Obstacles to Trump's Mass Deportation Plan

and financial obstacles. Joining me is an expert in immigration law, Leon Fresco, a partner at Holland and Knight and the former head of the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration. Let's start with his pledge to carry out the largest nass deportations in US history. Just how would he carry that out and what would some of the obstacles be.

There's the first issue, which is identifying people to deport. So how does one do that. There is some belief, and you've heard Tom Homan, who's the person now appointed to lead this operation, was the former ICE director, say in various contexts that this isn't going to just be a grab bag where individuals are simply apprehended for no reason, but that there's going to be a targeted effort here. So the first targeted effort would obviously be criminal non citizens.

So anybody with a criminal record is going to be the number one top priority for removal. So the question is, well, when you apprehend those individuals, where do you put them? There's about forty to forty five thousand beds that are available right now for such a purpose. Obviously, if you're doing the largest deportation program in history, you're going to need a lot more beds. Where are those beds coming from. We've heard the idea that that could be a military basis,

that there would be barrack for that purpose. So fine, you place people in those military barracks, you have them in detention, you put them in detention proceeding, and the question is will there be a place to actually deport those people to when this is all said and done. Will there be countries that are willing to actually accept these individuals? So that's where again, the State Department is

going to have to play in. Secondly, are you going to need to do a whole due process deportation hearing where these hearings are currently backed up by seven years in the immigration court? Or will Trump be able to get away with using what's called the Alien Enemies Act, which is a law that's been around since the late

seventeen hundred which allows deportation without due process. But you have to show that a country is specifically trying to infiltrate the United States with people designed to destabilize the United States. So will that be reviewable in a court of law because courts have said that things like that in the past are political questions that are not reviewable.

Will they be reviewable, and if they are reviewable, will courts actually say that any country people are from is actually doing this on purpose, is actually sending criminal foreign national into the United States for the purpose of destabilizing the country. So all of those are questions that are going to have to be grappled with pretty early on in order to determine whether such an operation could be successful.

So unless you've been living in the middle of the woods as a hermit, ICE will be able to find you if it wants to find you, relatively quickly, So that's sort of a twentieth century concern. At this point, the finding is the easy part. The question is what do you do when you find the person? Where do you literally detain the person and where do you actually deport the person? And that's where the Trump administration is going to have their work cut out for them.

not accept people. Given the country is almost in complete ruins, and there's another hurricane potentially coming there and who knows, and so the country has so destabilized, accepting hundreds of thousands of people is likely not an option there. Venezuela has not accepted recently people to be deported back to Venezuela. Haiti basically has no government they just today fired their prime minister, and the question is what do you do Visa vi Haiti and how do you deport people there.

Nicaragua is another country that doesn't let people get deported back to Nicaragua from the United States. And so those are just some examples, but pretty much any country, if you're going to start doing large numbers of people may start objecting to that as saying, look, you're going to

destabilize our country. Because United States is a big country with three hundred and fifty million people, but countries with a million people, if you suddenly put in fifty thousand deportees who are all criminals, that could lead to quite the de stabilization in those countries. And so they may

do everything possible to try to thwart these deportations. Not to say that the Trump administration will think that that's something to be sympathetic about, but it becomes a challenge if they actually can't deport people to these countries.

of that. But then they talk about the cost of what happens then to the economy, because interestingly, an undocumented person when they're working in the United States is a net positive to the US federal budget because what's happening is they're paying taxes and they're not getting any benefits because they don't qualify for any benefits. And so this is actually something that the Congressional Budget Office talks about

all the time. It's only when people get status and can get benefits that they become potentially a net negative to the budget. But when you remove all these undocumented workers from the economy, you actually create a larger budget deficit hole, and so that's also being counted toward those three hundred billion dollars.

And so that was finally allowed by the Supreme Court as legal in twenty nineteen and was about to be implemented in earnest by the Trump administration until COVID happened, And then that didn't end up happening because what happened was instead of putting the cases in the line, the Trump administration simply just rejected people. And that actually continued into the Biden administration, and, believe it or not, as

happening now. So the remain in Mexico policy will only be needed if the ban that is currently in place, which the Biden administration has in place at the moment, is overturned by the courts. Now it is likely to be overturned by the courts. That case has sort of been slow locked because of the election. I don't think that the people suing wanted to destabilize the border situation right before the election. But now that the election has happened,

that case is back up in the forefront. And if the Biden border policy is enjoined, which is essentially a band nobody can apply for asylum right now who entered I legally into the United States. If that van is taken away by the courts and said that that ban is illegal, that's when the Trump administration will need to use remain in Mexico. And the obstacle there is that Mexico has to agree to do this, and a couple

of things have happened since the last Trump administration. The Supreme Court of Mexico has said that that's not possible and it's not legal. But the question will be what does that mean if Trump threatens Mexico with fifty percent tariffs on their cars unless they do this, does the new president of Mexico, Miss Shinbaum, actually then say, well, we're gonna have to figure something out with our Supreme Court and everything else to make this a possibility, because

we don't want fifty percent tariffs on our cars. So all of these levers are in play. To try to figure out whether remain in Mexico needs to be placed back into place and can it be played back at the place.

And if the war's not over, what is the status of those planes still because they're still not technically being persecuted in Ukraine, they would just be evading a war, and so it's not clear what would happen to those asylum planes. And then with regard to Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, I mean, asylum planes are possible from those countries. But will all those people apply for asylum. One would assume they would just to slow things down. How many

of those will ultimately be meritorious? Will the government place those cases in the front of the line to get them out or will they be placed in the back of a seven and they hear current line? Those are all questions left to be answered.

States illegally, and even restarting construction of the Wall. I've been talking to immigration law expert Leon Fresco about some of the challenges Trump will face both legal, logistical and financial. Leon can Trump just say eh, we're not doing asylum anymore.

in I have every right to ask for asylum. And the question will be whether those cases get prioritized so that they get moved along first, or whether they get placed in the back of the line because they want to keep the border crossing cases first, and these people have already crossed the border, and so that's going to be a very complicated challenge for the Trump administration to try to determine.

the Biden administration. They didn't end up getting resolved during the Trump administration, and so he will have to again try to circumvent the moustrom of these TPS litigation and lawsuits to try to see if he can do it. But if he can do it and allow them to expire, then that's going to be another few hundred thousand people that simply lose their status when that expires. That includes the famous Asians in Springfield, Ohio that were of such

a note during the election. And if all of those folks lose their status again, they'll probably all end up applying for asylum and hoping that they can survive the four years of the Trump administration without their cases being heard. And that's going to be very interesting to see now.

Of course, the Trump administration may try to circumvent that with the Alien Enemies Act, but again will of course allow them to use the Alien Enemies Act for some of these countries where it's clear that those countries probably didn't order a migration for the purposes of destabilizing the

United States. Now, the Trump administration will try as hard as it can to build such a record, but their best hope will be that the court view this as unreviewable political questions that can even be reviewed, in which case, if that happens, even if the Trump administration was wrong about why it invoked the Alien Enemies Act, if an invocation of the Alien Enemies Act can't actually be reviewed as a political question, then it will be able to

place millions of people into deportation quite quickly. Now, again, they will have to be able to execute those orders to these countries. If they decide that, fine, what we'll do is we'll just detain people in the middle of nowhere in military barracks until they get thick enough that they leave on their own. And so these are all potential options that will have to just wait and see how it plays us.

Homeland Security Department in order for that to happen. Probably it will be, there's no doubt, but it's going to require a whole of government approach that we've never seen before. And you know, the real situation that will happen is that as these stories start to get out in the media, it starts to derail the momentum for this especially everyone knows their person that they know that's not one of the bad ones that needs to be deported, but that's

quote unquote one of the good ones. Why is the government going after this person? They should be going after the bad people. But it turns out most of the people won't qualify as the bad people because they'll have one or two people who say no, no, no, no, no, that's my nanny or that's my person who takes care of my parents, my family, et cetera. And it's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out.

dependent upon the taxpayers and that's self sufficient. And so there was a rule that was put in place during the prior Trump administration to really strengthen that and to say if anyone hadn't gotten basically a history of employment in their home country and a history of speaking English, they could be subject to this public charge ground. And so that had actually been allowed by the Supreme Court

until it was rescinded by the Biden administration. So it should be relatively quick for them to put back this public charge ground and to really make it difficult for anybody who doesn't speak English, or has any history at all of getting any kind of government benefits, or is a single person that's completely unemployed and doesn't have a relative, so for instance, there's not some sort of homemaker where

there's another spouse who's making the money. Those people would be fine, but they're just an individual who's one person without a job. All of those people would be subject now to this public charge ground that would not let them get legal status in the United States.

it's been shrunk. So that's number one, and then number two. The courts also have dramatically reduced when injunctive relief is available. So what the courts have been doing is they've been saying injunctive relief is only going to be available on a case by case basis, and there won't be this programmatic nationwide injunction that you can just go and get

in one district court and that'll be it. You'll actually have to go through a process where a bunch of individuals get injunctive relief and then maybe that stops the policy. And so because of that, that's all going to strengthen Trump's hands while he's doing this deportation.

So just for me, a question of whether you agree with the policy that's going to be put in place because Tom Holman, the thing I can say about him is he has always been, under many different presidents, a public servant who salutes the flag, and when people have given him a lawful order, he has executed the lawful order, whether it be prosecutorial discretion or whether it be deportation. Now, while he has gone off on his own as a private citizen, he has taken a very restrictionist talking point.

And so this is what he's being charged to do now, is to lead the largest deportation program in history. To be fair to him and to President Trump, they did campaign on that, so it's not a secret. Anybody who wanted that to be avoided should not have voted for President Trump. But now that President Trump has won and he campaigned on that promise, this is what Tom Holman

is going to be doing now. The one thing I will say is because he comes from Ice and because he has lived this for several decades, he understands the actual challenges from a legal and logistical standpoint in a way that appointing somebody who's a more political person but less of a detail oriented person wouldn't know. And that's why I've heard Tom Holman say things like, look, we're gonna have priorities, We're going to have certain people that we look at first, because at the end of the day,

that's actually how you have to do this. You can't just willy nearly round up millions of people. That's not going to be operationally possible.

happen a lot during the Trump administration. And so the point is when that last happened, which was in two thousand and seven under George W. Bush, that puts such fear in the immigrant community that people stopped going to work,

people were hiding. It was very complicated, and so what I think they're actually trying to accomplish more than anything, is like what you're seeing in all these other areas with foreign policy and with tariffs and where everything else you saw laid down a marker that this is going to be the worst thing you've ever seen. And what you're hoping it does is it incentivizes enough people to self support that you're actually getting banged for the buck

from that. So I think that's what you're gonna see. You are going to see a more robust effort to remove people. But I think at the end of the day, if four hundred thousand people end up getting removed in twenty twenty five. That might be ambitious based on where the infrastructure is now, and so we're not talking about ten million, twenty million, whatever million people we'd be talking about.

But the hope is that if it's done in a way that creates enough nervousness in the community, that individuals will decide that they can't live with this level of nervousness and they would take matters into their own hands and leave the country a lot of moving parts.

federal agencies. Trump's campaign pledges, including tariffs, mass deportations, and environmental rollbacks, will face legal challenges, and the Court transformed by Trump now sits as one of the few potential checks on his authority as he returns to the White House. Joining me is Bloomberg new Supreme Court reporter Greg Storr, who's written about the possible implications. So, Greg, as you write, Trump and the Court have had a complicated relationship in the past, tell us about it.

country from certain countries, many of them predominantly Muslim. But they also ruled against them on putting a citizenship question on the census. And I'm trying to end Barack Obama's so called DACA program. So it's not a court that has given him the sort of knee jerk we side with you sort of rulings that he has suggested he wants.

back and presidents do much much better. So it's pretty striking. And of course not all those cases are hugely important. Ones are ones that we might talk about. But in terms of sort of the run of the mill cases, it is a court that is not, as I said, necessarily going to need your side with Donald Trump.

Donald Trump can't block that. Both of those decisions were with a five justice of his majority and with John Roberts casting the key vote siding with the liberal in those cases. Since then, the Court has shifted even further to the right. When Bitter Ginsburgh died and Trump replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett, we got a six conservative. So the dynamic has changed and Trump will have perhaps a little bit of an easier path on some of these closely divided cases going forward.

It didn't question those tariffs, So you know, one might be inclined to say, oh, the Supreme Court is going to defer to down Trump on tariffs, But now he's talking about imposing across the board terriffs ten to twenty percent on everything that comes into the country, and that's

going to be harder to justify as a national security measure. Now, there are other provisions of the trade laws, but the bottom line is that it's not something where it's clear that the Supreme Court is going to be comfortable with the president having that much discretion, either because it reads the law as limiting his discression or because there's a

constitutional matter. The Court doesn't think Congress can give the president quite that much discrestion to just impose on his own these sweeping tariffs.

Under established law, the president can't just pluck somebody, or the executive branch can't just pluck somebody and immediately shift them out of the country. They have a right to certain process. And so when you're talking about supporting millions and millions of people, those are going to be real legal constraints. And given the mixed record he had at the Supreme Court previously on immigration, it's fair to think that it won't be a rubber staff at the Supreme Court.

There may be some real limit on what he can do.

is not universal. There are folks who argue that there's a different way to interpret that provision to borrow people who come in intentionally to have a baby in the country. But in any event, that one may be especially big uphill climb that Donald Trump does pursue.

regulation generally liked. But it's also a ruling that could come back and bte a conservative administration a deregulatory administration if what the Trump administration says, either through the EPA or some other agency that says, here's how we interpret this law. It means we're going to have less regulation than we used to the Supreme Court under this ruling will say, you know, we're actually going to be the one that determine what that law means and what you

can and cannot do. So it may mean, ironically, perhaps closer scrutiny of what the Trump administration is trying to do at its administrative agencies.

another by landmards in Westchester County. They were challenging various aspects of New York's sweeping rent control rules, including the restrictions on landlords we want to reclaim units for personal use or want to convert them to condos or co ops to the court as is usually the case when

it denies a petition. Made no comment, gave me no explanation, but one Justice Neil Gorsich said that he would have heard the appeals, so I strongly suspected we will see future challenges and ultimately it's possible the court will agree to take them up. This is an issue whether these

restrictions unconstitutionally take private property without just compensation. It's an issue that many people feel very strongly about, and I would be surprised if we don't see more appeals challenging the system now.

jury pool. If this case were to go to trial, he was invoking with known as federal officer removal, which basically means if you're a federal officer, you might be able to say, hey, this case against me should be in federal court. And a lower court said, now you're no longer a government employee and the stuff you would allegedly did was not official business, so you can't use this federal officer removal power to shift the federal court. The Supreme Court today said we're not going to take

your appeal, Mark Meadows. One thing just to note, because this is a state law prosecution, this is not a case where Donald Trump, when it becomes president, can make it go away. You can't order prosecutors to drop it. It's at least possible that this case will go forward, perhaps not against Donald Trump, but against other defendants in

this case. They are all accused of taking part in this scheme to overturn the twenty twenty election results, and Georgia prosecutors say they violated a state racketeering law.

will prosecute you criminally for that. And a federal appeals court in this case coming out of North Carolina said no, it's not automatically an anti trust violation. You have to look at whether there were potentially pro competitive justifications. So this is a case where the two companies also had supply or arrangements, so they were bidding for these construction contracts, and one of the companies, in addition to bidding on the contract, would also supply the needed aluminum to the

other company. And so what the Fourth Circuit said was you have to look at all that stuff to figure out whether the agreements on what the bids were going to be was actually an anti trust violation. The Justice Department went to the Supreme Court and said that's a big deal and it's going to make it much harder for us to press these criminal price fixing, criminal bid

rigging prosecutions. And the Supreme Court said, sorry, we're not going to hear your appeal, so that tougher standards and the Justice Department to meet is now for the foreseeable feature in place in five minute Atlantic States. It's something to watch because it could be an issue that crops up in other circuits and eventually the Supreme Court may have to decide it.