Washington
CNN
—

President-elect Donald Trump promised mass deportation during the campaign, and while the extent remains vague, the plan’s elements are an unlikely throwback to former President Barack Obama, who was dubbed the “deporter in chief” by Democrats and immigration advocates.

While Trump’s allies have taken draconian measures to detain and deport people living in the U.S. illegally, the plans are in many ways consistent with the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement has often conducted its operations. And the person at the top is Tom Homan, an immigration enforcement veteran who served under the Obama administration and was appointed by Trump as border czar.

“Many of the same tactics are being dusted off. What Tom is talking about are Obama-like things,” said John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director under Obama, warning that it will likely be a “tougher version” of what was done in the Obama era .

“He will have to take more draconian measures to carry out a million deportations a year,” Sandweg said.

Trump has previously spearheaded the Eisenhower administration’s large-scale deportation program, an aggressive and unprecedented effort that resulted in the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Such a program would represent a dramatic change in how domestic regulations are enforced compared to recent years.

But publicly, Trump aides have described a plan that mimics previous ones administrations.

Homan has repeatedly stated that he plans to target threats to public safety and national security, focusing first on removing those individuals. ICE has been widely instructed to follow this protocol, including under President Joe Biden.

But Homan warned that if other undocumented immigrants were found, they could also be picked up. This happened during the Obama administration.

“We will focus on public safety threats from the outset. What mayor or governor doesn’t want public safety threats to disappear from their communities? So again: Help us or get out of our way,” Homan told television star Dr. Phil McGraw.

“If you force us into the community, we will find a villain. We will probably find others, which means they will also be arrested,” he added.

Trump’s plans also include reintroducing family detention, which has been widely criticized by immigration advocates and is a practice that Biden has ended. However, Obama expanded family detention during his term in office, responding to the increasing number of families and children crossing the U.S. southern border.

Obama and Biden also had to resort to military bases to temporarily hold migrants during border crossings. Trump has vowed to do the same – although it is unclear how that would play out and whether the bases would be used for immigrants detained in the US.

“They’re not doing anything new. “None of these ideas that are being thrown around are new,” said Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, arguing that the key difference is one of scale and scope.

Immigrant advocates also argue that the rhetoric surrounding mass deportations has raised additional fears in the immigrant community.

But Trump and his team are already grappling with the realities that hampered his first term and those of his predecessors as they addressed the undocumented population in the United States: Limited resources and personnel.

According to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, Trump deported more than 1.5 million people in his first term.

That’s about half of the 2.9 million deportations during Barack Obama’s first term and fewer than the 1.9 million deportations during Obama’s second term. That’s in line with Biden’s 1.49 million deportations, according to updated calculations shared with CNN. Those numbers do not include the millions of people turned away at the border under a Covid-19-era policy issued by Trump and used during some of Biden’s term.

Trump acknowledged that the task of detaining and deporting immigrants is challenging in an interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired earlier this month.

“It’s a very difficult thing,” he said, adding: “You know, there are rules, regulations, laws. You entered illegally.”

Trump said his administration’s mass deportation efforts target people with criminal histories, but suggested they could go beyond deporting criminals – without specifying who the “people other than criminals” would be.

There are about 1.4 million people with final deportation orders in the U.S., according to an ICE official. But many of them cannot be sent back to their home countries because they do not want to accept them or because possible relief is still available to them through the immigration system.

Obama deported around 400,000 people in one year, many of whom were recent border crossers. Trump faces a greater challenge in targeting those already in the country.

“There is a difference between arresting people and deporting people. We’ve focused on ICE’s ability to detain people, but unless they make a significant change in the immigration process, deporting a person requires a process,” a former Department of Homeland Security official told CNN.

CNN previously reported that Trump’s team is assessing regional capacity to house migrants – a process that will likely lead to consideration of building new detention centers in major metropolitan areas. Homeland Security officials have previously identified several cities where they can build detention capacity in preparation for border surges.

ICE currently funds around 40,000 detention beds.

Trump’s team also prepared a possible national emergency declaration to free up Pentagon resources – which occurred during Trump’s first term and faced litigation – and adjusted that declaration to pave the way for expanding detention space.

Trump reiterated his plan to use the military to deport migrants who entered the U.S. illegally in an interview with Time magazine, saying he would push the use of the military “to the maximum extent permitted by law” for deportations.