Julia Gelatt Transcript — Sept. 17, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:01):
Our next session will provide us with a deep dive into how federal immigration policies are affecting local businesses across America. Really, this is not just a location-based conversation. This is uniformly affecting communities. We’re joined today by Julia Gelatt, the associate Director of the US Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. Her work focuses on the legal immigration system, demographic trends, and the implications of local, state, and federal US immigration policy. You can read Julia’s full bio on our website at nationalpress.org. Julia, thank you so much for joining us today, and I will turn it over to you and your presentation.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (00:55):
Great. Thank you so much for having me. I’m just going to move forward to the podium. I’ve got a presentation I’ll share with you all, but before I start, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the Migration Policy Institute. So we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan, think tank based here in dc. We study a wide range of immigration and immigrant integration policy questions. We do research, we do policy analysis. We recommend ideas for policy reform. Whenever we can, we convene stakeholders and experts and policy makers to foster frank dialogue about how we can improve our immigration policies. So I’m the associate director of our US Immigration Policy Program, which is run by Doris Meisner who led the INS, which existed before DHS was even created. So she is a legend in the field, really in the US Immigration Policy Program. We look at immigration policies, how people come to the United States, and also who gets to stay in the United States.
So we look at interior enforcement, border enforcement, visa policies, all kinds of things. My colleagues in the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy look at how states and localities can best support immigrant families with a special focus on early care and education, K through 12 education, adult workforce and higher education and English language learning. We also have an international program that looks at immigrants and immigrant integration around the world. We have a Latin American and Caribbean initiative, which looks a lot at the Venezuelan diaspora and migration through Central America and Mexico. And then I would also point you to our migration data hub. So that’s a repository of all kinds of data on immigrants. We have a lot of interactive data tools where you can look at characteristics of immigrants, especially at the state level. We have some information at the local level, not as much.
(02:42):
It’s harder to get and just lots of great interactive tools and charts. I was just explaining how our communications director, Michelle Middle stat, used to be a journalist and if you ever want some information about immigrants in your community, she knows our website in and out and upside and down, and she can point you to the best resources or point you to me or other experts at MPI who can help you with whatever it is that you’re working on. This is an incomplete overview I realized of my presentation, but I’m first going to level set a little bit on some broad immigration trends. Who are the immigrants in the United States? How many are there? Where are they? I’m going to talk about immigrants in the workforce, some of the policy challenges around attracting needed workers for businesses. And then the missing part is that I’ll give you a little bit of an update on what’s happening this year in immigration policy, which I could honestly spend a whole day telling you about because there’s a lot that’s happening.
(03:33):
But we’ll cover just kind of some top lines. So the Census Bureau just released the data from the 2024 American Community Survey. So this is a kind of hot off the press number that there are about 50 million immigrants in the United States right now and they make up in 2024 last year, and they make up 14.8% of the US population. For a long time. I’ve been giving these presentations and saying we’re at a historic high in terms of the number of immigrants, but we’re below our historic peak in terms of the immigrant share of the population. But as you can see, we’re now exactly right there parallel with the previous high of 14.8% foreign born that we were in 1890. So that’s quite notable. Of course, back in prior waves of immigration, we had a lot of immigrants coming from Europe, but ever since changes to our immigration laws in 1965 and increasing share of immigrants have come from Latin American countries, especially Mexico and Central America, from Asian countries, and really from all over the world. Immigrants from Africa are also a small but growing share of our immigrant population. I also wanted to talk about the legal status of immigrants, but before I do that, I wondered if any brave volunteer would want to guess what percent of immigrants in the United States are unauthorized immigrants? So of all the foreign born people in the us, what percent do you think are here without status? Does anyone feel brave and they want to guess?
(05:04):
Yeah,
Marlon Hyde | WABE News (05:07):
I would say 2%.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (05:09):
2%, okay. Most Americans actually think it’s a really high percent. So you went the other direction. It’s actually about a little under a third right now, 27% or a little over a quarter I should say, of immigrants in the US don’t have legal status. And actually almost half 49% of immigrants in the US are naturalized citizens. So those are people who came to the United States. They got some kind of legal status. They waited three or five years depending on their situation, took the naturalization test and became US citizens and have the same rights as all other citizens. And then the next, after unauthorized immigrants and naturalized citizens, the next biggest share is people who have lawful permanent residence or green cards. They have the permanent right to live and work here, but can’t yet vote.
(05:53):
Okay. So immigrants in the workforce, and now we’re going back to 2023 data. I haven’t had a chance to update all of this with the latest data, so forgive me that we’re one more year back in history, but I don’t think things have changed super drastically, at least from 2023 to 2024. So immigrants work at higher rates than US born people. So while they’re less than 15% of the population, as you saw just a little bit less, there’s 17% of all US workers, but that varies a lot by state. Immigrants are almost a third of the workforce, about a third of the workforce in California over a quarter in New Jersey, New York and Florida. And you all are from a lot of states, so I didn’t look them all up, but excuse me, immigrants are 5% of the workforce in Kentucky and 6% in Ohio, for example.
(06:42):
So there’s just a lot of variation of the share of workers that are made up of immigrants. Immigrants are particularly concentrated in certain parts of our economy, particularly in vital fields that really support a lot of us, like healthcare, agriculture, elder care and childcare. I think you heard about some of that today. So just to give some examples, 39% of home healthcare aides are immigrants. 31% of butchers or other meat processing workers are immigrants, 38% of software developers and 28% of doctors. So these numbers show you that immigrants are filling high proportions of workforces in both low skilled, high skilled and middle skilled industries. Immigrants are working all across our economy, and immigrants have a different educational distribution than the US born population. So immigrants are more likely than US born people to have less than a high school diploma, but also 35% have a bachelor’s or higher degree.
(07:44):
So similar rates of holding a college degree as a US born, but higher rates of having low educational attainment, which means that immigrants compliment US workers often by filling in lower wage jobs that tend not to be appealing to US-born workers, as well as bringing really high skills that US workers don’t always have and complimenting the US workforce in that way. Immigrant workers are playing an increasingly important role in our labor force as the US population is aging. So we have more people getting older and reaching the end of their lives and fewer babies being born every year. So that means that immigration is a bigger and bigger part of our overall population and labor force growth. These are projections from the Census Bureau. The US senior population is growing while the number of kids is falling. As these trends continue by 2034, the country may have more seniors than children, and by 2041 in five US residents will be aged 65 and older.
(08:44):
In that context, immigration is a key source of labor force growth. And already if we look over the past 20 ish years, immigrants and their kids have been driving all of the growth in our prime working age population and in our labor force. So this graph is a little bit confusing, but the kind of lime green. Okay, so the blue bar is first generation immigrants. Those are people who are born outside of the United States and came to the us. And then the Lime Green bar is people born in the United States who have at least one immigrant parent. And the orange bar is people who are born in the United States to two US born parents, and this is showing the change in the size of the population between 2020 23. So if you focus on the prime working age part of this, people age 25 to 54, you’ll see that the number of immigrants, foreign born people grew by 10 million. The number of their kids grew by 7 million, and the number of US born people with US born parents decreased by 8 million. So that’s to say that if it weren’t for immigration immigrants and their kids, our primary working age population would have shrunk to put that in another way, immigrants contributed to US population growth contributed to all of the growth in the labor force over the past 20 or so years. Before I keep going, does anybody have any questions about anything I’ve said so far?
(10:07):
Yeah,
Kelley Bouchard | Portland Press Herald (10:09):
Yeah. Kelley Bouchard with the Portland Press Herald. I was just wondering how you factor or where your statistics come from related to the undocumented immigrants as a, just curious how that is tallied.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (10:22):
Yeah, that’s a great question. So we at the Migration Policy Institute and other think tanks and also the government itself, we all use this methodology called the residual methods. So basically we take the American Community Survey, which is the Census Bureau’s annual really big survey of Americans, and we look at all of the foreign born people in that survey. And then we look at how many people came legally and got permanent residents in the United States since the 1980s. There was a legalization back in 1986. So most people who came before then are legal. And so we take the total immigrant population minus the legal immigrant population, and then we subtract out all the people in H one B visas and student visas and other things kind of guess at who they are based on their characteristics that leaves the residual of unauthorized immigrants. So basically we assign legal status into the American Community Survey, and we estimate the size of these populations using a mix of survey data, high quality survey data, and then also administrative data on people who came legally. Does that make sense? It’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s sort of like the broad strokes of the methodology. Yeah.
Omar Mohammed | The Boston Globe (11:36):
Omar Mohammed from the Boston Globe. I was curious about how when you talk about undocumented immigrants, does that include folks who were given temporary protective status?
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (11:49):
Yeah, that’s a really great question. So I’m going to go back to that bar graph just so that you can look at that. So yes, our unauthorized immigrant population includes everyone who’s not in one of those other parts. So not a naturalized citizen, not a green card holder, and not somebody with a visa like an H one B visa, a student visa. So in the unauthorized immigrant population slice of that pie, we have people who have deferred action for childhood arrivals, daca. We have people who have temporary protective status. We have people who got humanitarian parole under President Biden, but now they might have it taken away. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that. There are some people who are in the process of applying for asylum and they might have work authorization through that. So there are a bunch of people in that unauthorized immigrant slice who do have some kind of legal status.
(12:40):
Partly it’s really hard to count those people because there’s a lot of overlap in those different groups. That’s one reason why we don’t break them out. The other reason is that those are all temporary and non secure legal statuses as we’re seeing very much this year. And so we made the decision to lump them in. I have gotten the feedback that unauthorized immigrant is the wrong term, and I actually agree with that, but I don’t know how I to have a consistent term over time that sort of encompasses this wide variety of statuses that keep changing. So we’ve stuck with that even though it’s a little bit imperfect for who’s in there.
(13:16):
Lots of immigrants come to the United States through all kinds of channels. People come as refugees, they come through family-based channels, they come across the border and sometimes ask for asylum. Lately they’ve come through humanitarian parole, but the official way that employers who want to hire a foreign born worker are supposed to do things is that they could sponsor them on an employment based visa. So I wanted to talk a little bit about our employment based immigration system, which is built on a framework from 1952, and it was last updated in 1990, and Congress has found itself completely unable to update our laws since then. So we know that immigrants are driving our labor force growth. We know that immigrants bring a lot of helpful features. For example, I already mentioned that immigrants compliment the skills of US-born workers. So immigrants are sometimes interested in jobs that US-born workers don’t want to take, especially jobs that involve working outside or working with elderly people or things that are physically demanding.
(14:19):
Immigrants also help with geographic mismatches. So immigrants having already made an international move, are more likely than US-born workers to move inside the United States. Often there are jobs available and they aren’t always where the workers are available in US-born workers for a whole lot of reasons are less likely to move than they were in the past, but immigrants are more likely to move to where those jobs are to help match those geographic mismatches. And immigrants will also be helpful as our population is aging because they tend to come at prime working ages, growing our tax base to support the programs that support our older adults and just growing the workforce overall. So immigration can be helpful, but it’s hard to bring more immigrants legally to the United States because we have this really old system. We also have a system that has really specific categories. We have various immigration slots that people can try to slot themselves into, but lots of workers don’t fit.
(15:10):
So we have the H one B visa program, which is for people who have a college degree and are filling a job that requires a college degree. That’s great. We have the H two A visa, which is for people working in temporary and seasonal agricultural jobs. That’s great. We have the non agricultural H two B visa, which is used for other seasonal things like ski resorts or summer resorts or landscaping processing seafood that’s harvested in a particular season. But there are all kinds of jobs, home healthcare aids construction, the dairy industry where there’s absolutely no visa that’s available through this temporary visa system. And then our permanent employment based immigration system really values high skills. So it’s mostly for workers who are coming with a bachelor’s or higher degree. But our visa system, our permanent visa system is also really small. We only have 140,000 employment based green cards available each year, even though our economy is absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year. And our immigration system is plagued with backlogs. I forget what I have slides about. So this is the total number of green cards that the US issues every year, and this is to show you that almost all of them go to family-based immigrants. That’s an important value that people can reunite with their families. But you’ll see that that employment based preference slice, that’s the 140,000 visas, that’s a pretty small share of our overall permanent legal immigration system.
(16:39):
Yeah, and then we also have backlogs. So we have annual caps I already mentioned. We also have per country caps. So no country can take more than 7% of visas through a specific category, but our temporary visa system doesn’t have that per country cap. So we have a situation where our H one B visas are used primarily by Indian nationals and also Chinese nationals, and many of their employers want to keep them, and many of those workers want to stay, but they’re facing backlogs that are actually at this point, I think it’s maybe 200 years long. If you just calculate out how many visas are available each year for India and how many people have already applied for an employment-based green card, people won’t survive to get to the front of the line. Some people find other ways they marry a US citizen, they fall in love and marry them, but other people give up and they go back home because there’s no way for them to stay here even though they’re a worker that’s valued. We also have, as I already mentioned, we have about 13.7 million unauthorized immigrants, including those people with temporary legal statuses in the country. Maybe two thirds of them have been here for 10 years or more, and most of them don’t have any way to get in line and get legal status.
(17:49):
So at MPI, we’ve proposed that it’s long, long, long past time to update our 30 plus year old visa system for employment-based immigration. These are just some of the broad strokes of our proposals, which is there should be more employment-based immigration. Not to say we need to cut family immigration necessarily, but it would benefit the country in all kinds of ways to have more employment-based immigration. Those visas could be much more flexible and who can access them? So they should be available across the skill level. If there are employers who have tried and they can’t find us workers to fill jobs, and these are jobs where there’s consistently really strong demand and not enough supply of workers, the employer should be able to use the visa category for that kind of job. There should also be temporary to permanent pathways. It doesn’t make sense to have one set of rules for temporary visas and a totally different set of rules for permanent visas.
(18:39):
We should facilitate the way that people move through the system and facilitate that pathway from temporary to permanent. And then we also need a system that’s flexible. We can’t wait 30 plus years on Congress to keep updating our laws. Other countries like Canada, they have a different governmental system of course, and they update their visa caps and categories and requirements. Sometimes every two weeks they say, oh, we have too many applicants in this way and we need more people in this category. And they adjust. They tweak things a little bit. It’s really great for them, and we have to just wait and keep hoping that Congress might someday pass a new law. Any questions before I move on to today’s policy changes that we’re seeing?
(19:23):
Okay, so trying to follow everything that’s happening in immigration policy in 2025 is a really difficult task. And there are some topics where I’ve stopped trying to say, what is the policy today? And I just say, excuse me, here’s what the Trump administration is trying to do, and it’s in litigation, and then someday the court, we’ll figure it out and then we’ll have an answer because policies are on again, off again, on again, off again. So I’m going to zoom out just a little bit and tell you about some of the broad sweeping changes. So first focusing on the border. Of course, in recent years, we’ve seen really large numbers of people coming to the US Mexico border and trying to come into the United States. Some of them crossed without authorization, some waited for permission to cross. Many of them asked for asylum on day one.
(20:13):
When President Trump came into office, he declared a national emergency. He basically foreclosed the possibility of getting asylum at the border, and people around the world heard the message from President Trump that now was not the time to come to the border. The number of border apprehensions, the number of people encountered at the US Mexico border had been falling last year anyway, but you can see that that fall became even sharper between January and February. So the bottom darker orange line, I guess that’s showing this is by fiscal year. That’s why it starts in October, but that’s the current fiscal year. Last year is the lighter orange line. So you can see already the numbers were decreasing last year, but basically in July, 2025, there were fewer than 8,000 border encounters at the US Mexico border compared to over a hundred thousand in July last year and over 200,000 in July, 2022.
(21:09):
So we’ve just seen a really, really big changes in what’s happening at the border. Many fewer people coming. The UN does a survey of migrants in Central America and Mexico. They just released it last week, I think, or the week before. And they said for the first time ever, the migrants that they interviewed, more of them said they were heading to Mexico than said they were heading to the United States. 43% said Mexico was their destination versus 14% who said the US was their destination. So migrants who have been moving through the Americas have somewhat given up on the idea of coming to the United States or seeing the United States as a place that they want to go. This of course, has caught off a source of new workers even if some of those workers didn’t have work authorization. Employers, immigrants tend to find jobs, and employers tend to find a way to hire people sometimes, even if they’re not here legally. So that’s what’s happening at the border broadly.
(22:05):
We already started talking about the fact that there’s lots of people who have some kind of temporary legal status in the United States. So under President Biden, hundreds of thousands, millions of people came into the United States with a temporary status called humanitarian parole that gives people the temporary right to live and work in the United States. Usually it was granted for about two years. So almost 937,000 people came to a legal crossing point at the US Mexico border and made an appointment through the CBP one app and asked for permission to come in, and most of them were paroled into the United States for about two years. 532,000 people came through the Cuban Haitian Nicaraguan Venezuelan parole program. They had US sponsors and US communities who said they would support them. Over 240,000 Ukrainians came through the Uniting for Ukraine program. They also had sponsors. Tens of thousands of Afghans came, and the Biden administration also expanded who had access to temporary protected status, which also gives the temporary right to live and work in the United States to over a million additional people.
(23:09):
There’s a lot of overlap in who came and got parole, and then also who has TPS at this point. But the largest number of TPS holders have been recently from Venezuela, followed by Haiti, followed by a bunch of other countries. The Trump administration has ended almost all of these programs and protections. So the Trump administration has moved to end TPS for about a million people. So rewinding back to the much smaller TPS population that we had when President Biden took office, the courts have for now blocked that the termination for some of the countries, including for the Venezuelans. But the status of that is honestly very confusing because a lot of Venezuelans already lost their protections and already lost their jobs. So the court’s saying that they can have it back, it’s pretty unclear what that means for anybody. All of the CBP, almost all of the CBP one people have had their parole revoked and their work authorization terminated. The same with the CHNB people, the Uniting for Ukraine folks, technically they’re able to renew their protections, but that’s been a really slow process and some of them have fallen out of status. So nationally there’s a pretty large number of people who have just lost their work authorization. And in certain communities where more of these migrants have arrived, especially Florida where a lot of the South Americans went, it’s a lot of people that have lost their work authorization.
(24:35):
Okay. I also want to talk just a little bit about the legal immigration system and what’s changed. So I already said that Congress is in charge of deciding who gets to come to the us. They’re in charge of our visa policy. They decide all the rules and the annual caps, but administrative actions by the executive branch, they also matter. The Trump administration is taking the position that the role of the agencies that vet people for visas, that their main role is to prevent fraud and to enforce the law, which makes sense. What that means is that there’s a lot of vetting and a slowing down of our legal immigration system. So we’ve seen kind of a back and forth in administrations. And if somebody’s been interviewed by the government, do they need to get interviewed again if they’re getting another kind of visa, or if they’ve already given their fingerprints, do they need to give their fingerprints again?
(25:25):
Or if they’ve interviewed at a consulate before, should they need and now they’re getting a different kind of visa, should they show up for an in-person interview or could that be waived? The term administration is requiring more interviews, more fingerprinting, more vetting, requesting more information. We don’t have great data to see how that’s playing out yet. In January through March, so the first three months of this year, we saw slower processing at US Citizenship and Immigration Services than in prior quarters. We’ve heard that they’ve lost a whole lot of staff. A lot of people took the fork in the road buyouts and those kinds of things. The Department of Labor plays a role. They have to certify that employers have tried to find a US worker and failed, and they’re moving a lot more slowly. Even then. They’re very slow processing that they were doing in recent years.
(26:09):
And then the State Department visa issuance data doesn’t really show very clear trends, but there’s some initial signs of a slowing down. So we could see a slowing of our legal immigration system also. But of course, the biggest initiative of the Trump administration on immigration is the Mass deportations campaign. So this has really been the singular focus. The Trump administration has pulled in all parts of government into immigration enforcement. The placement of the National Guard here and in LA got attention, but that is happening alongside a big ramp up in ICE agents in here in Chicago, in LA and other communities. The administration has pulled many different agencies into immigration enforcement instead of their regular duties, including the FBI, the A TF, the Drug Enforcement Agency, US Marshals, even the IRS. This is a picture that journalist Amanda Moore took at the Rhode Island Avenue, DC Metro Station, and it’s a little hard to tell in this picture, but the guy closest to you, his vest says IRS. So that’s IRS agent. The next person, it just says police the guy to his left, it says, or woman. Woman, it says HSI, which is ice. It’s a part of ice, the Homeland Security Investigations. And then there’s someone who’s over by the trash cans, his says US Park Police. So I thought that was great that in this one picture she was able to capture sort of the alphabet soup that we have that’s doing immigration enforcement or other kinds of law enforcement altogether.
(27:37):
As a result of this big push into immigration enforcement, the number of immigration arrests has tripled from about 300 a day to maybe 900 a day from the best we can tell from the data, ICE is detaining the highest number of people ever. 60,000 people up from 40,000 in January and has deported 216,000 people since President Trump took office that we have in clear data. DHS also says that they’ve deported in total over 330,000 people. And we don’t exactly know how that number is broken down because it’s not super transparent, but that definitely includes some people who are deported by CBP by our border authorities. It might also include some people who came to airports or legal crossing points and were turned back around. Sometimes Canadians come to the US Canada border, the agents ask them if they smoke marijuana and they say Yes because it’s legal there. And then the US government says, Nope, you can’t come in. That didn’t used to be counted as a deportation, but it seems like maybe that kind of thing is being counted. These numbers aren’t super transparent. So we think that deportations could reach 500,000 to 600,000 this calendar year, which is of course not the 1 million that the incoming Trump administration had talked about.
(28:54):
And it’s hard to put in a historical comparison because when more people are coming to the border, the number of deportations is higher. But anyway, so that’s sort of where we stand on that.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (29:04):
Could you repeat the two numbers you gave us for how many detentions since Trump took us? Okay. Yes, that’s exactly,
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (29:14):
Thank you. I forgot to that line. Yeah. So 216,000 people deported by ice. DHS says 330,000 total, including deportations by the Customs and Border Protection, and then the detention number is about 60,000 people in ICE detention.
Marlon Hyde | WABE News (29:35):
Marlon Hyde WABE News in Atlanta. The last thing you said was very, I dunno, it kind of stopped me in my tracks for a second. You mentioned that there’s more deportation when there’s more people showing up at the border. So in the way, are you implying that there are people who are just deciding like you’ve mentioned earlier, but they’re just deciding altogether, stay away from the us and is that being influenced by these mass deportations or just from the overall immigration policy that is being pushed?
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (30:09):
Yeah, so I think there’s two different things there. One is yes, I think there is a huge deterrent effect and people coming to the US Mexico border right now, the Trump administration has basically tried to send the message that the border is closed. It kind of is closed. People really can’t access asylum. The people who are coming to the US Mexico border, they’re being held in border patrol stations, and then they’re almost always then being transferred into ICE detention and then the administration would put them into removal proceedings and try to remove them. Sometimes they can do that through a really quick process, and sometimes that can be harder to do depending on the court ruling of the day, but people who come to the border can generally be removed pretty quickly. So I think that there is a big deterrent effect that’s causing people not to even try to come to the United States.
(31:00):
Anecdotally, I’ve also heard we also get a lot of questions about self deportations, and we have absolutely no data about that. Normally I just call that immigration people come, they leave. That happens all the time, but we don’t have data on this. There are anecdotes. I know people whose family members have gone back to Mexico. Those people that I know, they were older folks who planned to retire in Mexico and they moved up their date of moving back. I’ve also heard stories of people. I know a woman who was living in a Mexican border town and she said that her town had seen maybe dozens, maybe a dozen, I don’t know. Venezuelans walking across the US Mexico border into Mexico, and they said, I don’t want to get deported to a foreign prison. I don’t want to get deported to South Sudan. I want to take my faith into my own hands and leave myself before I end up in some bad situation.
(31:53):
I don’t know how to get out of, but the magnitude of that we don’t know how to measure. And if any of you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them because I’m really trying to figure that out. I mean, one thing I wondered is if we would start now that school is in session most parts of the country, if we would see fewer children of immigrants enrolled in schools, but we’re also seeing kids not showing up to school. Their parents are scared. So I think it’s hard to know kind of the total number. Consulates and embassies are saying that more especially I think the Mexican consular network has set a lot more people have come in to register their US born kids to get Mexican passports, which is a step that people sometimes take when they’re about to leave the country, but it’s also a step that you take when you’re planning just in case you have to suddenly leave the country.
(32:35):
So it’s been hard to figure out how to know how many people are leaving. The administration certainly keeps telling people, Hey, you can go home and we’ll give you some money and you can use our app, but we really don’t know how many people are taking that up. But then the other thing that your question raised is that so when people come to the border in large numbers that they’re generally easy to remove unless they can show that they have the foundations of an asylum claim. And so our total deportations numbers have been bigger in years. When a lot of people come to the border and are easy to remove, it takes a lot more resources and time to find someone in the United States, arrest them, detain them, put them in removal of proceedings, and then eventually deport them from the us. So those interior deportations tend to be lower. So it’s a little bit hard to compare the five, I said there might be 500 to 600,000 deportations this year. It’s a little bit hard to know how to compare that to last year, which was a really different situation or even 10 years ago, which was a different kind of different situation. It’s a little bit hard to put that in historical comparison.
Marlon Hyde | WABE News (33:40):
I had another one of just how much does it cost? You mentioned that it’s resource intensive to go and find somebody, and I don’t expect that money to be coming out of the president’s pocket. So how expensive is all of this?
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (33:54):
Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t think I can dig out of my memory what the average cost of a deportation is, although I definitely have seen that number. Congress in the reconciliation bill, it passed the summer, appropriated tens of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement, for detention, and for ICE operations. So all of us in our annual taxes are paying for a really big ramping up of this immigration enforcement system. We’re just at the beginning of that. ICE is on its hiring campaign. They’re offering $50,000 bonuses and student loan forgiveness and all kinds of incentives. We know that they’ve been asking local law enforcement agencies or looking for staff from local law enforcement agencies, which local law enforcement agencies don’t love that because they can’t compete with that kind of offer and they need their staff or their staff. And so yeah, that ramping up is just starting and it is going to be a really large amount of money. And I know we have those figures, but I don’t have ’em in my head. Yeah.
Tanya Babbar | Hearst Connecticut Media (34:57):
Sorry, two quick questions. One is just a clarification, sorry slash repetition, but on the note about self deportations, you had mentioned there’s a lot of people who don’t want to be sent to a country they’re not from and want to take fate into their own hands. I haven’t been to immigration court a lot in my time, but I was there a few months ago and I saw a woman ask to, she wanted to do voluntary deportation, and we were just there to watch for ice at the courthouse that day. But I remember the judge said no and said she had to keep going through removal proceedings. I didn’t get a chance to speak with her, but she was very upset and I never understood, I didn’t get a chance to follow up with someone about if you know what that in terms of the legal structure, if there’s a reason why a judge would at some point during a removal proceeding, because I feel like I’m hearing there’s an uptick in people wanting to give up on going through their proceedings at all because there’s such a hopelessness to it that is there a reason within the legal system they wouldn’t even let you switch course is one question.
(36:12):
And the second is if you could just repeat what you meant by interior deportations. I think I might’ve missed that.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (36:19):
Oh, yeah. So on voluntary departure, I’m not sure that I fully know how common it is for the judge to say no. I could imagine. So there’s a bit of trust that has to happen in that kind of situation because especially if somebody’s out in the community and they’re in removal proceedings, I think there’s a fear that someone will ask for that as a way to just disappear into the country and live their life as an unauthorized immigrant and not actually leave the government. When you ask for that, the government then asks you to send them your plane tickets to confirm that you actually left the country, but if you don’t, then now if they want you out of the country, they have to come and find you and arrest you. And that might be one reason why. I also think there might be because this administration wants to reach a certain number of arrests per day and a certain number of deportations.
(37:13):
I think they’re also trying to keep people into that deportation pipeline, a person who might be on the way to being deported, and so that way they would count as that number. But I think one of my colleagues would know, but I don’t know in the normal, if we had talked about this, if you had been there last year, would you have ever seen that situation? I think I’m not fully up to speed on that. And your second question was, oh, interior deportations? Yeah. Okay. So in the data that we get from the government, sometimes we can see of all the deportations that happen in a year, how many of them started with an ice arrest versus with a customs and border protection arrest? And that was a nice way to sort of try to say, this is how many people were living their lives in the United States and then they got arrested and then they got deported, versus this is someone who just arrived at the border and then got deported.
(38:00):
I’m a little worried that those statistics are going to be kind of like, I don’t know, squiggly this year because CBP is out in our communities, right? CBP has jurisdiction within a hundred miles of the border, which is here. It’s Chicago, it’s Seattle. It’s like most of our country, most of our population is within a hundred miles of the border. So if CBP is doing arrest in communities like here in dc, I don’t know if that would then count as a CBP arrest and then A CBP or a deportation that started with the CBP arrest or if they would put that into the ICE category. Hopefully someday some statistician at DHS can answer this question for us, but because I think those are two really different phenomena, if you’re arrested inside the US and you’ve been living in the US versus if you’ve just come to the border,
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (38:45):
Ashley Murray states newsroom, I think that I read somewhere that ICE or D-H-S-D-H-S will be the most well-funded law enforcement organization in the world after the reconciliation package. And so I’m wondering, we looked at this graph where we see the border crossings really plummet. Perhaps I have a blind spot, but my mind automatically thinks like, well, what is this agency going to do now? Like the immigration portion of DHS? So I don’t know if you’re institute has thought about this or has any written pieces predicting this or maybe we just don’t know.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (39:41):
Yeah, I mean, I think that we’ve had this whole flip, so two, three years ago when the number of people coming to the border was really, really high customs and border protection mostly has jurisdiction at the border. Usually most of their staff are along the southwest border with Mexico, a few of them up there with Canada and their border patrol is watching for people crossing the border without permission and trying to apprehend them and process them for removal. And then ICE is mostly in local jails and prisons trying to identify people who don’t have legal status and then deport ’em. But in the last couple of years, when the number of people coming to the border was so high, ICE was actually detailed to the border to help out CBP because they needed help. They were understaffed. There was just a massive processing job of so many people that they were encountering because people were turning themselves into border patrol. They weren’t trying to run away. They were trying to find border patrol and say, I’m here. I want to apply for asylum. I’m scared to go home. Get me into the system. Now we see the opposite. We see CBP helping ICE out in the community.
(40:52):
We estimate 13.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the us. So even if nobody else came across the border and nobody else joined that population, that’s a really big population here without status ICE’s mandate is to find those people and remove them from the country. Do they need more help? Is it important for our country to find every one of those people and arrest them and deport them? Congress has just said we think that DHS should be doing more of that, finding people within our communities in the United States and arresting them and deporting them. And so that’s where the resources are going is to those ICE agents who identify unauthorized immigrants and arrest them. It’s also going to build out our detention system to grow it even further and to buy, I guess, planes and buses for the actual deportations, like all of the things involved in holding people in custody and then physically removing them from the United States.
Rachel Jones/NPF (41:46):
I want to make sure we have time for you to finish your
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (41:49):
I’m almost there also. So yeah, so I wanted to talk about work site enforcement. This has been in the news a lot because of the arrests at the Hyundai LG battery plant in Georgia in general. We’re seeing more work site arrests under the Trump administration. We we’re seeing a ramping up of this, and this is happening in workplaces all across the United States, even in Puerto Rico, it’s working at different kinds. It’s happening at different kinds of places as well. Some of these arrests are long planned operations. The one at Hyundai lg, I understand the investigation actually started last year, and some of the arrests are like ICE was in LA and they went to a carwash and they thought, here’s a bunch of Latino folks in this carwash. Maybe we could find out if we can arrest them. So site enforcement can look different things.
(42:43):
Some of the investigations do take time, so we’re probably going to see a ramping up of work. Site enforcement. ICE arrests happen in a variety of ways more broadly. So they happen at work sites, they happen out in the community. Like here, ICE is driving around and it feels like they’re pulling over work trucks, but I don’t know exactly how they would describe what it is they’re doing. And it also happens through local jails and prisons. So over the past decades, I think most ice arrests actually happen when somebody is arrested by local law enforcement, maybe for a traffic violation, maybe for a murder, maybe for something in between. And then ICE interviews. People in the jails or prisons ask ’em about their immigration status. If people either have a record already, like their fingerprints match, somebody who has a removal order or someone’s known to be in the country without status, or if the person admits like, Hey, I don’t have any kind of papers.
(43:39):
You’ve asked me enough questions that I have to tell you I don’t have papers. They can be put into deportation proceedings. That has been the main pipeline. I’m going to be curious to see when we finally get the data to explain what’s happening this year, whether most arrests are actually happening through local prisons and jails, or whether a lot of arrests are happening out in the community. We know things like some people have been allowed with discretion to stay in the us, but they have regular check-ins with ice. A lot of those people are getting arrested. That would be like a community arrest. People who have some kind of criminal court hearing, they’re getting arrested in those courthouses. People are getting arrested at work sites out in the community. So we may see that balance kind of shift. But historically, ICE has depended a lot on cooperation with local law enforcement to let them into the jails to share information, to hold people for ice.
(44:28):
So sometimes ICE asks local law enforcement to hold someone up to 48 hours for ICE to take custody when that person is deported. Some jurisdictions will do that and some won’t. And then there’s a deeper form of cooperation called 2 87 G agreements where local law enforcement can be deputized to do some of the functions that ICE does, and that takes different models. There’s the jail model where the local law enforcement staff in the jail will do a screening with the migrant to see if they might be in the country illegally, and then ICE will do the rest. The warrant surface officer agreement is a newer agreement that was created in the last Trump administration. It’s also a jail model, but it’s sort of a lighter touch like the local law enforcement does a little bit less, and then ICE does a little bit more of the work.
(45:10):
The task force model was actually ended in the Obama administration because there were found to be a lot of civil rights violations. But under the task force model, in the course of carrying out their other law enforcement duties, local police and sheriffs can ask people about their immigration status. So if they pull someone over for some kind of traffic violation, then they can ask some questions about their immigration status and then put them into deportation proceedings. This graph is just showing this year how much the number of 2 87 G agreements has increased. And I actually got a press release in my email as I was coming over here that there are now a thousand to 87 G agreements that have been signed between local law enforcement and DHS and Florida has required, as I understand it, all local law enforcement agencies to sign these agreements.
(45:57):
So that’s a big part of the growth, but it’s also been kind of a growing trend across the country. So I just wanted to end by pointing out that I think it’s pretty clear, but that if fewer people are coming to the United States because you sent the message that they shouldn’t come and they can’t come, if you’re taking away work authorization from people who were granted work authorization, you’re slowing down the legal immigration system. I didn’t even mention that our refugee resettlement is on pause. We may see our immigrant population shrink this year. Preliminary data suggests that it’s already shrinking, but that’s pretty data. With a small sample size, it’s a little bit hard to parse out, but certainly we’re not going to see the growth in our immigrant population that we’ve seen in recent years. And if we want to grow our economy, if we want to keep prices low, if we want to keep growing our labor force, that’s going to take immigrants given that we’re having fewer kids collectively.
(46:46):
So I think that some of the goals of this administration are a little bit intention, and we’ll have to see how this plays out. We’ve seen, I think the beginnings of conversations in Congress. People don’t want to, members of Congress don’t want to necessarily confront the Trump administration right at this point. But I think that a lot of members of Congress are hearing from their localities that employers need workers and employers don’t know how to find those workers and that the immigration policies are not helping them. So we’ll see how that all plays out and whether there’s some appetite for visa reform, which again, would be really great to have in this country. It’s very much beyond needed. So happy to take any other questions in our last five, six minutes. Yeah, right here.
Christian LeDuc | The Cincinnati Business Courier (47:28):
My name is Christian LeDuc. I’m with the Cincinnati Business Courier. Do you have any data or have you heard anything from people that work in ICE about are they leaving because they don’t agree with their bosses, essentially because it’s just at work, and so they have their own views and they’re being forced to essentially do these things in the way that it’s presented in the press. I know as journalists, were not supposed to have opinions on things, but it’s pretty negative. I mean, they’re seen tearing people from their families and people don’t like them. And so at the end of the day, it is just a job. Are they having trouble recruiting or is it just certain people really want to do this job? It seems like that was never the case. They didn’t sign up for this type of law enforcement when they signed up to be in this agency, but now they’re having to do this.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (48:17):
I haven’t seen any data on that at all. I think the administration did tell us, and I’m forgetting what the number is, but how many people signed up in their initial hiring push? I think they said We’ve had this many applications. I want to say a hundred thousand, but I could be getting that completely wrong. And then so many tentative offers. So certainly people are signing up. I mean, that $50,000 hiring bonus and student loan forgiveness, that’s a pretty big offer. But yeah, I don’t know. I’ve been wondering that too. I mean, you see the videos in liberal cities like DC or Chicago of people just screaming at ICE and telling them to be ashamed of themselves. And I don’t know how that makes people feel about their jobs, or if they just sort of feel like, well, here I am doing my job. Why are you yelling at me? I don’t know how that affects ’em. So I don’t think we’ve seen that. And there’s been these buyout offers all across the government. So it might be a little bit hard to tease out leaving because they’re discontent versus leaving sort of there’s attrition across the government. But it’s a good question.
Rachel Jones/NPF (49:11):
Olivia is next. And then Andrew.
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (49:14):
Hi, I’m Olivia Evans with the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky. You mentioned that there we’re seeing more investigations into different work sites, and I’m just wondering how do you find the investigation data? I imagine a lot of it would be preliminary or whatnot, but I know the Department of Labor has databases for their preliminary investigations into OSHA stuff. And at least from my efforts, I’ve used some OSHA records to see things around our immigrant workforce. But I think these work site investigations that you mentioned could perhaps prove more fruitful for things that I’m looking for. So just trying to figure out how I find those.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (49:47):
Yeah, that’s a good question. Please feel free to send me an email and I can ask someone else to get back to you. But I think that we only know about them in retrospect, and that we only know about kind of the aggregate number. I’m not sure that we are given a full database of all that happens. I mean, we tend to track it through news reports, ICE likes to put out press releases when they do work site enforcement. So we’ve kind of tracked those. And then I know I’ve seen aggregate data of the number of different investigations that ICE does. There’s the I nine investigations. Did people do the paperwork checks when their workers were hired, but other, how many employers were fined. But even that has been a little bit, from what I remember, it’s been hard to patch together. The Congressional Research Service had a good report, and in the last term, administration ICE had this whole page about work site enforcement. It had all these numbers, and then they stopped doing that. So I think it’s a little bit inconsistent, but yeah, feel free to reach out and I can see what I can figure out.
A J Johnson/Bridge Detroit (50:44):
Hi, I’m Alina Johnson. I’m with Bridge Detroit. I wonder if there’s any breakdown of the data that you have on immigration arrest and deportations in Detroit. A DPS student was on a field trip and got picked up. And when I worked at GAO right here in the district, we audited DHS for fragmentation and duplication as an annual report. And I wonder if anyone is tracking students affected by IMPORTATIONS and arrests, if that’s even a statistic that we could look for.
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (51:35):
Yeah, I don’t think that we would know that. So there’s this project called the Deportation Data Project at Berkeley Stanford to get them mixed up. One of those two. Does anybody know they have been submitting regular FOIA requests of ICE data, and they’ve started to get regular polls of ICE data that’s individual anonymized records of ICE arrests. And so I know some data analysts, we haven’t had the capacity to analyze ’em ourselves, but I know some analysts have started analyzing those because there is some detailed information. But I think it’s really messy about the arrest location. I think that might have age, and it might have some, some kind of indicator of the arrest location, but that’s not going to tell you necessarily who’s a student because any given 18-year-old may or may not be a student. I don’t think you’d be able to tell that. It’s a really good question, but I’ve never seen data that would identify that.
Savannah Hawley-Bates | KCUR (52:32):
Hi, I’m Savannah. I’m with KCUR in Kansas City D. So Kansas City is, the metro is split evenly along a state line. And I report a lot on unions and labor groups, and they talk a lot about workers who are undocumented, who are essentially trafficked across state lines because they’re in Missouri. And then they get taken to either Kansas or Indiana or Illinois or something for work, but then that would qualify them for a T one Visa. And I’m wondering if those, but at the same time, it’s hard to get workers to try to get a T one Visa because they’re scared of just getting punished for speaking out against their employer. And I’m sure that’s gotten worse. Now. Do you have any numbers on T one visas or any insight into that that would be helpful to look into? And then my other question is how regularly are those 2 87 G agreements, I guess, uploaded for maybe a foia?
Julia Gelatt/Migration Policy Institute (53:41):
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think that all, it used to be the case that all of the 2 87 G agreements were on, there’s a 2 87 G agreement page that DHS creates, and I think all the agreements are there, but I think, yeah, and I think that they used to be more individualized and detailed in the agreements, and now they’re pretty proforma, but I, you can find them all. I always just Google 2 87 G and that’s the first result that comes up is that page on TV visas. I’m trying to remember if there’s any, I know we get the annual number of TV visas and I’m not sure we get much else besides that. So yeah, that’s the tricky one.
Rachel Jones/NPF (54:21):
We are once again, fortunate in that Julia has said that she wants you to reach out to the Migration Policy Institute if you do have more questions and you do want to pursue these kinds of stories. So let’s take this opportunity now to show our thanks to Julia Gelatt for joining us today.
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