President-elect Donald J. Trump has said little about the specifics of how he would carry out the promised largest deportation effort in American history. But immigration experts say it would be nearly impossible to execute without some critical assistance, particularly from jails and prisons.
Mr. Trump’s promises have provoked fears of wide-scale roundups across cities and states. Yet the more efficient path might be persuading — or forcing — far more of the people who run the nation’s jails and prisons to open their doors to federal immigration agents to find and deport undocumented prisoners.
Thomas D. Homan, a senior immigration official in Mr. Trump’s first administration who will now be the “border czar” in charge of the nation’s borders, has a well-documented preference for picking up migrants in jails. It takes just one officer, he has explained, to pick up multiple immigrants each day inside a county or state lockup.
In recent weeks, Mr. Homan has tried to draw attention to areas known as sanctuary cities that refuse to hand over certain immigrants detained by the local police or allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement into their jails and prisons.
“New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the major cities in this country are still sanctuary cities, and either President Trump’s got to reissue the lawsuit,” he said last month. “And look, if they’re not going to help us, then we’ll just double the manpower in those cities.”
Mr. Trump said on Sunday that ICE would be “starting with the criminals.”
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