'Increasingly sloppy': Analyst warns angry Trump applying pressure for deportation ramp up

President Donald Trump is angry that his policies aren't yet leading to the number of daily deportations he promised his supporters, and taking it out on his advisers, according to reports. But as he ramps up the pressure, he is likely to wreak terrible harm on communities around the country, wrote Hayes Brown for MSNBC.

"There’s no reason to interpret the relatively slow start as a sign that the promised immigration crackdown might not be so bad," Brown warned. "The rising pressure to get deportation numbers up will likely yield increasingly sloppy and inhumane measures as the dragnet is thrown ever wider."

Trump is being advised by Tom Homan, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who has raised controversy by suggesting U.S. citizen children can be deported as part of entire families, and threatening to arrest Democratic officials who stand in the way of mass deportation efforts.

"The Washington Post reported last month that senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been told that 'each of the agency’s field offices should make 75 arrests per day and managers would be held accountable for missing those targets,'" wrote Brown. "Given ICE’s 25 field offices, that would mean 1,200 to 1,500 daily arrests, a massive increase from the few hundred per day under former President Joe Biden."

In fact, deportations during the Biden administration far surpassed those during Trump's first years in office, with the 12 months from May 2023 seeing 740,000 undocumented immigrants removed from the U.S. — the highest number since 2010, the Washington Post reported.

And this all comes as Trump removes temporary protected status from a number of groups, including Venezuelans who fled from authoritarianism and economic devastation — prompting their Trump-supporting friends and relatives in the Venezuelan-American community to feel betrayed.

"Taken together, the expanded powers ICE has received, attacks on legal immigration and quotas are a recipe for a humanitarian and civil rights disaster," Brown warned. "Demanding that rank-and-file ICE officers hit an arbitrary number of arrests transforms the people being swept up into mere figures in a spreadsheet. Further, it’s impossible to achieve the numbers Trump wants without being indiscriminate. Administration officials may claim that the priority will be on arresting and deporting 'criminals,' but we’re already seeing how unlikely that will be."

And things could escalate even further, he concluded — Trump's efforts to reinterpret the 14th Amendment to revoke birthright citizenship, currently blocked by the courts, could become "the next feeding grounds for an ever-hungry deportation machine, constantly on the search for new groups to expel from America in the name of MAGA."