The Case Against Mass Deportation

The Trump Administration's mass deportation efforts are a cruel, violent affront to the values of our nation.

usicegov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Checks & Balances is a newsletter of the Society for the Rule of Law Institute.

By Ilya Somin

Since Donald Trump returned to office, U.S. immigration enforcement and deportation operations have become more cruel and oppressive than they have been in many decades, if not ever - with victims including both immigrants and many US citizens. The best approach to curbing these abuses is cutting back on deportations more generally.

Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal officers have killed at least three U.S. citizens (two in Minnesota and one in Texas), wounded numerous others, and detained hundreds illegally, usually after mistaking them for illegal migrants. ProPublica found some 170 cases of illegal detention of citizens through October 2025. But that is almost certainly a severe underestimate.

ICE and other agencies also make extensive use of racial profiling, which leads to detention and harassment of numerous U.S. citizens who are Asian, black, or Hispanic, or look like they might be and thus potentially suspect. The enormous extent of racial and ethnic profiling by ICE is shown by the fact that immigration arrests in Los Angeles County declined by 66 percent after a federal court order barring the use of such tactics (the ruling was eventually blocked by the Supreme Court, perhaps for procedural reasons). Conservatives and others who favor color-blind government cannot make an arbitrary exception for immigration enforcement.

Conditions in ICE detention facilities are often horrific, routinely featuring overcrowding, inadequate food and denial of essential medical treatment. Since the start of the present fiscal year in October, a record 29 people have died in ICE detention, even though the fiscal year is only about half over. The brutality and violations of civil liberties have been exacerbated by the administration’s massive expansion of the number of ICE personnel (including hiring many poorly qualified people), and by its imposition of deportation quotas incentivizing arbitrary arrests with little or no proof. There have been so many illegal ICE detentions that courts have ruled against the administration in detention cases some 11,500 times, including thousands of decisions issued by Republican-appointed judges.

Despite Administration claims that their deportation policies are targeting the “worst of the worst” and reducing crime, some 73% of people detained by ICE in the present fiscal year have no criminal convictions at all. Only 5% had convictions for violent crimes, and 3% for property crimes. Overall, undocumented immigrants have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans. Focusing law enforcement resources on deportation actually diverts them away from fighting real crime, and hurts crime-fighting efforts by poisoning relations between law enforcement and minority communities subjected to racial profiling and other abuses.

Many of the people targeted for deportation under Trump’s policies did not even enter the US illegally. During 2025, The Trump Administration terminated legal status for some 1.5 million migrants, thereby subjecting them to deportation. The victims of these policies included hundreds of thousands of people who fled horrible oppression under authoritarian socialist regimes, such as those of Cuba and Venezuela, and radical Islamist governments, like those of Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban – including Iranian Christians escaping religious repression and Afghans who aided the US and its allies during the War on Terror. American conservatives once welcomed refugees from communism and radical Islamism, for both moral and pragmatic reasons. Today, Trump seeks to return these people to their oppressors.

The Trump Administration has virtually completely dismantled the US refugee program – meant to aid people fleeing persecution based on their political views, race, religion, and other similar factors- with the exception of letting in white South Africans. The claim that they are the only people worthy of refugee status is utterly ridiculous. More generally, Trump has closed off a vast range of legal migration options, including near-total exclusion of potential migrants from some 40 countries under a “travel ban” policy issued in December, which comes on top off earlier bans barring all or most migration from twelve other countries. This, of course, leaves more and more desperate people fleeing terrible conditions with no option but continued poverty and oppression or illegal migration.

The abuses of the deportation system have increased significantly thanks to Trump’s policies. But the system is cruel and unjust even under more conventional presidents. Illegal detention and deportation of U.S. citizens long predates Trump. Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens estimated that the federal government detained or deported more than 20,000 U.S. citizens from 2003 to 2010, at a time when George W. Bush and Barack Obama—two relatively pro-immigration presidents— occupied the White House. Racial profiling is also not unique to the Trump era. In 2014, the Obama administration decided to perpetuate the use of racial profiling by federal immigration enforcers in areas within 100 miles of a “border,” a designation that covers areas where some two-thirds of the population lives. Officials concluded that large-scale immigration enforcement could not work without such racial and ethnic discrimination.

Ultimately, it is impossible to deport any large proportion of the estimated 13.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States without arresting and detaining many people with little or no due process. And authorities will usually have no precise way to identify supposedly illegal migrants, thereby incentivizing use of crude proxies, including racial profiling. Similarly, mass detention of immigrants likely cannot be done without keeping many in cruel and inadequate conditions.

Recently appointed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s policies may be slightly less bad than his predecessor’s. ICE recently apparently ordered its officers to pull back on some of their most extreme enforcement tactics, such as breaking into homes without judicial warrants and arresting immigrants who come to scheduled hearings at courthouses. But this will, at most, only modestly curtail the brutality of the deportation system.

Ultimately, the only way to end or greatly reduce that brutality is to radically scale back deportation itself. There are a variety of ways to do that. For example, Congress could abolish ICE and bar all or most interior deportations, limiting federal deportation operations to actual border areas near the Canadian and Mexican frontiers. This would significantly reduce the threat deportation poses to civil liberties. But those effects would still be present in border areas, where millions of people live, including many who are vulnerable to racial profiling and other abuses.

Courts could ban racial profiling for violating constitutional rules against racial discrimination (as some judicial decisions have begun to do). And Congress could enact laws requiring punishment of officers who engage in profiling and other abuses, and subject them to civil liability (currently, such liability is usually blocked by various immunity doctrines). This would help deter abuses.

The federal government could also limit interior deportations by prioritizing the few undocumented migrants who really have committed serious violent or property crimes, thereby following the example of some previous administrations. But, unless mandated by Congress, such prioritization could easily be reversed by the executive, as President Biden’s policies were by Trump.

Finally, we could take steps to make legal migration easier, and grant legal status to many currently illegal migrants, thereby shielding them from deportation. These measures could greatly reduce the range of people subject to deportation. If the objection to undocumented migration is its illegality, that can be most effectively addressed simply by making it legal! Most of the problems of illegal migration are a consequence of restrictionist policies that incentivize the creation of a vast black market, much as alcohol Prohibition caused various social pathologies and created opportunities for organized crime in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Elsewhere, I have argued that – ideally – the US should abolish all or nearly all immigration restrictions. It is unjust to restrict people’s liberty and economic opportunity merely because they were born to the wrong parents in the wrong place, especially if doing so consigns them to a lifetime of poverty and oppression, as is all too often the case. Immigration restrictions severely harm native-born citizens by stopping valuable economic growth and innovation that immigrants bring, and by preventing them from reducing America’s massive budget deficit (immigrants pay far more in taxes than they take out in government benefits).

Restrictionists argue that migration has a wide range of negative effects on natives, such as overburdening the welfare state, increasing crime, and degrading political institutions. In Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. I explain why these objections are overblown, and—in most cases—can be addressed by “keyhole solutions” that do not require exclusion. For example, any overburdening of the welfare state can be addressed by restricting migrants’ eligibility for benefits.

But even if governments cannot or should not abolish all migration restrictions, much can be done to reduce the brutality of the deportation system by curbing deportation, and making legal migration easier. At the very least, we should recognize that extensive brutality and injustice is inherent in the very nature of mass deportation policies. It is not simply a matter of putting the wrong officials in charge.

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, and the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. A few portions of this article are adapted from an earlier piece at the Liberalism.Org website.