The Wall Street Journal discussed major roadblocks that will prevent President-elect Trump and his team from deporting a significant number of illegal migrants. The roadblocks include:

  • Court Backlog: Most immigrants in the U.S. illegally cannot be deported without a hearing in an immigration court where they have a chance to ask for asylum or another avenue to stay in the country. Immigration courts are so backlogged that hearings are being scheduled as far into the future as 2029.
    • Outside experts estimate that Congress would have to hire 5,000 immigration judges—the system now has roughly 500—to sort through all the existing cases as well as new ones.
    • Without a change in the law, most illegal migrants won’t be legally deportable for years.
  • Lack of U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents: The agency has roughly 6,000 agents on staff and funding to jail about 40,000 immigrants at any given time.
    • The government is having trouble recruiting new Border Patrol Agents and does not have enough asylum officers to hear claims made outside of court.
  • Blue-State policies: Immigrants living in our country illegally are often concentrated in big, Democratic-led cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Denver.
    • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a CNN interview recently that he would not be cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Denver mayor Mike Johnson is strongly opposed to mass deportations. Without local cooperation it is very challenging to arrest and deport illegal aliens.
  • Foreign Opposition: Immigrants come from many different countries such as China, India, Mauritania and Uzbekistan. The U.S. cannot simply push migrants back across the border or even load them all onto a flight heading to the same place. Many of the countries where illegal aliens come from have frayed or even nonexistent diplomatic relations with the U.S., such as Venezuela.
  • Legal challenges: Under existing law, migrants can legally ask for asylum even if they have entered the country unlawfully. Trump’s pledge to end birthright citizenship cannot be changed by Congress. It requires an amendment to our Constitution.