Under President Joe Biden’s failed leadership, the United States has been in the throes of a four-year-long illegal immigrant crisis, during which an estimated more than 10 million people have entered the country.
With immigration among the top issues in the 2024 campaign cycle, the American people are sending President-elect Donald Trump, who campaigned on a platform of mass deportations, back to Washington.
The question now becomes how does the government actually go forward with deporting more than 10 million people, many of whom are deep in the interior of the country. I sat down with Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, to discuss what a second Trump administration’s immigration agenda could look like on this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.”
Trump has the authority to secure the southern border on Day One through executive orders, Ries said. Under the Biden administration, border and immigration enforcement agents have been stuck behind their desks, unable to enforce the laws on the books. The results have been a disaster. “Right now we’re at 10.5 million inadmissible alien encounters by Customs and Border Protection, plus another more than 2 million known gotaways—and I say more than that, because that number is at least a year old.”
“During the Biden Harris administration, over 525,000 unaccompanied children came to the U.S., in part because of a bad law that needs to be repealed and in part because [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas said multiple times publicly, ‘if you come as an unaccompanied child, we will not turn you back,’” Ries explained.
“The statute in place regarding unaccompanied children offers immigration benefits to unaccompanied children. So, of course, what are we going to get? And what have we gotten? More unaccompanied children. And the numbers have been so vast that Health and Human Services, which is responsible to provide shelter and find a sponsor for these children, has not been able to keep up,” Ries added.
“HHS has lost track of hundreds of thousands of these kids, and we need to find them,” she said.
That starts with Trump “declaring a national emergency to deal with the border crisis,” on Day One, Ries said.
To deliver on his promises, Trump has tapped Tom Homan as his “border czar.” Ries, a former colleague of Homan, said, “He’s a great pick.”
“He has worked his way up through the ranks,” Ries said of Homan. “There’s nothing that he asks agents and officers to do that he himself hasn’t done. He started in the Border Patrol at the then-[Immigration and Naturalization Service]. He was the head of enforcement and removal operations at [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and worked his way up to be acting director of ICE.”
“[Homan] knows how to prioritize the resources and to prioritize who needs to be identified, arrested first, in terms of national security threats,” Ries said.
Ries believes there are five keys to closing the border and deporting more than 10 million people.
“Illegal aliens want five things when they come here: They want to enter; they want to remain; they want to work here; they want to send money home; and they want to bring or have family here. And so if you prevent those five things, then they are either not going to come or go elsewhere,” she told me.
“In terms of entry, we talked about ‘remain in Mexico,’ and the wall, and border agents, etc.,” Ries said.
“Stopping the ability to remain here,” she said, “includes immigration detention, but it also means not providing downstream benefits, whether that’s driver’s licenses or business licenses.”
As for preventing migrants from working, Ries said, policies such as E-Verify should be implemented.
While preventing migrants from working will help prevent migrants from sending money home, “remittances has always been the tough nut to crack,” Ries said. She suggested taxing remittances could provide additional disincentives for migrants working in the United States.
Finally, putting an end to chain migration, a focus in Trump’s first term, must be another priority.
It’s a herculean task for the incoming Trump administration. It’s so, all because “Joe Biden sold out to the Left—the radical Left”—as has Mayorkas, Ries said, adding: “I don’t know how Secretary Mayorkas sleeps at night.”
The radical Left’s vision that Biden, Mayorkas, and other Democrats have sold out to is a plan to turn the United States into a one-party state.
“It’s about power,” Ries said of the importation of millions across the open border. “More people in their districts, for example, means more congressional power based on the census and the head count and apportionment and redistricting. And then, in turn, presidential electoral votes.”
Ries cited California as an example. “California has more representatives in the U. S. Congress than it should because they count everybody, and yet everybody isn’t supposed to vote in federal elections. Only U. S. citizens are supposed to vote in U.S. federal elections.”
“So, why wouldn’t you just limit head count to U.S. citizens to determine congressional districts?” Ries asked rhetorically.
“It’s a zero-sum game,” she added, meaning representation in government is “skewed to the left.”
The abuses of our current immigration system have been so persistent, so extensive, that Ries suggests it might be better to start from scratch.
“I think we need to throw out the whole immigration statute and just start over. It is too complicated, it’s too slow, it’s too expensive, and it just frustrates those who are trying to obey the law,” she told me.
A well-functioning immigration system, she explained, should “be based in what benefits America in terms of sovereignty; in terms of a lawful, manageable system, communities, and populations we can assimilate into the American fabric; in terms of a common language and loyalty and a good understanding of civics and learning English.”
“We’ve gotten away from that, and it shows,” Ries said.