch. So they're re-arrested, they're put in detention, and they're moved to be quickly deported and removed again without getting their chance to actually have their day in court, even if they were trying to have that process to begin with. The second way is, you know, putting people through through mandatory detention.

There's a recent memo coming out of the Department of Homeland Security saying that those who entered the country illegally are subject to mandatory detention. They don't get the chance to be outside of a detention center while their cases are pursuing. And several immigration lawyers have argued that this is a tactic to get people to be in a very miserable condition away from their families, often crowded conditions, and then they say

they want to leave and maybe self-deport or take a voluntary departure out. All right, well, we are going to take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. Most people have some albums, some movies, some book from when they were young that helped shape how they came to see the world. That's no less true for the Code Switch crew. It's still really touching and I cried rereading it. So there. Listen as we revisit some of our old faves on Code Switch from NPR or wherever you get your podcast. which from NPR or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. The administration got clearance from the Supreme Court

to deport immigrants to so-called third countries, places where they do not have ties. So what's happening there? We're seeing the Trump administration only continue to increase this use. So that original Supreme Court case related to eight men who were going to be deported to South Sudan. In the middle of that deportation, a federal district judge

stopped that deportation. They ended up in the African nation of Djibouti on a military base for several weeks while the Supreme Court came to its decision. I've been told that the men ended up being taken to South Sudan once the Supreme Court allowed for this to go through. Now the Supreme Court also cleared the deck on any injunction in any decision that had been put in place, meaning that the federal government is able to swiftly remove people to these third countries without much notice, much time to secure a lawyer, much time to, you know, be able to speak out and say that you fear persecution being taken to that specific country. Those men are in South Sudan. Their families haven't really heard from them in about a week. Neither have their lawyers. Now, what we've seen this week is a continuation of that policy.

So the Trump administration has sent five men to Eswatini, another country in Africa, where the five deportees are currently housed in correctional facilities in what the Eswatini government calls isolated units. The government put out a statement saying that they're going to work with the United States to collaborate with the International Organization for Migration to facilitate the transit of these deportees to their countries of origin. But a lot of questions remain about who is actually overseeing these deportees? Are they in US custody? Are they in custody solely of these other governments?

Are people going to be put in correctional facilities anytime they're taken to a third party country? I mean, there just continues to be more questions about how the Trump administration plans to utilize this policy. Okay, Mara, let's talk about politics. Do you have a sense of how the public is feeling about the administration's tactics? And also, does that matter? Well, those are the two questions. First of all, how the public is feeling is not dissimilar

to what we saw in President Trump's first term when public support for immigration went up as he pursued hardline anti-immigration policies. So this time we have Gallup with a new poll, 79% of US adults say that immigration is good for the country and immigrants are good for the country and there's tremendous support for a path to citizenship for the dreamers. Those are those people who were brought here without documentation as children and 85% favor giving them a path to citizenship. That's up in the past year. So it seems like this is a reaction

to Trump's hardline immigration policies. Even among Republicans, 59% of Republicans in the Gallup poll said they favored a broad path to citizenship for immigrants living here illegally. The second question you asked, does it matter? Does it have political consequences? That's a really good question. Donald Trump is not running again.

He cares about his base, who are very happy with his immigration policies. I don't think he's thinking about appealing to swing voters, but there are some Republicans in Congress who might get pushback. It hasn't happened yet in a big way, but who might get pushback from their local business communities who are losing employees to these raids.

Okay. So there have been calls for a comprehensive approach, a broader fix for what everyone agrees is a broken system. I think it's pretty clear that the legislation that the president just signed isn't that. No, it's kind of half that. The comprehensive immigration reform, it's been tried in the past. It generally had two components. One, stronger border security and and more immigration judges, a more streamlined system to decide if people should get asylum or not.

And the second part was a path to citizenship for dreamers, for sure, but also possibly for people who've been in this country for 20 or more years paying taxes and living law-abiding lives Congress has gotten close a couple times. They even got close in the first Trump administration There was going to be a deal between the Democrats and Donald Trump on a comprehensive bill But Stephen Miller who is the deputy chief of staff now, but he is kind of the immigration czar, squelched that. And it's hard to see this current MAGA Republican party approving any kind of bill that would provide a path to citizenship for anyone here

without legal documentation. So unlikely, but the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote a really interesting piece that said, immigration reform is a great opportunity for Donald Trump since he has so much credibility with his anti-immigration base that if he did push for a comprehensive bill, including a path to citizenship for the Dreamers,

he could pass it and he would be a real hero and he would cement his support among the Hispanic voters where it has been growing. So there's a lot happening right now with regards to immigration. Do either of you have a sense of what the long-term impact might be of all of these policy actions that are happening right now? Well, I have an easy answer for in the short to medium term. We have a labor crisis in this country, a huge labor shortage,

and this will probably make it worse. And one of the reasons we have this immigration situation is that for years and years, the United States Congress has decided not to pass comprehensive immigration reform, but the employers needed workers. They created a kind of demand push for people to come across the border to fill these jobs.

For me, the money and the regulatory changes are really key because it is completely reshaping the way that agencies like ICE operate, not just with each other, but also with the community and the people that they're trying to go after and arrest. And so, you know, I'm really kind of keeping an eye long term on how this influx of cash, as well as, you know, all the different changes that are being made to allow them to expedite removals or make arrests in new places, will change the way that that agency operates down the line. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there for now. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White

House. I'm Ximena Bustillo and I cover immigration policy. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.