Building the Deportation Machine for Trump 2.0

What can we expect when President-elect Donald Trump begins his second term on Monday? This week on The Intercept Briefing, we ask Intercept reporters what’s on their radar as a new president and a Republican-controlled Congress take office. 

They’ll be watching the tentative ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, the brazenness of oligarchs seeking to profit from the new administration, and threats to reproductive healthcare. Trump’s biggest policy promise has been immigration, with a campaign built around his pledge to conduct “the largest mass deportation operation” in U.S. history.

Now Congress is advancing measures that could help the administration achieve its deportation vision by expanding immigration authority to the states. Provisions in the Laken Riley Act, which passed the House of Representatives last week with support from dozens of Democrats, would mandate detention for unauthorized immigrants accused of shoplifting and theft. It would also grant state attorneys generals the power to sue the federal government over who is detained or released by U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement and block people from specific countries from obtaining visas. Historically immigration has been the exclusive domain of the federal government — not states. 

“We’ve been trying to raise the alarm,” says Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, Deputy Director of Federal Advocacy for United We Dream, a nonprofit immigration advocacy organization.

“This would just totally change the way detention and deportation decisions operate,” says Shawn Musgrave, The Intercept’s Senior Counsel and Correspondent. “The Laken Riley Act doesn’t have any provisions that change the powers of local law enforcement,” says Musgrave. But it implicitly “allow[s] an arresting officer to trigger an immediate detention for something like petty shoplifting.” 

To hear more of this conversation and understand what’s at stake, check out this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.