Trump wants to expand deportations, but a report finds ICE already falling behind

President Donald Trump has ordered federal immigration authorities to expand deportations, but a new report casts doubt on Immigration and Customs Enforcement's ability to carry out the new administration's objective.

The report by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General found that ICE does a poor job managing the deportation of immigrants who are no longer detained. As a result, deportation officers are so overwhelmed with the cases they already have, they have lost track of immigrants, including some criminals who could have been deported.

ICE will likely have trouble keeping up with even more deportation cases, the report concludes.

"These management deficiencies and unresolved obstacles make it difficult for ICE to deport aliens expeditiously," the report said. "ICE is almost certainly not deporting all the aliens who could be deported and will likely not be able to keep up with growing numbers of deportable aliens."

In January, Trump signed an executive order directing federal immigration authorities to cast a far wider net in picking up and deporting immigrants, including those not only convicted of serious crimes, as had been the policy under the latter years of then-President Barack Obama's administration, but also those charged with even minor crimes.

The report, however, shows that ICE is struggling to keep up with current caseloads, specifically immigrants who are no longer detained but are under ICE supervision while their cases are pending in Immigration Courts.

For the report, DHS inspectors visited four ICE field offices: in Seattle; Washington, D.C.; St. Paul; and Atlanta.

Because of overwhelming caseloads and inadequate oversight, overworked deportation officers told DHS inspectors that criminal-background checks were not always conducted when non-detained immigrants facing deportation arrived for routine check-ins with ICE. Other deportation officers reported they were sometimes unaware when undocumented immigrants facing deportation missed check-in appointments or missed court dates and sometimes lost track of the whereabouts of non-detained immigrants altogether.

"You might work 18 hours a day, but you still won't get caught up," the report quoted one deportation officer as saying.

Will more migrants fall through the cracks?

The report suggests that more immigrants facing deportation could fall through the cracks if ICE tries to ramp up deportations too quickly to meet Trump's directive, said Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs, at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C.

"If they try to expand deportation cases more quickly, they are just going to have more problems," Capps said.

He pointed out that the backlog in Immigration Courts currently exceeds 500,000 cases nationally. The cases can take years to resolve, making it difficult for deportation officers to keep track of non-detained immigrants facing deportation for such long periods of time.

As of the end of August, ICE was supervising about 2.2 million immigrants facing deportation who had been released after being detained, including 368,574 with criminal convictions, the report said.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which pushes for more immigration enforcement, said she was "astonished" by the number of cases some officers are juggling.

The report "really illustrates that when ICE says that someone is under supervision that probably in most cases doesn’t mean much, that in fact ICE may have actually lost track of them or is failing to track them," she said.

She said the report bolsters Trump's request that Congress allocate more funding to hire 10,000 more ICE officers to ramp up immigration enforcement and deportations.

She disagreed, however, that Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration will add to ICE's inability to track non-detained immigrants facing deportation. That's because Trump has also directed ICE officials to implement changes that speed up deportations, she said.

"There are lots of things ICE needs to do to alleviate this workload, but just because ICE is arresting more people doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to see a huge backlog develop if they are able to process them more efficiently," she said.

The report recommends ICE conduct a comprehensive review of its policies and procedures and review the caseloads and staffing allocations of deportation officers, among other recommendations.

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