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During their terms, presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden both issued "prosecutorial discretion" guidance, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to prioritize deportations of those deemed to be threats to national security or public safety, and recent arrivals at the border.

After taking office in 2017, Trump canceled the prioritization guidance for ICE, and has indicated he'll do so again in his second term. That's likely to divert resources from cases involving people who pose a threat and to increase enforcement against those without serious criminal records, said Michael Kagan, immigration law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

"What I expect (Trump) to do is to reject the idea of setting priorities, which actually means that ICE might spend more resources arresting someone who doesn’t even have a parking ticket," Kagan said. "Having ICE spend a lot of time, and most importantly, having immigration courts spend a lot of time on the deportation of a mom with three kids, who volunteers at her church, would not just be devastating for her and her family, but also might actually clog up the system for the higher-priority cases."

In Trump's first term, a zero-tolerance policy and lack of prioritization led to family separations, mass detention of asylum seekers and the release of more people with criminal records from ICE detention compared to Biden, according to an April 2024  by David J. Bier of libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute.

ICE data show that releases of people with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges declined from 34,415 in 2019 under Trump, to 15,514 in 2023, under Biden, in part due to Trump's focus on detaining asylum seekers and undocumented workers, Bier said.

"Law enforcement agency resources are finite, and they should be devoted to targeting serious criminals and threats to the public, not micromanaging our demographics or labor force," he wrote. "Every minute that ICE or CBP (Customs and Border Protection) wastes on pursuing someone seeking to work here is a minute they are not pursuing someone who may threaten the public."

Trump's transition team did not directly respond to the Star's inquiry about whether Trump would set any priorities in his mass-deportation campaign.

"President Trump will enlist every federal power and coordinate with state authorities to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history while simultaneously lowering costs for families," wrote spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. "The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail, like deporting migrant criminals and restoring our economic greatness. He will deliver."

Arizona leads the nation in alien smuggling and immigration prosecutions, said Gary Restaino, U.S. Attorney for Arizona. Over the last three months, the office has brought criminal charges against 3,141 people for illegal entry or re-entry into the U.S. and filed 309 human-smuggling cases.

Under Biden's Department of Justice, "We think we’ve hit the right balance now by increasing individual accountability but still having prosecutorial discretion to decide which people really need a criminal consequence and which can be handled administratively," Restaino said.

Going back to a zero-tolerance policy would likely have an "adverse" impact system-wide, further burdening the courts and detention capacity, he said.

Other Republican-backed proposals targeting immigrants could undermine public trust in local police, hindering investigative work, prosecutors say.

The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan, billed as a blueprint for the next Republican administration, also seeks to limit eligibility for "U visas," a nonimmigrant visa category for crime victims, including victims of sexual assault and trafficking, who cooperate with law enforcement.

Restricting U visas could result in fewer victims coming forward to work with law enforcement, said Lynn Marcus, director of the University of Arizona's Immigration Law Clinic.

"Many police and sheriff's departments view it as something that enhances their ability to get information and enforce the law," she said. "If you take that visa out of the mix or increase denials, which is what Project 2025 talks about, then you undermine public safety."

Arizona's voter-approved ballot measure , which empowers local law enforcement to arrest immigration violators, would likely discourage undocumented people who witness crimes, or who are crime victims, from contacting police, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover has told the Star. Proposition 314 would only go into effect if a similar Texas law survives a court challenge.

“We need people to feel safe, and we need people to continue to report crime,” Conover said . “You don’t want half your community hesitating to report crime that they’ve observed, report crime that they have suffered from. That creates a very dangerous situation.”

Another concern for advocates and law enforcement is the GOP-led , which the U.S. House of Representatives passed Jan. 6 and is under debate in the U.S. Senate, would mandate ICE detention of undocumented immigrants accused of theft-related crimes such as shoplifting, even without a conviction or formal charges. 

Without billions more in funding for detention and ICE staffing, the legislation could force the release of tens of thousands of people, potentially including those who could pose a risk to the public, to make room for those accused of non-violent offenses. That's according to an ICE report on the bill submitted to legislators in December, first reported by  last week. More recent ICE estimates put the cost to implement the bill at $26.9 billion in its first year, NPR Ěý°ŐłółÜ°ů˛ő»ĺ˛ą˛â.Ěý

"This bill, as currently written, would eliminate ICE’s discretion to prioritize the detention and deportation of dangerous individuals. Instead, it requires ICE to treat a child arrested for shoplifting candy the same as an adult convicted of child abuse,” said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, in a Jan. 13 statement.

Biden didn't cut enforcement, Cato says

Attributing the rise in migrant arrivals at the southern border to lax enforcement by the Biden administration is a false narrative, Bier of the Cato Institute  in a recent Substack post.  

The rise in migration started during Trump's term, due to both the "pull" factor of a strong U.S. job market following the pandemic, and the "push" factor of a historic increase in forced displacement globally, Bier said. More arrivals from places outside Mexico and Central America, such as Africa and Asia, also complicates returns to those countries.

At the southern border, migrant arrivals have now fallen back to 2019 monthly averages, which many attribute to aggressive  in Mexico and asylum  imposed by the Biden administration in 2024. Bier attributes it largely to a cooling economy and Biden's expansion of legal immigration pathways.

Republicans have criticized the Border Patrol's release of asylum seekers into the interior of the U.S. to await their immigration hearings, alleging the so-called "catch-and-release" practice poses a threat to national security.

During the Republican National Convention, Trump said dangerous criminals "are coming from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and terrorists at levels never seen before."

Alejandro Mayorkas, outgoing secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a Friday media call that such releases have happened since DHS was created, as detention space has never been sufficient to hold everyone border agents encounter at the southern border.

Mayorkas pointed to the Biden administration's enhanced vetting of border-crossers prior to their release, through reforms like expanding, from 11 to 21, the number of countries participating in biometric-data sharing and screening platforms, as well as improving DHS's ability to share classified information with border agents and port officials in the field, “enabling real-time vetting of certain nationalities for the first time ever.”

"Our screening and vetting of individuals encountered at the border is more robust now than it ever has been before," Mayorkas said, "and that is a function of the process strengthening that we have undertaken here, as well as the agreements we have negotiated with foreign countries to learn more about individuals who have sought to migrate here."

Border-crossers were also released under the Trump administration, and although the number increased under Biden due to higher arrival numbers, at times the percentage released was higher under Trump, according to the Cato Institute.

The Trump administration has also pledged to shut down the CBP One phone application, a central part of the Biden administration's "carrot-and-stick" approach to encourage use of regular pathways to enter the U.S.

Under Biden's "" policy, which replaced Title 42 in May 2023, asylum seekers must use the app to schedule an appointment at a port of entry, or face denial of their asylum claim.

Advocates criticize the scarcity of appointments available through the app and say the policy violates the right under U.S. law to request asylum once on U.S. soil, regardless of how one entered the U.S.

But the Biden administration has pointed to the app's success at encouraging more orderly arrivals at the ports: For the last two months, migrant encounters at official ports — where entry is tightly controlled and most asylum seekers without appointments are turned away — have outpaced encounters by border agents between the ports, CBP data show.

Trump has also said he'd bring back the pandemic-era Title 42 policy, which experts say only led to more chaos at the border.

Title 42 empowered border agents to immediately return migrants across the border to Mexico, without processing or penalties, often in as little as 15 minutes.

Research shows the policy resulted in a surge in repeat attempts by migrants: "Recidivism, which is CBP’s term for the re-encounter within a year of a previously encountered migrant, surged under Title 42, rising from 7 percent of all encounters made by the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2019 to 27 percent in FY 2021," according to a Migration Policy Institute  of Title 42's impact.

It was a boon to human smugglers in Mexico, who ended up selling packages to migrants including multiple attempts to cross the border, Reuters  in 2020.

The policy also resulted in a surge in "gotaways," migrants who successfully evade border agents after irregularly crossing the border, MPI said. In April 2023, the month before Title 42 ended, there were about 73,500 gotaways, compared to 32,800 two months later, MPI said.

Interior vs. border deportations

The Trump administration has not released details on how it will carry out its "mass deportations," although Trump has promised 1 million deportations each year.

In his entire first term, Trump deported more than 1.5 million people, about the same as in Biden's four years, but just half as many as in Obama's first term, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, lawyer and policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, or MPI.

"Most of the deportations (under Biden) were recent border-crossers as opposed to the first Trump administration, which was trying to deport more people from the interior of the country," she said.

The most deportations from the U.S. interior — where ICE has jurisdiction — happened under George W. Bush and in Barack Obama's first term, when Obama truly earned the moniker "deporter-in-chief," Kagan said.

Kagan said it's important to distinguish interior deportations from removals of recent arrivals detained within 100 miles of the southern border, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including the Border Patrol, has control.

“When Trump promises mass deportations and references �Operation Wetback’ from the �50s, that focuses on interior removals, meaning taking people out of American communities,” Kagan said.

Most of Biden's deportations have happened at the border, with a significant decline in interior deportations, falling from 325,000 interior removals during Trump's first term to fewer than 139,000 interior removals during Biden's term, through June 2024, according to MPI.

Yet there's no evidence crime committed by migrants increased under Biden, said César García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in the intersection of criminal and immigration law.

"The research doesn’t suggest that there has been any shift in the amount of crime that migrants have been committing in recent years," he said. "We ought to take any claim by politicians and candidates for elected office with a grain of salt."

Public support for "mass deportations" tends to be higher when the question doesn't give any specifics about who would be affected, Kagan said. But the support breaks down when respondents are asked more specifics about who should be deported, he said.

°Âłóľ±±ô±đĚý and Ipsos polls have found majority support for "mass deportations," an October  by Data for Progress found support was contingent on who would be affected.

The survey found 70% of respondents supported deporting people who recently crossed the border illegally, and 67% supported deporting a recent border-crosser with a non-violent criminal record.

But only 24% of respondents supported deportation of an undocumented person who has U.S.-born children and has lived in the U.S. for 15 years, or an undocumented business owner who has lived in the U.S. for 10 years. Only 20% supported deportation of someone who sought asylum in the U.S. three years ago and was awaiting their hearing. 

False premise

Republicans' and increasingly Democrats' framing of the "border crisis" relies on a false premise: that migrants are inherently dangerous and that enforcement reforms should be the priority, advocates say.

But a narrow focus on enforcement doesn't address the systemic factors that actually cause chaos at the southern border — namely, an immigration system that hasn't been updated in 30 years, said Laura Collins, director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute, which aims to strengthen democracies and advocates for a modern immigration system.

With 8 million job openings in the U.S., "our economy is the biggest pull factor for people wanting to move to the U.S., both lawfully and through irregular channels," she said. But Congress isn't debating ways to expand legal pathways to the U.S. and ensure those coming here for work can be vetted through a regular immigration process, she said.

Congress also hasn't increased resources for the over-stretched asylum system to ensure quick decisions can be made on those claims.

"People are very upset about what they perceive to be chaotic immigration, and I think that's fair. Orderly migration is better," she said. "That's not what we have right now because Congress has not wanted to update our immigration system for far too long."

Policy should follow data, not political rhetoric, and research consistently shows immigrants commit less crime than native-born citizens, said Restaino, the U.S. Attorney for Arizona.

By and large, "these are not bad people coming (to the U.S.) and I think the rhetoric sometimes gets in the way," he said. "We really need to let our rhetoric reflect the data that’s out there. There's just no reason to believe people who are not citizens are going to commit crimes at a greater rate."

A recent  of data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, funded by the National Institute of Justice, found that for violent and drug-related crimes, undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens. For property crimes, undocumented people were arrested at a quarter the rate of native-born citizens, according to the study, released in September.

"Mass deportations are not an effective anti-crime strategy, because the population that would be targeted has a lower crime rate than the rest of the population," said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute. "We should absolutely focus on those individuals who are criminals, but spreading law enforcement thin to focus on a lot of folks who aren’t criminals, they just broke immigration law, will actually worsen enforcement of our criminal laws."