Trump advisers ramp up work on mass deportation push

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. WASHINGTON : Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump are drawing up plans to carry out his mass deportation pledge, including discussing how to pay for it and weighing a national emergency declaration that would allow the incoming administration to repurpose military assets to detain and remove migrants. The behind-the-scenes discussions, which started months before the election and have picked up in the days since Trump’s victory, include policy changes required to increase deportations, according to people working on the presidential transition, members of Congress and others close to the president-elect.

Among the changes: revoking a Biden administration policy directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement not to pursue immigrants in the country illegally who haven’t committed other crimes, and making changes to the immigration court system to speed up cases. Trump’s allies have said they are planning first to focus on immigrants in the country illegally who have received final orders of deportation from an immigration court, of which there are about 1.3 million, as well as those with other criminal convictions or charges.

Trump’s budding deportation plans are still in flux, the president-elect’s advisers said. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the transition, said: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver." Trump has argued that an aggressive deportation effort is necessary to put the country back on course after an estimated eight million migrants entered the U.S.