How Donald Trump's plan to deport migrants might work

Her 11-month-old son, Abdías, swaddled on her back, Jimena Casas was hawking chopped mango, grapes and watermelon recently at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. An Ecuadorian immigrant, Casas says she migrated to the United States to escape murderous gangsters who extorted her.

Nearby, Mohammed Ndiya, who is from Senegal, had a wheeled cart he filled with empty cans and bottles, picked from the trash, to cash in for the deposit, 5 cents each. He says his homeland has dangerous and discriminatory conditions.

To seek asylum and stay in the United States, both Casas, 26, and Ndiya, 31, readily provided intricate, personal information to the government. Both immigrants routinely send money back to family abroad. And both are like millions of immigrants at risk of being subject to what President-elect Donald Trump has promised would be "the largest deportation operation in American history." Massive camps would hold those accused of being in the United States illegally, Trump has said.

"Ya know, getting them out will be a bloody story," Trump said in September at a rally in Wisconsin. "Should have never been allowed to come into our country."

Such an operation would have profound effects on immigrants and the communities in which they work, changing not only the immigrants’ lives but also the economy and the workforce.

The operation to deport millions will begin on Day One of the new administration, campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Nov. 6.

Earlier this year, the acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Patrick J. Lechleitner, said a mass deportation operation would pose a vast logistic and financial challenge, but Trump on Nov. 7 told NBC News there’s no "price tag" for the plan and the country has "no choice" but to execute it no matter the cost. 

Using migrants’ information against them

In pursuing the operation, information immigrants provided on government forms — for asylum, for work permits, for temporary legal permission to stay — can be tapped, according to Ava Ayers, an associate professor at Albany Law School.

"Generally speaking, if the federal government’s got it, the federal government can use it, and certainly you would expect that under a Trump administration, there would be aggressive efforts to use whatever data the federal government has," said Ayers, who litigated high-profile cases for New York State involving immigration law and states’ rights.

Still, while most data can be used, it’s not absolute, Ayers said. For example, it’s less likely immigration enforcers could access personal information provided to get health care or to apply for the Obama-era program known as DACA, which protected from deportation those who were illegally brought as children to the U.S.

Since spring 2022, at least 223,000 foreign migrants have come to New York City, according to Mayor Eric Adams’ spokeswoman Liz Garcia. Some, though not all, have been bused north by red state governors in protest of Biden administration border policies. The influx has strained the municipal budget, which until recently had to fund a virtually unlimited right to shelter under a decades-old mandate to provide room and board to anyone in need. 

Of the migrants who have been processed by the city during that wave, at least 82,980 federal applications have been filed, including for asylum, Temporary Protected Status and work permits, according to Garcia. Each application could cover multiple migrants. (It's unclear how many have been granted.)

There are no authoritative headcounts of who is in the United States illegally and where, but there are rough estimates.

About 476,000 of the city’s 8.3 million population is estimated to be living illegally in the United States. On Long Island, that number is at least about 112,000. Nationally, it’s about 11.7 million.

Newsday has reported that most migrants aren’t likely to formally seek asylum, and due to the high bar long set in American law for achieving asylum, those who do apply are nevertheless unlikely to be granted it. Being poor and wanting a better life isn’t a basis for asylum. An unknown number are expected to remain illegally anyway in the U.S.

Trump has said he’d use the National Guard and law enforcement agencies to round up immigrants and invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to restrict, detain or deport any noncitizen from an enemy nation. The act can be used against anyone 14 or older during a "declared war¨ — generally, by Congress — or a foreign government undertaking or threatening "any invasion or predatory incursion." Presidents invoked the act during the War of 1812, and World Wars I and II.

Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James say they are planning to protect New York's immigrants. 

Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel with the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, a left-leaning group that opposes the use of the Alien Enemies Act, said using the act to cover immigration would constitute an abuse, but it’s unclear whether courts would step in to stop Trump from using it, she said. The act’s constitutionality was last challenged, and upheld, in 1948 by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court over the past decades has established more robust equal protection and due process guarantees, she said.

A one-time deportation plan could conservatively cost at least an estimated $315 billion, according to the American Immigration Council, which seeks a "nation where immigrants are embraced."

Vice President-elect JD Vance has likened Trump’s plan to eating "a really big sandwich."

The first "bite," he said, campaigning at a Pennsylvania VFW post, would be of "the first million who are the most violent criminals." 

"You take the first bite, and then you take the second bite, and then you take the third bite," Vance said in August.

Of 22.8 million noncitizens in the U.S., there were about 662,566 as of July with criminal histories, including those who entered the U.S. over the past 40 years or more, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year told a congressman. Some are detained; most are not. About 15,000 are arrests or convictions for homicides; 128,000 are for traffic offenses.

Even migrants who cross illegally into the U.S. provide lots of data to the government. For some, it starts at the border, and earlier, but then the details provided get more intricate when filling out forms to try to stay in the U.S. legally.

For instance, the I-589 — the asylum application — seeks not only name, current and past addresses (both physical and mailing), phone numbers, nationality and country of origin, but also particulars about spouses, children, schooling and employers. Other forms additionally seek height, weight, eye color, hair color and more.

Then there is a suite of forms migrants have completed with local governments that could, if the information isn’t kept confidential, be used against them. Data is collected for shelter placements, municipal ID cards, social services and more.

Shielding New York’s migrants

New York City’s efforts to shield the population from federal immigration enforcement dates back decades, to Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s. Efforts ramped up substantially during the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, who presided over a broad expansion.

Foremost on his mind when crafting those laws and policies, de Blasio told Newsday, was the possibility that a presidency unfavorable to the immigrant population could rise to power and seek to access municipal records to facilitate deportation.

During de Blasio’s time in office, city lawyers successfully stopped the Trump administration from cutting off certain public safety funding due to sanctuary city laws.

Now, with the specter of Trump’s immigration promises, de Blasio said, localities like New York now should be figuring out what they’ll do if Trump follows through on his plan.

"Should jurisdictions prepare and be ready to fight incursions on their rights? 100%," he said.

In the aftermath of Trump’s election, Adams has said the city has plans to protect migrants from the forthcoming administration’s policies, though he has refused to be specific. Adams’ immigrant affairs commissioner, Manny Castro, said in Spanish: "This will continue to be a sanctuary city and that we will be protecting their information and will not be following the instructions of the federal government in cases of mass deportations."

A so-called sanctuary city is a jurisdiction, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, that typically won't cooperate with immigration enforcement despite what federal law says about who is and who isn't allowed to be in the U.S.

Fears a federal administration unfavorable to immigrants would harness information that migrants themselves provided was a key driving factor in creating policies a decade ago governing the city’s municipal ID card program, said former City Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who helped negotiate the law creating the program.

Initially, Menchaca said in an interview, records about the underlying documents that applicants provided, such as a passport that would reveal a person’s home country, were retained for just three years and then destroyed. Now those records are destroyed immediately after verification.

But Menchaca said he’s concerned that data provided by the city to third-party contractors won’t be shielded from federal access.

The city cooperates with immigration enforcement only under rare circumstances. So far, this year, the city complied 11 times; a decade ago, the number was thousands. The first Trump administration tried and failed to force sanctuary city jurisdictions like New York to cooperate with more expansive efforts to conduct immigration enforcement, such as through data sharing.

But, within certain constitutional limits, that could change depending on a cooperative Congress, and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Ayers said. Trump reportedly wants to try again. 

The border czar Trump plans to appoint, Thomas Homan, told Fox News the deportation plan would be carried out with or without sanctuary cities’ help. He’d just send extra federal agents into those jurisdictions, particularly to nab criminal immigrants. 

"If they’re not willing to help, then get the hell out the way, cause ICE is going to do their job," he said. 

Homan said there would not be "a massive sweep of neighborhoods," but he cautioned: "If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem."

Homan also said the country would restart a practice stopped by the Biden administration: mass workplace raids.

In a series of raids in 2019, hundreds of immigration agents with guns drawn stormed into poultry processing plants across central Mississippi. The doors were shut. Production lines stopped. Some 700 workers were put onto buses and driven to an airplane hangar. It's unclear what happened to the workers, but lawyers who are involved in representing them estimate that about 230 were deported. 

A year earlier, agents raided an upstate New York dairy farm, arresting a worker suspected of living in the U.S. illegally. The owner said agents didn't identify themselves, refused to provide a warrant when asked, and handcuffed him when he started recording.

There are about 600 farms on Long Island, most in Suffolk County, according the Long Island Farm Bureau. Although an Island-specific breakdown isn’t readily available, about half of all hired crop farmworkers nationwide "lack legal immigration status," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. 

Local response to Trump's plan

Local jurisdictions also could choose to cooperate on their own — or not.

Mike Martino, a spokesman for Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine, said the county wouldn’t cooperate if the feds sought access to information such as addresses of Suffolk residents for the purpose of immigration enforcement. Martino said the county would change its stance if Congress passes a law requiring cooperation.

Martino said he couldn’t say if the county would challenge the law.

Christopher Boyle, a spokesman for Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, said: "Nassau County is not a sanctuary county. There is no sanctuary program for illegal migrants in this county."

There is a statewide task force examining how to resist Trump’s plans, including on immigration, but Hochul said, "We are not a sanctuary state."

Vance has proposed making it harder for migrants to send earned-in-America money back home, one of the reasons they work in the U.S. in the first place.

Vance wants to tax remittances — the process of sending money to foreign countries — which has been proposed in the past by Republicans in Congress but has failed to pass.

Taxing remittances, Vance said, would make it "harder for them to work" and lead "a lot of them" to "actually leave the country willingly."

Andrew Arthur, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks stricter immigration enforcement, said he believes that depending on how it’s structured, a tax on remittances would recalibrate the incentives for working illegally.

"It’s simply going to change the labor analysis," he said, adding: "It’s going to mean less money that you’re going to be able to send home ... It’s definitely going to diminish the incentives to come here to work."

Proposals have included taxes ranging from 1% to 10% or beyond, he said. In Oklahoma, the only state with the remittance tax, he said, it’s 1%.

Paul M. Vaaler, a University of Minnesota professor who studies how migrants remit money, said he believes that migrants would continue to work at existing rates regardless of any tax on remittances, and that making it harder to use the formal remittance system would shift transfers to means that are harder to track and tax. Those informal systems, he said, often take a bigger cut than banks and other official institutions. 

"It almost certainly will be a futile exercise because it will result in individuals simply moving, changing the way that they remit money and cost them more to do it, and so it's going to go to other informal players," he said.

Vaaler predicted that curbing remittances could further destabilize poor countries and motivate even more illegal immigration to the U.S. 

Last year, remittances to developing countries topped $600 billion worldwide, tens of billions of which come from those living in the U.S., he said.

Remittances are how immigrants like Jimena Casas and Mohammed Ndiya send money home.

"My family is over there: my father, my wife and my children. They need medications," Ndiya said in French. He lives in Brooklyn at a shelter.

Casas, who now lives in Manhattan, sends small amounts back to Ecuador to help her family, selling cups of fruit out of a shopping cart to tourists, office workers and other passersby. 

"Sometimes I send $100 or sometimes $50," she said in Spanish. She added: "And to get here, you get into debt ... and by the time you arrive, you come with a lot of debts and a lot of worries."

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.