Trump’s Border Plans Are Light on Details but Strong on Fury

 

News Analysis

Trump’s Border Plans Are Light on Details but Strong on Fury

 

The former president’s sweeping immigration proposals face daunting challenges, but voters still trust his positions more than his opponent’s.

 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Zolan Kanno-Youngs has covered immigration politics throughout the Trump and Biden administrations. He reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/15/us/politics/trump-immigration-plans.html

Oct. 15, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET

 

During a rally in Arizona on Sunday, former President Donald J. Trump left out a crucial detail when promoting his proposal to hire 10,000 new agents to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

He did not say where these legions of new agents would come from.

 

Given its longtime struggles with recruitment, it would take the U.S. Border Patrol years to ramp up hiring to that extent, if it ever could.

 

But that was just one of several aggressive moves he said would be coming to protect the border if he is elected. He pledged mass deportations, but it is unclear whether he could harness the resources to roundup millions of immigrants. He proposed funneling some of the military’s budget toward border security, though he did not say how he would get the courts to sign off on that.

 

Mr. Trump’s plans as outlined on Sunday were the latest reminder that when it comes to the former president’s vision for border security, hyperbolic rhetoric, rather than substantive solutions, often wins out.

 

Many politicians announce ambitious, if unrealistic, policies on the campaign trail to energize their base that are scant on implementation details. But Mr. Trump has centered much of his campaign on such proposals, pitching a staggering array of tax breaks without discussing how he might pay for them and promising an immediate end to conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza but providing scant details on how.

 

He is running that playbook again as he seizes on the issue of illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels under the Biden administration, to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

Mr. Trump has tried to blame her for the millions of migrant crossings in recent years, even though President Biden assigned her a role that was not responsible for managing the policies specific to the U.S.-Mexico border. Ms. Harris was rather in charge of addressing the poverty and corruption in Central America to discourage migrants from traveling north to the United States.

 

“They’re destroying our country,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. He said Ms. Harris had “ruined the jobs of a lot of these agents.”

 

Yet Mr. Trump’s own announced plans to deal with border security at times seem focused more on tough-sounding policies — intended to tap into anger and fear about immigration — than sweating out the details of workable solutions.

 

Case in point: Mr. Trump’s pronouncement to bring in 10,000 new Border Patrol agents. While aggressive and sweeping, like much of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, the proposal would face extraordinary challenges on implementation.

 

“We were about 1,200 down when I was there, and we still had a great deal of difficulty filling the existing slots,” said Gil Kerlikowske, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection during the Obama administration. “The 10,000 would be really a difficult number.”

 

The agency, with more than 19,000 agents, has struggled to hire officers in recent years because of morale issues, the pandemic and congressional dysfunction that made funding unpredictable, according to the Government Accountability Office. Mr. Trump also said he would ask Congress to immediately approve a 10 percent raise for agents and a $10,000 retention and signing bonus.

 

The Trump campaign did not answer questions about how it would follow through on the plan to hire thousands of agents.

 

In a much harsher position, Mr. Trump said he would pursue a historic deportation operation. He proposes invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.

 

That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.” While the Supreme Court has upheld past uses of the law, it is not clear whether the justices would allow a president to stretch it to encompass drug cartel activity. The text of the law requires a link to the actions of a foreign government.

 

Still, Mr. Trump raises the specter of roundups, which he said would be made possible by transferring other federal officers and deputizing local law enforcement to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some cities, however, refuse to collaborate with ICE out of concern such cooperation would lead to deportations for minor offenses.

 

When Mr. Trump was last in the White House, sweeping deportation operations were unsuccessful. That was in part because ICE lacks enough agents or detention capacity for such an operation.

 

This time, Mr. Trump has said, he would use money in the military budget to build giant detention facilities for such deportation missions. But a similar strategy to use Pentagon funds to build his border wall during his last time in office was blocked by the courts in 2020.

 

Still, these campaign flourishes are not necessarily aimed at passing logistical tests. They are aimed at winning over voters. Mr. Trump used a similar strategy during the 2016 presidential election, when promising repeatedly to build a border wall and have Mexico pay for it. American taxpayers ended up paying the bill.

 

Despite the logistical, legal and financial challenges Mr. Trump faces as he seeks to implement his immigration proposals, polling shows many voters trust Mr. Trump to handle the border over Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris.

 

The Harris campaign has tried to cut into those numbers by spotlighting the vice president’s record as a prosecutor in a border state and by challenging the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s proposals.

 

“Trump doesn’t care about solving problems — he only wants to run on one,” said Matt Corridoni, a Harris campaign spokesman.

 

Democrats note that while Mr. Trump proposed a surge in hiring for Border Patrol agents on Sunday, he helped block an effort earlier this year to hire 1,500 officials to the parent agency of the Border Patrol.

 

A Senate border bill negotiated by the White House, Democrats and Senate Republicans would have provided the funding to hire border officials, as well as thousands of asylum officers.

 

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump opposed that bill because it “would have expedited the illegal entry of thousands of illegal immigrants into the country every week.”

 

The package actually would have toughened an initial asylum screening for migrants, making it far more difficult for them to stay in the country. It was endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council, the union for Border Patrol agents, which endorsed Mr. Trump during his rally on Sunday.

 

But taking a cue from Mr. Trump, Republicans tanked the bill to prevent Democrats from securing an election-year victory. Ms. Harris has said she would sign the bill once elected, if it is reintroduced and passed.

 

Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, who led the negotiations on the package, said this year that Republicans chose not to support it to give Mr. Trump a political edge on the border.

 

“It got stirred up in all the presidential politics, and several of my colleagues starting looking for ways” to back away from the bill “after President Trump said, ‘Don’t fix anything during the presidential election,’” Mr. Lankford told Fox News in April.

 

Still, Mr. Lankford stressed the need to prioritize realistic solutions to the border.

 

“He’s got an office that’s running for. He’s got a campaign that he’s running,” Mr. Lankford said of Mr. Trump. “I’m already in office. I’ve got a responsibility to be able to carry on this.”

 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent, covering President Biden and his administration. More about Zolan Kanno-Youngs