The Obama administration ended up replacing Secure Communities with something that (theoretically) sets much clearer and more limited rules for when someone gets turned over to ICE. To critics, the administration was capitulating to sanctuary cities.

The Bush administration empowered local police who wanted to help with immigration enforcement. The Obama administration pioneered a way to get cooperation from local police and politicians who didn’t want to help turn in immigrants. The Trump administration could easily do both.

Under Bush, no unauthorized immigrant was “off limits” for deportation
Even more important than how many people get deported, though, is who ought to be deported.

President Obama used a strategy called “prosecutorial discretion” to prioritize the deportation of certain types of immigrants (especially those convicted of crimes) and discourage deporting others (like parents of US citizen children).

It took most of his presidency to figure out a way to turn this into a consistent policy across the vast immigration enforcement bureaucracy, and he never got all the way there. But the practical result was that many otherwise law-abiding unauthorized immigrants didn’t have to worry nearly as much about being deported in 2016 than they had in 2008.

In contrast, George W. Bush’s immigration policy tended to reflect the philosophy that all unauthorized immigrants in America ought to feel that deportation was a possibility at any given time — because if they felt the pressure, they might be inspired to leave on their own before ICE got to them. (You might recognize this as the theory of self-deportation.) 

Supporters of this strategy see it as a really important part of maintaining the rule of law against unauthorized immigration. They believe that if you have broken a law, and you don’t feel afraid you might be punished for it, the law might as well not exist.

child hugging detainee father

This is the philosophy that Trump’s key immigration advisers — from longtime ally Sen. Jeff Sessions to transition staffer Kris Kobach — subscribe to. It’s extremely unlikely that it won’t become the policy of his administration.

The most obvious consequence of this is that the Trump administration almost certainly will, as candidate Trump has promised, end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which grants protection from deportation (and work permits) to unauthorized immigrants who entered the US as children or young teens. 

The 700,000 or so people who currently have protections under DACA could lose them as soon as the first day of the Trump administration.  Trump’s DHS would have their names, addresses, and biometric information. It might choose not to use that information to track people down — but nothing in its philosophy would stop it.

The Bush administration staged big, headline-grabbing workplace raids

There’s more to immigration enforcement than deporting people. The federal government also puts a lot of energy into ensuring that people working at US businesses have legal authorization to do so.

The Obama administration has used what it calls “paper raids” — it asks businesses to provide proof that all of their employees are working in the US legally, and if the business can’t prove that within a certain amount of time, it faces penalties. This is an efficient way to do things, and it focuses on penalizing the employers rather than the employees (an unauthorized worker might lose her job because her employer is facing a “paper raid,” but she isn’t as likely to get deported).

But critics, including Republicans who are now Trump advisers, think this strategy lets unauthorized immigrants working illegally and lets those who hire them off too easily.

The Trump administration, therefore, is likely to go back to the physical raids favored by George W. Bush’s administration — which were often huge, high-profile operations including coordination among multiple police departments and SWAT team–level technology (like police helicopters).

The Bush strategy was much more likely to lead to criminal charges and deportations for the unauthorized workers who got arrested by ICE agents during the raid (though, under Bush, employers often escaped serious punishment).

In some cases, like the raid of a meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa, in 2008, a workplace raid traumatized and destroyed an entire community. Postville lost half its residents, and, the LA Times wrote a year later, “the family-like community of high school football game gatherings and homey weekend meals inside cafes began to unravel.”

To people who think the federal government needs to crack down on unauthorized immigrant labor, constant awareness of the threat of deportation is a feature, not a bug. Workplace raids are almost certain to come back.

Bush deputized local police to act as immigration enforcement squads

Immigration law is federal law, and local police usually aren’t in a position to enforce federal laws. But under a provision of federal immigration law, local police forces can get deputized for immigration enforcement — allowing them to arrest suspected unauthorized immigrants, giving them access to federal immigration databases, etc.