BREAKING NEWS
By Favoredjane
WASHINGTON, Under President Donald Trump’s renewed immigration crackdown, speed has become the strategy and the symbol of his promise to deliver the largest deportation campaign in American history.
In recent weeks, deportation flights have taken off mid-hearing, immigrants have vanished into detention centers with no warning, and people have been removed from the country without ever seeing a lawyer, a judge, or even their families.
A flight to El Salvador departed as a federal judge was still deliberating its legality. A mother of two U.S. citizens was deported to Honduras after speaking only to immigration officers. College students have been arrested on sidewalks and quietly shipped to detention facilities states away.
The administration’s breakneck tactics have alarmed legal experts and human rights groups, who say Trump is exploiting legal gray zones to bypass the courts and speed up removals. “One theme that runs through all the Trump administration’s immigration actions this term is its attempt to rush people out of the country without due process,” said Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, who has fought several of Trump’s immigration policies in court.
Even though deportation numbers this February trailed those under the Biden administration during the same period last year, Trump is moving with a new level of urgency and authority in his second term. Surrounded by loyalists and buoyed by a political base that has grown more hardline on immigration, Trump is flexing executive power more aggressively than before.
“This is a much more powerful presidency than I had the first time,” Trump told The Atlantic in April. “The first time, I was fighting for survival… This time I’m fighting to help the world and to help the country.”
That “help,” in the administration’s view, includes invoking the obscure Alien Enemies Act — a wartime power not used in modern immigration enforcement — to justify mass deportations of Venezuelan men suspected of gang ties. Despite a judge’s emergency ruling to halt those deportations, two planes still took off. The judge later suggested the administration appeared to be trying to “outrun” the courts.
While Trump insists the administration will follow judicial rulings, he also told ABC News this week: “I can’t have a trial — a major trial — for every person that came in illegally.”
Critics say that kind of rhetoric reveals the real goal: deport first, deal with consequences later. And with the 2024 election behind him, Trump appears less concerned with pushback — and more determined than ever to make good on his hardline promises.
