The Deportation Rationale

President Trump’s promised immigration crackdown is here. Over the past two weeks, his administration has pushed against the limits of executive power — and surpassed them, critics say — to kick more people out of the country.

The administration has readied two facilities in Texas to again detain immigrant families, including children, my colleagues Jazmine Ulloa and Miriam Jordan reported yesterday. It invoked an arcane law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador, despite a judge’s order. It deported a kidney transplant expert who works at Brown University, also despite a judge’s order. It detained a green-card-holding leader of last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Presidents have not traditionally treated illegal immigration as a national security issue, but Trump says migrants pose a threat. He claims without evidence that other countries have deliberately emptied their prisons and asylums to fuel an “invasion” of the United States.

Today’s newsletter examines the new rationale for the crackdown — and the way it is taking shape.

Stretching powers

In each of the examples above, the Trump administration has gone further, or plans to go further, than previous administrations felt they could:

• Family detention: The administration has indicated that it will contest a 20-day limit on how long child migrants can be detained. Trump’s allies have long decried such limits as imposing a “catch and release” policy that forces the government to free unauthorized migrants.

• Venezuelan deportations: To evict migrants without a hearing, the administration cited a wartime law used most recently to intern Japanese Americans during World War II. (The United States is not at war with Venezuela.) It dispatched planeloads of migrants over the weekend despite a court order that tried to stop the deportations. White House officials argue that a judge can’t restrict the president’s national security powers, and even if one could, the order came too late. They stuck to those arguments in a court hearing.

• The nephrologist’s deportation: The government deported Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese kidney transplant expert at Brown University, over the weekend. She had a valid visa, and a court tried to block the move. The administration said that it deported her because she attended a Hezbollah leader’s funeral during a trip to Lebanon.

• The student activists: The administration detained Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests, this month. Another student activist at Columbia, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled to Canada after immigration agents revoked her visa and showed up at her home. Supporters of Khalil and Srinivasan argue that the First Amendment protects their right to protest. But the Trump administration counters that immigrants, particularly those it deems national security threats, do not enjoy the full freedom of speech. It suggests that the activists supported a designated terrorist group, Hamas. (Read more about Khalil’s story and why he was targeted.)

• A proposed revival for the travel ban: During his first term, Trump repeatedly tried to ban visitors from mostly Muslim countries, citing the threat of terrorism. The courts blocked the first two attempts. But the Supreme Court eventually allowed a ban on eight countries, six of them predominantly Muslim, to remain. Last week, my colleagues Charlie Savage and Ken Bensinger reported on a plan to bring back the ban — and grow it to cover 43 countries.

In some ways, these examples continue a longstanding executive tradition: Presidents often use national security concerns to expand their powers. George W. Bush, for example, pointed to worries about another attack like Sept. 11 to detain and torture people without trial, drawing criticism from civil rights advocates.

Preparing for more

The extraordinary measures are needed to deliver on a campaign pledge, Trump says. He has struggled to execute the mass deportations he promised. In fact, he has deported migrants at a lower rate than Joe Biden did, as this chart shows:

(The Times broke down what the data shows about Trump’s deportation efforts so far here.)

Some of that failure is a result of the administration’s success. Fewer people are crossing the border illegally, leaving fewer people to ship back. But Trump vowed to deport not just recent arrivals but also those who’ve been in the country for months or years. He has so far failed to kick out much of that second population, which enjoys stronger legal protections, such as rights to specific immigration court hearings, than people caught at the border do.