KPBS Border Reporter Gustavo Solis hosted Adam Isacson from the Washington Office on Latin America for a brief conversation about the current state of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation. They cut through the political spin to give a clear sense of what is really happening on the ground. Isaacson mentioned resource limits that are currently blocking mass deportation efforts and how Republicans plan to overcome those obstacles.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I want to start with mass deportations. Are they happening? Are they not happening? I know the Trump administration made a big deal of publicizing these arrests, but I'm not sure whether those arrests have led to an increase in deportations.
Isacson: There's definitely increased deportations around the country. But ultimately ICE, this civilian agency with 5,500 people nationwide devoted to removing people, is still working off a 2024 budget that was approved when Joe Biden was president, and the Democrats were in the Senate. That's their level of personnel. That's their level of detention capacity. So, they haven't been able to just create more out of nothing.
They're being more aggressive. They're putting out a lot of videos and a lot of tough talk, and they're probably scaring a lot of people, but the numbers show only a modest increase so far in the number of arrests and deportations. That's probably going to change, but for now, they don't have the resources to do much, and Donald Trump is apparently so angry about it that they just reassigned the acting ICE Director away from his job.
President Trump is trying to get creative. Deportation flights to Guantanamo Bay, sending migrants to Panama. That's something I've never seen before. How significant are these shifts, and are they moving the needle?
Isacson: The Trump administration, sort of with Stephen Miller in the White House, did try to pioneer this idea of sending migrants to other countries. The famous Remain in Mexico program of 2019, 2020 and Title 42 the pandemic. But that was mainly Mexico.
But now, right off the bat, they're making a real point of sending migrants to other countries. And sending migrants who, in general, are hard to deport, directly to those countries. But the numbers are not huge.
They sent a total of 177 people to Guantanamo, and then two and a half weeks later to Venezuela, which is — that doesn't even fit a jumbo jet. They sent 200 people to Costa Rica and 300 people to Panama. People who are from mostly Asia and a couple of African and Eastern European countries who are also hard to deport to, but with a promise to actually pay the cost of deporting them then to their home countries from Panama. So, it's actually even more expensive than just putting them on plane to Beijing or something like that.
A lot of this seems to be using relatively small numbers of people. But broadcasting it widely and trying to put fear into the migrant community as they ramp up what would be the larger mass deportations.
You mentioned in your report last week that Congress is considering $175 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, I think you mentioned it would more than double the agency's current budget. Do you have any idea of how that money could be spent? Would Congress actually approve something like this?
Isacson: We're still waiting for details. They're looking for a bill that they can concoct that's just a whole bunch of new spending, but without needing a single Democratic vote to do it. And so, they start with what's called a budget resolution. The Senate narrowly passed one the week after Valentine's Day, and then the house just did one two days ago. They're not matching. The House, one gives about $90 billion to the Department of Homeland Security. The Senate, one gives about $175 billion.
We don't know where they're going to end up, whether it's between one or the other. But just for perspective, the annual budget of Homeland Security, which is not just border stuff and ICE, it's also Secret Service and the Coast Guard and TSA and FEMA, is $105 billion a year.
So, if you're going to dump $175 billion there with the idea of it being for border controls and mass deportation, that is just a huge increase. It's about seven or eight times the budget of Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol right there. What do they want to do with this? There's no detail yet. They've only passed a skeleton this budget resolution, and I think they're still negotiating among themselves how they would spend it, but there will be no Democrats involved in that discussion.
Before we wrap up, what's one thing you wish people understood more about immigration right now?
Isacson: I wish they knew how easy it would be to make our asylum system work. The big increase of immigration during the Biden years was at least two-thirds asylum seekers.
And the way the discussion moved was, ‘How do we stop these people from coming the United States to ask for protection?’ not 'why do we only have 700 immigration judges to judge all these cases, and why is there this backlog that goes back so people are here for six, seven years for a decision that should only take a few months?'
It was basically an administrative problem, but we ended up making it turn into a ‘crisis,’ and finding a way to just block people. Our lack of understanding of this really had a lot to do with the 2024 election outcome.
Yeah, I think that's a good point. A lot of the focus was on the images of mass migration and enforcement. But not so much looking under the hood to see the system that's in place.
Isacson: And it's hard to explain to people, but you know, if somebody comes here says, ‘I fear going back to my country,’ but doesn't really have to even prove it until 2029 and they're here. In the meantime, everybody's on cell phones now. Everybody hears that this is a thing you can do now.
If we had enough judges, enough asylum officers, enough attorneys and alternative detention programs — if we had all of that so that most people could get a fair decision within a year, that would not be the same draw. And that would, in a peaceful and fair way, have solved this quote, unquote problem of so many asylum seekers. But instead, it was just ‘how do we treat these people like criminals?’ And I don't know how we get away from that, frankly.
