| Driving immigration protests spreading through major U.S. cities is President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport as many undocumented immigrants as his administration can. In Los Angeles, agents have arrested people at their workplaces and in their communities while they are generally living their lives — something that hasn’t happened at scale in modern America. “We wake up to agents being throughout L.A. County at parking lots, at grocery stores outside,” California Assemblymember José Luis Solache told The Washington Post. “I’ve never seen this in my lifetime.” Many of the people being rounded up may indeed be undocumented after entering the country illegally. But Trump often alleges they are violent criminals, amid bubbling concern from Republican lawmakers that he is deporting workers otherwise living in the country peacefully. The Trump administration is under increasing pressure to achieve the president’s ambitious deportation goals, so it is employing some novel tactics. Here’s what’s going on that appears to be driving nationwide protests and what could happen next, some of which I reported on in a recent newsletter. ICE agents ‘in every neighborhood’ Republicans in Congress are working to infuse billions of dollars into border security efforts, which some experts predict will actually be used to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out deportations of migrants already in the country. (Border crossings have come way down from the middle of President Joe Biden’s administration.) “This is going to have ICE agents in every neighborhood, in every courthouse, in every public place you can imagine,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, told me. A top White House official widely seen as the driver behind mass deportation efforts, Stephen Miller, has demanded ICE arrest at least 3,000 migrants a day, and administration officials privately talk about deporting 1 million in one year. Those kinds of numbers mean that ICE agents will have to “look under every hood” for migrants, said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. ICE is significantly increasing investigations of companies suspected of employing undocumented immigrants, The Post reported this week. Agents appear to be quickly carrying out raids at those workplaces, leading to the detention of “hundreds of workers, including at a meat-processing plant in Omaha, gas stations in Phoenix, construction sites in Tallahassee and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, and a pallet manufacturer in Pennsylvania,” The Post reports. In Los Angeles, workers have been whisked away at car washes, The Post reports, detailing how one of those raids occurred: “Officers in masks and bulletproof vests have been spotted pulling up to businesses in pickup trucks, detaining workers wiping windshields and then shuttling them away — all in a matter of minutes.” Even during the protests in L.A. that were spurred after arrests at a clothing manufacturer and in a Home Depot parking lot, ICE agents arrested more than 100 migrants Tuesday. “I think they are laying the groundwork for deporting large numbers of people,” said Denise Gilman, who leads the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. Quickly deporting asylum seekers While Trump has faced pushback from the courts for rapidly deporting Venezuelans, he can quickly kick out people who have been in the country for two years or less without giving them a chance to challenge their deportations. That process is called expedited removal, and the Trump administration appears to be ramping this up, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, with the Migration Policy Institute. “This can mean someone is deported in a couple of hours,” she said. In Los Angeles, 23-year-old Juan Fernando was arrested at his job at a clothing store and deported two days later — so fast his parents didn’t have time to get an attorney, The Post’s Arelis R. Hernández and Marianne LeVine reported. Working with local officials to more to deport people Immigration experts said they also expect the federal government to empower local law enforcement officials, like sheriffs, to arrest people suspected of being in the country illegally. ICE agents could then go into jails to deport people. But experts warn that using law enforcement officers untrained in immigration arrests could mean more mistakes. “We’re going to see a huge number of people deported when they shouldn’t be,” said Bier, with the Cato Institute. Incentivize self-deportations It’s possible that all these ICE actions still don’t add up to Trump’s deportation goals. If that happens, one immigration expert thinks Trump could try to make life much harder for the millions settled in the U.S. without legal status by turning off some basic rights afforded to migrants. “It means telling kids they should be scared to go to school,” said Chishti, with the Migration Policy Institute. “If parents are scared to send their kids, then why should they stay in the country? If parents are concerned that if they go to the emergency room they may end up in deportation proceedings, why would you call 911? Those are really big societal costs.” This spring, Social Security classified thousands of migrants as “dead,” meaning they couldn’t receive benefits or work legally in the U.S. The government is trying to ban households where some people have legal status and others don’t from public housing, and threaten some migrants with jail by enforcing a little-known law requiring them to register their presence in the country. Gilman said all of this raises essential questions on whether the government is respecting people’s due process, a right afforded to everyone in the country regardless of their citizenship status. “It has never been the case that people in the U.S. can just be detained without justification,” she said, “and once we go down that road, then we have really lost the strength of the fundamental principles of liberty for even our citizens.” | 
