Get Ready for Mass Deportation Theater

There's real deportations. And then there's deportation press releases.

Over four days last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrests of seven individuals in Boston, Newark, Philadelphia and New York. They were all facing serious criminal charges, including homicide, failing to register as a sex offender, and indecent assault. At least two of them are accused of membership in violent, transnational gangs. ICE reported each of these arrests in separate press releases between December 19 and 23.

There’s lots to quibble with in those ICE arrests, starting with the fact that most of the people were merely accused of serious crimes; they had yet to be convicted. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? If deported before trial, would ICE be effectively helping these seven people escape justice for their alleged crimes? But save such innocent notions for another day.

Let’s just talk just about the press releases.

These December 2024 press releases, I must tell you, were relatively responsible compared to what is coming. ICE issued seven separate releases about seven separate arrests, each one focused on the specific individual. What ICE did not do was combine all of these arrests into a single press release and then claim to have conducted a major operation across the Northeast. Nor did ICE pad the numbers by adding in the total number of people arrested from the same four states over the same period of time, most of whom probably did not have significant criminal records.

Without changing anything in real life, it would have been pretty easy for ICE to have claimed to have conducted a multi-state deportation operation targeting dozens or hundreds of people, including some gang members and murder suspects. ICE could have created an impression of a major sweep. Except that, in reality, this was probably just a normal week, and only a handful of people have such serious criminal records.

We should expect ICE press releases to change when Trump takes office. Reporters in particular should be savvy about what the ways ICE will try to create the impression that a) They are ramping up deportations, and b) The immigrants they are deporting are really bad people.

Important advice to journalists: Read the texts closely. Very closely.

During the first Trump Administration, it was routine for ICE to issue press releases describing an “operation” with impressive numbers of arrests or deportations over several days or weeks, with the strong impression that most were dangerous, violent criminals. But when read closely, these press releases were really just mash-ups of a cluster of separate arrests, with manipulative language that seemed fact-based, and yet impossible to pin down as to the facts that matter most.

Consider this April 17, 2018 ICE press release announcing the results of something that ICE dubbed “Operation Keep Safe in New York,” which took place over a six-day period “in New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley.” Read these two paragraphs from the ICE press release. Then be ready to answer some obvious questions about it.

Yikes! It sure seems like ICE rounded up a lot of immigrants with criminal records, doesn’t it? And there sure seems like a lot of facts in that press release, right? I mean, ICE cited to quantifiable numbers, and listed several specific and alarming criminal offenses. Hard numbers were given: 225, 180, 80, child sex crimes! Facts!

But tell me: Of the people ICE arrested, how many had actually been convicted of violent felony?

Feel free to read it again.

Actually, I’ll make it easier. Just tell me, how many had been convicted of anything at all, felony or not, violent or not? Convicted of anything at all. How many? That’s basic info. Just tell me.

This is open book. If you want, you can click on this link and read the full press release.

Still can’t find the answer?

Strange, right? Here’s ICE saying they rid New York of more than 200 people to make it safer. Yet the somehow they never actually said how many of them had even been convicted of a crime, even a minor one?

Instead, ICE offered bullet points with more complete details about only 13 of these 225 arrests. These 13, presumably the worst of the bunch, all had long(ish) rap sheets, and nearly all with violent crimes or sex crimes on their records. (Although: One of the thirteen, a 35-year-old from Guatemala, just had a DUI and a driving without a license conviction.)

That still leaves a fog around the other 212 people. What about them? What made them a threat to the safety of New York?

It seems that 45 of the people arrested by ICE had neither a criminal conviction nor even a criminal charge filed against them. ICE of course did not highlight that rather salient fact. The reason we know that 45 people had clean records is that ICE claimed that “of those arrested, more than 180 were convicted criminals or had criminal charges pending.” But they arrested 225, so, math.

So what can we say abut the 180 who had some kind of criminal record? About them we can’t pin down much, except about the Notorious Thirteen who merited their own bullet points. Note that of these 180, ICE only tells us they were convicted or had charges pending. That’s a pretty big “or.” It means that we can’t tell how many of these people had any criminal convictions at all.

And charged with what, exactly? Well, ICE offered this not especially helpful summary:

Sounds like a lot of pretty minor arrests at best, not Hannibal Lecter stuff. Without disputing a single hard fact in the press release, it is entirely possible that the “Operation Keep Safe in New York” arrested more than two hundred people, most of whom either had no criminal record or who had merely an arrest for DUI.

Be real. People shouldn’t drink and drive. It’s dangerous. But should we take a child’s mom or dad away forever because he got arrested once for DUI? Is New York safer because those 45 people without any criminal record at all were taken away?

ICE issued dozens of press releases like this during the first Trump Administration, all following the same pattern. Here’s one from Nevada, where I work. Here’s one from Northern California. Here’s another from San Diego. And another from Texas and Oklahoma. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

Let me be clear: This isn’t just theater. I fully expect Trump to ramp up deportations. He actually did increase deportations somewhat in his first term, and I expect his administration to be more efficient and effective this time. I’m pretty worried about it, actually.

I think it is possible that by the end of four years they will be able to carry out such a large, indiscriminate operation, complete with mass detention camps in the desert and crying, devastated children left behind that decades later schoolteachers will talk about it with the kind of awkward it-was-a-different-time tone that they use today for the Japanese Internment. But that won’t be easy to pull off. Stephen Miller and Tom Homan will have to find their way around a maze of legal and logistical hurdles to approach even Obama-level deportations, much less the Operation Wetback ferocity that Trump fantasized about in the campaign.

We should expect deportation theater, as well as actual arrests and deportations, to play a pretty significant role in Trump’s second term. The press releases will be part of it. They might also stage easily televised raids, the kind that involve loading people onto buses so that local new cameras can film it. They might come up with some new tricks. Trump is good at showmanship.

I do worry that such Deportation Theater will panic people who don’t deserve the anxiety. Psychological warfare is a big part of Trump’s attack on immigrants. It was last time, too. There’s also the danger that enough reporters will buy the spin, and sell the public on the false impression that the people being deported are all dangerous criminals.

But it is also possible that televised cruelty to a few immigrants might satiate some of Trump base, and maybe reduce the motivation to do the heavy lifting that would be required for a true mass deportation. That wouldn’t be a good outcome. In fact, it would be extremely bad. But as we sit here in early January 2025, that is not the worst plausible outcome that I can imagine. If I had to choose among bad options, I’d rather have more theater, and less of the real thing.

But no matter what happens, people who want and need to be informed about what is really happening will need to savvy and skeptical. That especially goes for reporters who have a professional obligation to not help the government throw sand in people’s eyes.

Read closely.