In his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to conduct a mass deportation of more than 13 million immigrants in the country illegally. In some campaign speeches, the number bounced from 13 million to 15 million to 20 million. It would be “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he said.

Trump has promised to be far more aggressive in a second term, emboldened by close advisers, like Stephen Miller, to launch a “shock-and-awe blitz” of executive orders and actions that will target millions of immigrants and their families and threaten the freedom and security of everyone in the United States. “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told The New York Times in November 2023. Former senior Trump officials helped write Project 2025, a detailed plan to overhaul federal agencies that includes more than 175 immigration actions.

So, how’s that going? Not so great. Reuters reported that, so far, Trump has been deporting people at a slower rate than Joe Biden did last year. I understand this is because there have been fewer people crossing at the border. But Big Bad Trump was promising to deport millions of people already here, wasn’t he?

And he must have anticipated some pretty impressive deportations right off the bat. That’s why one of the first things he did was arrange to have ginormous military aircraft carrying all these alleged terrorists and criminals out of the country. That would make for some great television, right? Except that I understand a lot of these aircraft were taking off half-empty, and the cost was out of control. So on March 1 the Administration quietly went back to using chartered commercial planes, as previous administrations have done.

And then there were the big plans to house 30,000 or so badass migrants in a tent city at Guantánamo Bay. But construction of the tent city was soon halted, and the 300 or so migrants who were sent there were all sent back by March 11. Possibly somebody has calculated how much money went down the drain in that operation. It’s not clear to me if any migrants are there now.

I’ve seen various estimates of how many people Trump has deported so far, but he’s no where close to his first million deportees. He’s probably no where close to his first 100,000 deportees. He probably hasn’t hit 50,000 yet. Nobody knew it was so hard to round up people and deport them! But, hey, if you don’t have to go through the due process thing, it could get a lot easier. So Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 so he can do an end-run around due process and speed up deportations. Never mind that the Alien Enemies Act only applies to times of declared war with a foreign country or invasion by a foreign country. He can pretend a criminal gang amounts to the same thing. And he finally got some impressive video footage, of men shackled and frog-walked, their heads down so we can’t see their faces. Trump must have been happy about that. Finally some decent television!

And it turns out that any Latino man with tattoos can be identified as a “gang member.” Convenient. It is being reported in multiple sources that at least some of the men sent to El Salvador had no connection to gangs.  It’s all about the optics, see. One Latino man is as good as another, for the cameras.

(update) The Associated Press:

Franco Caraballo called his wife Friday night, crying and panicked. Hours earlier, the 26-year-old barber and dozens of other Venezuelan migrants held at a federal detention facility in Texas were dressed in white clothes, handcuffed and taken onto a plane. He had no idea where he was going.

Twenty-four hours later, Caraballo’s name disappeared from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee locator.

On Monday, his wife, Johanny Sánchez, learned Caraballo was among the more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants flown over the weekend to El Salvador, where they are now held in a maximum-security prison after being accused by the Trump administration of belonging to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.

Sánchez insists her husband isn’t a gang member. She struggles even to find logic in the accusation. 

Trump also has targeted another group of Latinos who should be easy to identify and deport. The Associated Press:

The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that it will revoke legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, setting them up for potential deportation in about a month.

The order applies to about 532,000 people from the four countries who came to the United States since October 2022. They arrived with financial sponsors and were given two-year permits to live and work in the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said they will lose their legal status on April 24, or 30 days after the publication of the notice in the Federal Register.

The new policy impacts people who are already in the U.S. and who came under the humanitarian parole program. It follows an earlier Trump administration decision to end what it called the “broad abuse” of the humanitarian parole, a long-standing legal tool presidents have used to allow people from countries where there’s war or political instability to enter and temporarily live in the U.S.

In the past they would have been able to apply for asylum or other visas to stay longer, but the Trump Administration isn’t allowing that. Any Latino in the country legally as part of the parole program must now leave. Trump also is considering stripping the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians in the U.S. That would get Trump closer to his first million. I’ve seen no reporting saying that the people here as part of the parole program are criminals or causing trouble of any sort. They’re foreigners, and they’re handy. Low-hanging fruit, as they say.

But wait … Trump says he didn’t sign the proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move.

“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.

The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court on Friday that the proclamation was “signed in the dark” of night and that migrants were hurried onto planes.

“We want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”

The proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act appears in the Federal Register with Trump’s signature at the bottom.

White House communications director Steven Cheung explained that “obviously” Trump was saying he didn’t sign the original bill into law back in 1798. Sure he was. Either his dementia is kicking up a notch, or he’s become aware the use of the law is creating one messy fight with the courts, and he’s preparing to blame Rubio for it. Or both.

Also, in spite of there being fewer border crossings, thousands of federal agents have been diverted from their usual crime fighting activities to stand guard at the border.

Federal agents who usually hunt down child abusers are now cracking down on immigrants who live in the U.S. illegally.

Homeland Security investigators who specialize in money laundering are raiding restaurants and other small businesses looking for immigrants who aren’t authorized to work.

Agents who pursue drug traffickers and tax fraud are being reassigned to enforce immigration law.

As U.S. President Donald Trump pledges to deport “millions and millions” of “criminal aliens,” thousands of federal law enforcement officials from multiple agencies are being enlisted to take on new work as immigration enforcers, pulling crime-fighting resources away on other areas ? from drug trafficking and terrorism to sexual abuse and fraud.

So, expect a rise in the crime rates in the coming months. But the perpetrators will likely be in the U.S. legally, so that makes it okay.

Update: More low-hanging fruit, or more accurately fruit forced to hang lower:

The IRS is nearing a data-sharing agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would allow immigration officials to use tax data to support the Trump administration’s deportation agenda, two sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

After weeks of negotiations, administration officials are close to reaching an agreement that would enable ICE officials to submit names and addresses of suspected immigrants lacking legal status for the IRS to check against its confidential databases….

…The use of sensitive taxpayer information to further the Trump administration’s immigration policies has alarmed career officials within the IRS.

Section 6103 of the federal tax code requires the IRS to keep individual taxpayer information confidential with certain limited exceptions, which includes law enforcement agencies “for investigation and prosecution of non-tax criminal laws” with approval from a court, according to the agency’s website.

The IRS has allowed immigrants without legal status to file income tax returns with individual tax numbers, or ITINs. These immigrants contributed $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes using borrowed or fraudulent Social Security numbers, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Note that they pay into Social Security but cannot collect benefits without a legitimate Social Security number. And if they’re paying into Social Security they are probably working “real” jobs, right? How about making it easier for people who are not criminals to become legitimately documented, instead of kidnapping and deporting them?