President-elect Donald Trump says he will carry out the largest deportation effort in American history, a vow that has sent unease into immigrant communities.
"To be honest there's a lot of fear," said Valeria Paz Reyes, who came to America from Honduras as a child. She has since become a U.S. citizen, but other family members remain undocumented. "However, we are together. We're going to fight and make sure we're protecting each other."
While Trump has said any one of the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally may be deported when he takes office, certain groups are at greater risk than others.
"It's not going to be a massive sweep of neighborhoods," Trump's newly announced border czar Tom Homan said in an interview with Fox News. "It's not going to be massive raids. It's going to be a targeted enforcement operation."
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Homan said the new Trump administration will prioritize deporting unauthorized immigrants with a criminal past.
"It's going to be public safety threats and national security threats (that) will be the priority," Homan said.
Numbers sent to Congress this fall from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, show there are 662,566 non-citizens with criminal convictions or pending charges, largely for assault and drug offenses.
The most common crime listed for undocumented immigrants was "traffic offenses," a category that includes driving under the influence.
ICE policy already prioritizes deporting immigrants who are in the country unlawfully and have been caught up in the criminal justice system.
"Immigrants in general commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born," said Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. "But our deportations tend to prioritize people who have criminal records. We don't want bad guys staying in this country."
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Homan says ICE will also zero in on the much larger pool of immigrants who've already been ordered out of the country by a judge but who have yet to leave.
"If the judge's order doesn't mean anything and is not executed, then what the hell are we doing?" Homan said on Fox News.
According to ICE, about 1.3 million immigrants with final orders to depart remain in the country.
Gelatt said it takes a lot of government resources and time to track down and remove people who are under orders to leave.
"The U.S. government doesn't necessarily know where every single person in this country is living, or how to find them," Gelatt said.
There is also the challenge of finding places to detain people who are located while arranging for their departure.
The 2023 ICE annual report said, "ICE has very limited detention capacity and appropriated bedspace has remained relatively static."
ICE currently has funding for just 41,000 beds.
"If you're talking about deporting one million people a year, something on that magnitude, 41,000 beds is certainly not a lot," Gelatt said. "I think there are ways the government could expand that number with more funding, which might be possible in this new Congress."
Trump's mass deportation push may also target immigrants at large workplaces.
Homan says he will bring back worksite raids that ended under President Biden, whose Homeland Security department instead focused on employers, rather than the undocumented immigrants they hire.
The success of widescale deportation efforts may also depend on the states where they occur.
States with governors who are Democrats are already saying they will fight mass deportations, while states led by Republicans are more likely to cooperate with Trump's efforts to remove people in the country illegally.
