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 Buried deep in the Trump administration’s plans to round up undocumented immigrants is a provision certain to enrage Mexico — new authority for federal agents to deport anyone caught crossing the southern border to Mexico, regardless of where they are from. 
 
 If present immigration trends continue, that could mean the United States would push hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, even Haitians into Mexico. Currently, such people are detained in the U.S. and allowed to request asylum. 
 
 President Trump wants them to do so from Mexico, communicating via videoconference calls with U.S. immigration officials from facilities that Mexico would presumably be forced to build. 
 
 “This would say if you want to make a claim for asylum or whatever we’ll hear your case but you are going to wait in Mexico,” a DHS official said. “Those are details that are being worked out both within the department and between the US government and the government of Mexico … there are elements that still need to be worked out in detail. 
 
 Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will travel to Mexico later this week to meet with representatives of the Mexican government. It remains unclear if they will discuss this issue. 
 
 The new authority for immigration agents is among the dramatic, some would say untenable, tactics the Trump administration is preparing to deploy as it upends President Obama’s policies on illegal immigration. 
 
 A pair of memos signed by John Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, and publicly released on Tuesday outline the plans for what present and former government officials say will be a massive roundup of undocumented immigrants. Near final drafts of the memos had leaked over the weekend and had been first reported by McClatchy. 
 
 Officials disclosed that two former Senate aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions drafted the plan without input from career DHS policy staffers. The ideas aren’t new. Many of the approaches described in the memos come from a 1996 law that policy makers and law enforcement agents had disregarded as either unenforceable or absurd. 
 
 “Most of these provisions of law have been there for decades,” the DHS official said. “We are simply trying to execute what Congress has asked us to do.” 
 
 Among them was the Mexico part of the plan, for example, which calls for returning undocumented immigrants “to the foreign contiguous territory from which they arrived.” The memo goes on to point out how foisting the immigrants onto Mexico would benefit DHS’s budget, saying that it would, “save the Department’s detention and adjudication resources for other priority aliens.” 
 
 However, former senior Mexican and American immigration officials said it could very well create new security problems along the border, as authorities in each country push unwanted migrants back and forth. 
 
 The American Immigration Lawyers Association said that the proposal would violate U.S. law and international treaty obligations. Mexico is as likely to embrace the plan as it did the notion of paying for a wall. “I would expect Mexico to respond with an emphatic ‘No,’” said Gustavo Mohar, a former senior Mexican immigration and national security policy official. 
 
 Whether viable or not, the Trump administration’s deportation plans mark a dramatic departure from decades of policy and practice. Current and former immigration policy officials say that while the details of how the administration intends to carry out the plans remain unclear — if not insurmountable — the administration’s overall message to enforcement agents across the country is clear: the limits have been lifted. 
 
 President Obama attempted to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, and on those who were caught while or shortly after illegally entering the country. Still, his administration deported record numbers of immigrants, most of whom had only been accused of minor crimes and immigration violations. 
 
 The Trump administration says it, too, is focused on deporting criminals, but it has redefined crimes to include any activity that might bring a conviction, including entering the U.S. without permission. Effectively, that makes virtually everyone in the U.S. without a proper visa subject to roundup at their workplace or home. 
 
 “If you are present in the U.S. without being admitted or paroled or having overstayed your visa, the immigration laws of the U.S. subject you to removal,” the DHS official said. “Everyone who is in violation of the laws is theoretically subject to enforcement. The Department has limited resources and we will, to the extent that we can, focus on folks who have committed serious crimes.” 
 
 The only clear exception, according to the enforcement plan and the DHS briefing, is for immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers. 
 
 “Anyone who complained about Obama as the deporter-in-chief,” said David Martin, formerly DHS’s principal deputy general counsel, “is unfortunately going to get a taste of what it’s like when someone is really gung-ho.” 
 
 Greg Chen, the policy director at AILA, said the Trump plan would “effectively unleash a massive deportation force with extremely broad authority to use detention as the default mechanism for anyone suspected of violating immigration law.” 
 
 The question looming over the proposals is how many of them, with all their legal and logistical obstacles, will the president actually be able to carry out. 
 
 The memos, for example, authorize the Border Patrol to hire 5,000 new agents, even though the force has never been able to fill the slots it has already been allotted. Some 60 percent of applicants to the Border Patrol fail the required polygraph, and those who pass take 18 months to get sent out into the field. 
 
 The Trump plan calls for the expansion of a George W. Bush-era program, known as 287g, which allows DHS to deputize state and local police as immigration agents. It was touted after 9/11 as a critical “force-multiplier.” But by 2010, some of the country’s largest police departments were refusing to participate because they believed it would shatter the trust between their officers and the communities they were sworn to protect. Meanwhile, participating agencies, which foot the bill for the program, were suddenly saddled with new debts and hounded by accusations of racial profiling and other abuse, forcing the Obama administration to suspend expansion of the program. 
 
 Until now, the enforcement of summary deportation laws, known as “expedited removal,” have been limited to those apprehended within 14 days of illegally entering the country and within 100 miles of Canada or Mexico. The memos signed by Kelly would allow use of those laws anywhere in the country against anyone who entered illegally within the past two years. 
 
 Reader Questions Answered on Trump’s Travel Ban After the chaos surrounding President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees and visitors from seven majority Muslim countries, we received lots of questions. Here are some answers. Read the story. Help Us Investigate Trump’s Travel Ban Are you from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya or Somalia? Did you aid the U.S. military or U.S. journalists? We want to hear from you if President Trump’s now-suspended travel ban is still impacting your life. Email us at [email protected] to share your story. 
 
 Lucas Guttentag, a former DHS adviser and Stanford law professor, said this would “unleash chaos,” violate due process, and meet challenges in court, similar to those that scuttled the administration’s travel ban. 
 
 There would also be aggressive challenges, lawyers said, to plans that would allow immigration agents to deport unaccompanied minor children who crossed the border illegally, rather than uniting them with parents or other relatives in the U.S. 
 
 The reason for discussing unaccompanied minors is “ that they have been abandoned by their parents or legal guardians,” the DHS official said. If it is “determined that there is a parent or guardian in the U.S. that they can be handed over to, then DHS needs to take a hard look over whether that person is actually’’ an unaccompanied minor. 
 
 “There will be a renewed focus on ensuring that folks don’t abuse the system,” the DHS official added. 
 
 They also expect legal opposition to a proposal that would strip undocumented immigrants of existing privacy protections, allowing personal information such as asylum cases or immigration violations to be publicly disclosed. 
 
 “We want to ensure that our privacy policies are consistent with the law,” the DHS official said. “The Privacy Act applies by statute to citizens’’ and green card holders. “The President has asked us to align our laws with what congress has directed.” 
 
 “The Trump people have clearly bought into the model of harsh enforcement. They apparently think, ‘we’ll be tough, and a lot of people will leave on their own,’” said Martin, an immigration law professor at the University of Virginia. “They believe they’ll win in the court of public opinion. I’m not sure about that. A lot of Americans know hard-working undocumented immigrants. The kind of enforcement Trump’s people are talking about will visibly create many more sympathetic cases than unsympathetic ones.” 
 
 Some of the provisions explicitly acknowledge that it could take years before DHS has the manpower and money to pull off what the president has ordered. Immigration enforcement agents, however, have already begun filling the policy void by launching raids and deportations, including some that advocates worry are meant to test the limits. Meanwhile panic has taken hold in many immigrant communities. 
 
 “The level of fear is more than anything we’ve ever seen,” said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She said the plan’s sweep, “sent a chill to my bones,” because it threatens to do irreparable harm to millions of families. She added, “This all seems aimed at changing who we are as a nation.” ||||| WASHINGTON — President Trump has directed his administration to enforce the nation’s immigration laws more aggressively, unleashing the full force of the federal government to find, arrest and deport those in the country illegally, regardless of whether they have committed serious crimes. 
 
 Documents released on Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security revealed the broad scope of the president’s ambitions: to publicize crimes by undocumented immigrants; strip such immigrants of privacy protections; enlist local police officers as enforcers; erect new detention facilities; discourage asylum seekers; and, ultimately, speed up deportations. 
 
 The new enforcement policies put into practice language that Mr. Trump used on the campaign trail, vastly expanding the definition of “criminal aliens” and warning that such unauthorized immigrants “routinely victimize Americans,” disregard the “rule of law and pose a threat” to people in communities across the United States. 
 
 Despite those assertions in the new documents, research shows lower levels of crime among immigrants than among native-born Americans. ||||| The Department of Homeland Security is officially putting the sweeping executive orders that President Donald Trump signed his first week in office into practice — giving the federal government nearly free rein to arrest, detain, and deport unauthorized immigrants wherever it finds them. 
 
 On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued memos to senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that provide instructions for implementing two executive orders President Trump signed January 25, regarding immigration enforcement on the US/Mexico border and within the United States. 
 
 Kelly’s memos direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to treat most unauthorized immigrants currently in the US as “priorities” for deportation. They direct the government to dramatically increase its capacity to detain immigrants, and dictate that it should detain nearly all immigrants caught near the US border. They instruct ICE to work aggressively deputize local law enforcement agents to arrest unauthorized immigrants. And they make it much easier to deport children who come to the US alone to reunite with their parents — and the parents they’re reuniting with. 
 
 Most of the policies laid out in the memos, first signed and issued Friday but later called back for White House approval, won’t change overnight. It’s now the job of agencies, including ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), to do another round of interpretation and implementation based off Kelly’s memos. 
 
 But in some cases — such as the direction to broaden “priorities” — the memos are likely to affect what field agents feel empowered to do. And they’re definitely yet another sign to unauthorized immigrants themselves that they should not feel secure in the United States. 
 
 The memos are a fairly straightforward interpretation of the executive orders. They don’t include the more aggressive provisions that were included in a draft version (reported by the AP and posted by Vox on Friday) of the memo on border enforcement, or some of its more inflammatory language. Some of the biggest changes to enforcement policy are likely to come through formal regulation; others (such as a proposal to deputize state National Guard units for immigration enforcement) appear to have been scrapped. 
 
 But that doesn’t mean the memos are a moderate step. The executive orders they’re implementing sketched out a forceful crackdown on unauthorized immigrants. That sketch is now beginning to be filled in. 
 
 Most, if not all, unauthorized immigrants in the US are now “priorities” for deportation 
 
 The US has more resources devoted to immigration enforcement than it ever has before — both on the border and in the interior of the United States. That escalation, which happened after 9/11 and the Department of Homeland Security’s founding, was met with a desire to direct those resources in the most strategic way. Under the Obama administration, this meant “prioritizing” ever-more-narrow categories of unauthorized immigrants for deportation; by the end of the Obama administration, unauthorized immigrants living in the US who hadn’t been convicted of crimes were at pretty low risk of being deported. 
 
 That era is over. Under President Trump, the massive immigration enforcement “machine” of the US will now have nearly free rein to arrest, detain, and deport unauthorized immigrants wherever it finds them. 
 
 Instead of focusing on deporting convicted criminals, the executive order tells ICE agents to focus on immigrants who’ve been convicted, charged, or “have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense.” Those “offenses” include immigration crimes (illegal entry and reentry are both criminal offenses) and things that are part and parcel of living in the US as an unauthorized immigrant, like driving without a license. 
 
 Indeed, the order prioritizes people who have engaged in “fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter,” which could apply to anyone who applies for a job and pays taxes under a fake Social Security number. 
 
 Furthermore, the executive order tells immigration agents to prioritize anyone they feel is a “risk to public safety or national security” even if they haven’t done any of those things — which is to say, anyone immigration agents want to deport. 
 
 Local police will again be deputized to arrest unauthorized immigrants 
 
 And ICE will have even more resources than it has right now to carry this out. 
 
 The executive order triples the number of agents in ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office. Those agents will be able to resume use of the tool that made it easiest for them to pick up immigrants involved in the criminal justice system. 
 
 Trump is resurrecting the Obama-era Secure Communities program, which automatically examined immigration databases to identify people checked into local jails, then allowed ICE agents to ask local officials to hand over any immigrant they wanted to deport. The Obama administration discontinued the program when many cities and counties started refusing to participate in allowing immigrants to be turned over for minor offenses. 
 
 And the Trump administration is reinvigorating a program known as 287(g), after the relevant provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, that allowed ICE to deputize local law enforcement agents to enforce immigration law, including arresting unauthorized immigrants as part of immigration “task forces.” The memos signed by Kelly direct ICE “to engage immediately with all willing and qualified law enforcement jurisdictions that meet all program requirements” for 287(g) agreements. (Unlike an earlier draft, it does not include state National Guard units as a potential 287(g) partner.) 
 
 The memos explicitly refer to these agreements as a “force multiplier” for immigration enforcement. They’re designed to use local law enforcement for the purposes of enforcing federal immigration law — and provide a funnel of unauthorized immigrants who ICE can detain and deport. 
 
 President Trump has claimed he’s going to target criminals for deportation, but he’s also shown a tendency to characterize all unauthorized immigrants as dangerous “bad hombres.” Using local police to enforce immigration law makes it easy to depict everyone being deported as a criminal — otherwise, why would local police have come across them to begin with? But in practice, the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs aren’t just baskets to catch immigrants, but vacuums that actively suck them up. 
 
 Immigrants could be sent to Mexico first — and formally deported later 
 
 It can take years after an immigrant is apprehended for that immigrant to get deported, because immigration courts are massively backlogged. The executive order signed by President Trump lays out a possible solution: sending people back “to the territory from which they came” while their cases are still pending in immigration court. 
 
 Basically, it’s a “deport first and ask questions later” strategy. 
 
 Under Kelly’s memo, immigration officials would use the “deport-first” strategy for any immigrant apprehended crossing the border who they didn’t think was likely to try to cross illegally again. And the memo directs DHS, as well as the Department of Justice, which runs the immigration courts, to increase its capacity to hear deportation cases over videoconference. That way it can hear cases of people after they’ve been sent back. 
 
 Agents might not want to use this option in most cases — it’s not clear how many immigrants would try to cross once, then be content to hang out in Mexico while waiting for their case to be processed instead of trying again. But it’s possible that some asylum-seekers might be willing to wait. 
 
 It is (to understate things) not a given that the Mexican government will be okay with the US sending people — especially non-Mexicans — back to Mexico for an indefinite period of time while their cases move through a massively backlogged court system. The measure might be intended to pressure Mexico to do more on its own Southern border to prevent Central Americans from coming north to begin with — but to the extent Mexico’s been effective in preventing people from getting to the US, it’s been in large part because of US support. 
 
 Asylum-seekers coming to the US would have a hard time avoiding detention — and getting a fair chance to plead their case 
 
 Under current policy, border officers have a range of options when they apprehend an immigrant crossing into the US — not all of which involve keeping the immigrant in detention. 
 
 The memo signed by Kelly sets a new policy: detention until proven otherwise. 
 
 Trump’s executive order told DHS “to ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for violations of immigration law.” The memo spells out what that might mean: Immigrants caught coming into the US without papers will be detained until they are sent out of the US (or ordered to leave), or until they can persuade an immigration officer that they’ll be allowed to stay in the country for good. 
 
 The biggest reason mandatory detention isn’t already government policy is that many, many of the immigrants coming into the US without papers are here to seek legal status. According to Customs and Border Protection, nearly half of all unauthorized immigrants apprehended crossing the border in the fall of 2016 (from October to December) were either unaccompanied minors or families traveling together. In most cases, these children and families came from Central America; in many cases, they were seeking asylum from violence there. 
 
 Secretary Kelly’s memo implies it might get harder for asylum-seekers to be allowed to stay in the US at all — in or out of detention. 
 
 The first step in avoiding deportation and applying for asylum is to establish to an asylum officer that you have a “credible fear” of being persecuted in your home country. Kelly’s memo doesn’t change the standard for passing a “credible fear” screening, but it does tell the director of USCIS to make sure agents “elicit all relevant information from the alien as is necessary to make a legally sufficient determination” — implying asylum-seekers could soon be asked to start providing evidence that they may not possess immediately upon their arrival in the US. 
 
 Kelly’s memo allows asylum-seekers to get released from detention if they can meet two tests. First, they have to prove to an asylum officer that they have a “credible fear” of persecution. Then they must prove to an ICE agent that they are who they say they are and aren’t a security risk. Depending on how those standards are set, and how ICE agents decide to implement them, that could result in the detention of tens of thousands of children and families. 
 
 Immigrants in detention have a much harder time getting a fair hearing, a lawyer, or time to make their case. This means the government is more likely to send a person who should have qualified for asylum back to her home country, putting her in mortal danger. (It’s a violation of international law for countries to return people to places where they’re unsafe.) 
 
 The government doesn’t currently have the capacity to detain this many people, and Kelly’s memo acknowledges that. It doesn’t put the detention policies in place until the government has the space to carry them out. 
 
 Even under Obama, the government was working to increase its detention space at the border. But detention is expensive. Deporting someone quickly is cheaper than housing them for years and then deporting them. So the expansion of detention creates a strong incentive for the government to deport as many people as possible without a full court process. 
 
 The memo allows the government to deport families seeking to be reunited 
 
 In recent years, thousands of “unaccompanied alien children,” mostly from Central America, have come to the US, often fleeing persecution or seeking to reunite with relatives living in the country (or both). Because the processes for detaining and processing these children are so different, they’ve exacerbated the immigration court backlog and taken resources away from other immigration enforcement. And, to the consternation of many immigration hawks, most of them have been allowed to stay in the US in one form or another. 
 
 The executive order Trump signed last month tells DHS to make sure that unaccompanied children, “when appropriate, are safely repatriated” to their home countries. The DHS memo suggests two ways to do that: by changing the definition of who counts as an unaccompanied child; and by deporting the relatives of children who come to the US to join them. 
 
 Kelly’s memo cites a statistic that 60 percent of children who arrive in the US unaccompanied end up in the custody of a relative. (The Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for the care of unaccompanied immigrant children, usually tries to locate a relative to take care of the child because they have limited capacity.) It suggests that children who are reunited with their parents once in the US should no longer be considered “unaccompanied alien children” within the US immigration system — and should therefore be treated as regular unauthorized immigrants and placed in deportation proceedings. 
 
 Furthermore, it suggests that “parents and family members of these children” who are immigrants in the US, who often pay smugglers to ensure their children make it safely north, should be considered accomplices to human smuggling and trafficking. It recommends that legal immigrants who pay for their children to come to the US be referred for criminal prosecution — and that unauthorized immigrants who do the same be deported. 
 
 Of course, Kelly’s memo didn’t need to spell out that unauthorized immigrants whose children come to the US to reunite with them should be deported. Under his own guidance, if they’ve ever held a job or driven a car, they are now a priority for deportation. They are now not only possible targets, but wholly encouraged ones, for an enforcement machine that is about to be more powerful and less discriminate than it’s ever been. 
 
 Watch: The racist history of US immigration policy ||||| The Trump administration on Tuesday sought to allay growing fears among immigrant communities over wide-ranging new directives to ramp up enforcement against illegal immigrants, insisting the measures are not intended to produce “mass deportations.” 
 
 Federal officials cautioned that many of the changes detailed in a pair of memos from Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly will take time to implement because of costs and logistical challenges and that border patrol agents and immigration officers will use their expanded powers with care and discretion. 
 
 Yet the official public rollout of Kelly’s directives, first disclosed in media reports over the weekend, was met with outrage from immigrant rights advocates over concerns the new policies will result in widespread abuses as authorities attempt to fulfill President Trump’s goals of tightening border control. 
 
 Trump took a hard line against illegal immigration during his campaign, at times suggesting he would seek to create a nationwide “deportation force” to expel as many of the nation’s estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants as possible. 
 
 In a conference call with reporters, a senior Department of Homeland Security official moved to avert what he called a “sense of panic” among immigrant communities. 
 
 (Alice Li/The Washington Post) 
 
 “We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination,” said the official, who was joined on the call by two others, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to answer questions. “This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.” 
 
 The new guidelines, intended as a road map toward implementing a pair of executive actions Trump signed last month, call for the hiring of thousands of additional enforcement agents, expanding the pool of immigrants who are prioritized for removal, speeding up deportation hearings and enlisting local law enforcement to help make arrests. 
 
 The policies represent a sharp break from the final years of the Obama administration and could reverse a sizable reduction in the number of deportations that occurred toward the end of President Barack Obama’s time in office. 
 
 After deportations reached a record high of 434,000 in 2013, intense pressure from immigration advocates prompted the Obama administration to implement new guidelines that focused enforcement on hardened criminals. Obama announced in Nov. 2014 that his administration would deport “felons, not families.” Many undocumented immigrants have lived in the country for more than a decade and have family members and children who are U.S. citizens. 
 
 The number of people deported in 2015 was just over 333,000, the lowest number since 2007, according to federal data. Statistics for 2016 are not publicly available. 
 
 Kelly’s new DHS policies considerably broaden the pool of undocumented immigrants prioritized for removal, including those who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, those who commit acts that constitute a “chargeable criminal offense,” and those who an immigration officer concludes pose “a risk to public safety or national security.” 
 
 The Trump administration “is using the specter of crime to create fear … in the American community about immigrants in order to create an opening to advance the indiscriminate persecution of immigrants,” said Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro, deputy vice president at the National Council of La Raza. “This administration is saying, ‘Now, everybody is going to be a priority,’ and the devil may care.” 
 
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 DHS officials emphasized that the guidelines in Kelly’s memos hew closely to the language of Trump’s executive orders and that the secretary has written the memos to conform to federal immigration laws established by Congress. 
 
 “We are not creating anything out of whole cloth,” the DHS official said. 
 
 Democrats and human rights groups blasted the administration. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) called the policies “xenophobic” and suggested they could lead to racial profiling of minorities. 
 
 “It is irresponsible to treat a hardened criminal the same as an immigrant mother with children for purposes of deportation,” Menendez said in a statement. 
 
 [Trump’s hard-line immigration rhetoric runs into obstacles — including Trump] 
 
 White House press secretary Sean Spicer also denied that the goal of Trump’s executive orders is mass deportations. Rather, he said, the Obama administration had allowed “so many carve outs” on which immigrants were to be the focus of enforcement actions that federal agents “had their hands cuffed behind them.” 
 
 “The president wanted to take the shackles off individuals in these agencies and say, ‘You have a mission, there are laws that need to be followed, you should do your mission and follow the law,’” Spicer said. 
 
 Yet Spicer on several occasions during his daily press briefing misrepresented the number of undocumented immigrants living in the country, citing “13, 14, 15” million, or “potentially more.” In fact, the number has held steady in recent years at just over 11 million, after peaking in 2007 at about 12.2 million, according to a report last fall from Pew Research Center. 
 
 That is in part because of stricter border control measures have flattened the net flow of illegal immigrants to roughly zero, according to the report. 
 
 During his campaign, Trump said he thought there could be as many as “30” million illegal immigrants. “Nobody knows what the number is,” he said. 
 
 Trump’s early attempts to crackdown on immigration, including his executive order banning travel of citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations, have drawn criticism both in the United States and abroad. Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plan to visit Mexico later this week where tensions over the president’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border are sure to be on display. Around the same time, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) will be leading a delegation of lawmakers to the border as Congress wrestles with how to actually implement Trump’s signature campaign promise. 
 
 Kelly’s implementation memos do not overturn one important directive from the Obama administration: a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that has provided work permits to more than 750,000 immigrants who came to the country illegally as children. 
 
 Trump had promised during his campaign to “immediately terminate” the program, calling it an unconstitutional “executive amnesty,” but he has wavered since then. Last week, he said he would “show great heart” in determining the fate of that program. 
 
 But the new directives released on Tuesday seek to expand partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to apprehend undocumented immigrants, hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, and broaden expedited deportations, currently limited to those in the country two weeks or less, to those who have been in the country for up to two years. 
 
 The provisions mandate that the government detain immigrants until they are granted a hearing before an immigration judge, ending the Obama administration’s policy of releasing some to live with relatives until their hearings. Backlogs at immigration courts have delayed hearings for more than a year. 
 
 The provisions also allow federal authorities to prosecute the parents of unaccompanied minors who enter the country illegally if they are found to have paid smugglers. 
 
 DHS officials said the Trump administration is seeking to maximize federal immigration policies that have been on the books for years but were not used by the Obama administration. 
 
 Some of the changes, they said, will take time to implement because of the costs and because some of the policies must be announced through the federal register. Officials declined to estimate the costs for the additional personnel, including more immigration judges to speed up hearings, as well as significant new detention housing for unauthorized immigrants awaiting their court proceedings. 
 
 “This will not happen tomorrow,” the DHS official said. 
 
 “The big picture here is that we’re executing what the president directed, which is consistent with what Congress put into law,” the official added. “We will do so professionally. We will treat everyone humanely and with dignity, but we’re going to execute the laws of the United States.” ||||| New guidelines include people in US illegally charged with or even suspected of a crime, and would send border crossers back to Mexico regardless of origin 
 
 Donald Trump has laid the groundwork for potentially deporting millions of undocumented immigrants by issuing new guidance that drastically broadens the ways in which federal immigration laws should be enforced. 
 
 The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled two memos on Tuesday detailing wide-ranging directives focused on both interior enforcement and cracking down on security along the US-Mexico border. 
 
 'Psychological warfare': immigrants in America held hostage by fear of raids Read more 
 
 The memorandums would enable federal authorities to more aggressively detain undocumented immigrants, expand the pool of immigrants prioritized for removal from the country, and restrict asylum claims by migrants. 
 
 The memos set out that any immigrant living in the US illegally who has been charged or convicted of any crime – and even those suspected of a crime – will now be an enforcement priority. That could include people arrested for shoplifting or minor traffic offenses. 
 
 “The surge of immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed federal agencies and resources and has created a significant national security vulnerability to the United States,” the DHS secretary, John Kelly, states in the guidelines. 
 
 The new policies call for the hiring of thousands of additional federal agents, enlisting local law enforcement to expedite arrests, and deploying more immigration judges. 
 
 One of the documents released on Tuesday appears to be the final form of a draft memo that was leaked to the Associated Press last week. The draft included other extreme measures, including an instruction to mobilize national guard troops to assist with deportations, but this was not included in the final instruction. Although the White House last week denied this draft was an official document, the DHS memos released on Tuesday contained identical phrases to those in the leaked draft. 
 
 The White House denied the new guidance was intended to produce mass roundups or deportations, even though Trump vowed on the campaign trail to create a deportation force and frequently spoke of removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. 
 
 “We don’t need a sense of panic in the communities,” a DHS official said in a conference call with reporters, according to the Washington Post. “We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination. This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.” 
 
 The official added: “The president has been very clear on this issue that he wants to focus on criminals and convicted individuals and folks who pose public safety threats.” 
 
 Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, echoed the official’s view that the guidelines would not result in mass deportations. 
 
 The memos, he told reporters on Tuesday, were about “prioritizing the people who are here who represent a threat to public safety or have a criminal record”. 
 
 “That’s it, plain and simple.” 
 
 
 
 But the memos provide Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents with the ability to effectively target any undocumented migrant who has either been convicted of any sort of crime, has simply been accused of a crime, has carried out minor fraud or is, in the assessment of an Ice officer, “a risk to public safety”. This expansion of deportation priorities is at odds with the Obama administration’s policy, which commenced in 2014, of targeting the removal only of those convicted of serious crimes. 
 
 The memo also instructs the department to restore partnerships with local and state law enforcement bodies that would allow them to carry out federal immigration enforcement themselves. These controversial agreements were phased out by the Obama administration after widespread criticism that they encouraged discriminatory policing, wasted local resources and had little effect in apprehending violent criminals. 
 
 
 
 The department will now be allowed to target any undocumented immigrant who has been in the country up to two years for “expedited removal” – meaning a removal that does not need to be authorized by the court. Under the Obama administration, such removals were only to be applied to those in the country for up to two weeks and who had been apprehended within 100 miles of the US border. 
 
 
 
 Grace Meng, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, argued this move in particular signaled “a desire to put the actions of immigration enforcement agents beyond the basic protections of due process”. 
 
 The guidance does, however, leave in place two of Barack Obama’s executive orders with respect to immigration: the 2012 policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Daca, which sought to protect so-called “Dreamers” who were brought to the US as children from the threat of deportation; and another order made in 2014, which has been held up in courts but allowed millions of parents of US citizens or permanent resident children to stay in the country despite entering illegally. 
 
 Trump told NBC News on Tuesday his administration would “try and take care of the Dreamers very, very much”, but did not elaborate further on his plans. 
 
 Immigration advocates said Daca recipients could still be targeted by the new guidelines, given their broad scope. 
 
 The memorandum also seeks to stem the surge of unaccompanied minors fleeing violence in Mexico and Central America over the last three years. Under Trump’s new policy, parents found to have paid smugglers to bring their children across the border would be subject to prosecution. Thousands of those children would also no longer be protected from deportation. 
 
 Kelly’s memo also describes plans to enforce a longstanding but obscure provision of the US Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the government to send some people caught illegally crossing the Mexican border back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from. 
 
 Some advocates suggested the new directives would result in prompt legal action. “These memos confirm that the Trump administration is willing to trample on due process, human decency, the wellbeing of our communities, and even protections for vulnerable children, in pursuit of a hyper-aggressive mass deportation policy,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project. 
 
 “However, President Trump does not have the last word here – the courts and the public will not allow this un-American dream to become reality.” 
 
 The global waiting room: displaced migrants headed to US in limbo in Tijuana Read more 
 
 Despite the Trump administration’s emphasis on the criminal records of undocumented immigrants, studies have found that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than individuals born in the US. Analyses of US census data since 1980 concluded that immigrant males aged 18 to 39 were incarcerated at rates of one-fifth that of natives, with the gap widening each decade. 
 
 But Trump, while seeking to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiments among a faction of the American electorate, has routinely exaggerated the frequency of violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. He infamously launched his presidential campaign in June of 2015 by falsely declaring of Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” 
 
 Earlier on Tuesday, Trump pledged to unite “a divided country” after making his first visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. 
 
 The president was accompanied by Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate nominated by Trump to serve as his housing secretary, as well as South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who in 2014 became the first African American elected to the Senate from the south since Reconstruction. 
 
 Trump dubbed the one-hour tour of the museum, which opened last September amid great fanfare, “a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry and hatred and intolerance”. At the same time, he used his remarks to praise his victory in the South Carolina Republican primary last March by “double, double, double digits”. 
 
 Trump also addressed recent threats targeting Jewish community centers across the US, following on the heels of criticism by both Jewish groups and Democrats over his refusal to explicitly condemn antisemitism. 
 
 “I think it’s terrible, I think it’s horrible, whether it’s antisemitism or racism or anything you want to think about having to do with the divide,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. 
 
 “And you don’t know where it’s coming from but I certainly hope they catch the people,” he added. “But I will tell you that antisemitism is horrible and it’s going to stop and it has to stop.” 
 
 He added: “The antisemitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centres are horrible and are a painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.” 
 
 Trump insisted he has condemned antisemitism whenever given the chance. But his White House stirred controversy last month for issuing a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that omitted any mention of Jews or antisemitism – and for defending its action by stating many other victims had also suffered and died in the Holocaust. 
 
 Last week, when the president was asked about antisemitism by a Jewish reporter, he dismissed the question as unfair and “insulting”. 
 
 “Number one, I am the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” he said. “Number two, racism, the least racist person.” 
 
 Asked about anti-Jewish attacks during a press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump talked about his electoral college victory before saying he would do everything he could to stop “long-simmering racism and every other thing that’s going on” and drawing attention to Jewish members of his family. 
 
 Steven Goldstein of the Anne Frank Center criticized Trump’s remarks on Tuesday as “too little, too late”. 
 
 “His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting antisemitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record,” Goldstein said. “Make no mistake: the antisemitism coming out of this administration is the worst we have ever seen from any administration.” 
 
 Spicer told reporters he wished the Ann Frank Center had instead “praised the president for his leadership in this area”. 
 
 “I think it’s ironic that no matter how many times he talks about this that it’s never good enough,” Spicer said at his daily press briefing. 
 
 “Today I think was an unbelievably forceful comment by the president as far as his denunciation of the actions that are currently targeted towards Jewish community centers. But I think that he has been very clear previous to this that he wants to be someone that brings this country together and not divide people, especially in those areas.” ||||| White House press secretary Sean Spicer explained the new Department of Homeland Security memos on immigration released on Feb. 21, as "empowering DHS to carry out the immigration laws currently on the books." He said that the departments are still "figuring out" their funding needs to implement the actions. (Reuters) 
 
 The Department of Homeland Security has finally released a series of memos detailing how President Trump’s mass deportations will be implemented. As expected, they scrap most of the enforcement priorities put in place under President Barack Obama, and vastly expand the pool of undocumented immigrants who will now be targeted for deportation. 
 
 Which raises a question: Will congressional Republicans appropriate the money that this will cost? 
 
 The new DHS memos represent a massive change in the way the deportation machinery will now function. Under Obama’s DHS, the removal of low-level offenders and longtime residents with ties to communities was deprioritized, so limited enforcement resources could be focused on serious criminals and recent border-crossers. Now that is no longer the case, as Dara Lind explains: 
 
 Under the Obama administration, this meant “prioritizing” ever-more-narrow categories of unauthorized immigrants for deportation; by the end of the Obama administration, unauthorized immigrants living in the US who hadn’t been convicted of crimes were at pretty low risk of being deported. That era is over. Under President Trump, the massive immigration enforcement “machine” of the US will now have nearly free rein to arrest, detain, and deport unauthorized immigrants wherever it finds them. 
 
 Read Lind’s piece for more details on the various ways in which the new regime will seek to maximize the deportations of these lower-level offenders. But one of the most important includes tripling the number of removal agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, by adding 10,000 agents. 
 
 [How enforcing Trump’s immigration actions could hurt public safety] 
 
 Today I spoke about the implications of this with John Sandweg, who for a time under Obama was acting director of ICE and acting general counsel of DHS. 
 
 Sandweg argues that vastly expanding the pool of targets for deportation is mostly about driving up the numbers of people being deported — by going after the lower-level offenders and longtime residents, or what he calls the “low-hanging fruit.” But that, he says, would divert resources away from going after the serious criminals and recent border-crossers. 
 
 “A lot of this is designed to put up numbers — but in doing so, you diminish the impact on public safety,” Sandweg says, adding that the new policies will “disproportionately impact non-criminals.” 
 
 Now, the way that Trump’s DHS will deal with this is by increasing the number of ICE agents — hence the tripling of them. But that is going to cost money. Sandweg estimates this could cost as much as $1 billion to $2 billion for the first year — because of hiring, training, equipment, and offices. Politico recently put the estimate even higher, at nearly $4 billion per year. 
 
 “Are Republicans going to give them the money?” Sandweg asks. “It’s on Congress now to fund this.” And Congress is already going to have to appropriate money to pay for Trump’s border wall. 
 
 What’s more, Sandweg doubts that even these increased expenditures would secure results that are worth that additional money. That’s because in the end, a large chunk of these additional appropriations might end up getting spent on removing low-level offenders. “Getting 10,000 new agents is not going to get you one-for-one bang for the buck,” Sandweg says. 
 
 Of course, this would drive up the number of deportations. Which, at bottom, seems to be the real goal of the policy. 
 
 I’ve argued before that targeting low level offenders who have been here a long time for deportation is freighted with moral complications. Many came here to better their lives and those of their families in ways that are in sync with American history and values. Many have since developed longtime ties to communities and are currently contributing to American life. Deporting many of them will rupture families and communities. Yes, they broke the law, and the conservative argument that allowing them to remain rewards lawbreaking must be taken seriously. But they are more than mere lawbreakers — or, arguably, they have become more than mere lawbreakers — and these changing circumstances, too, deserve to be taken seriously in deciding what constitutes the most just response. 
 
 What’s more, it needs to be asked whether vastly stepping up deportations makes sense as policy — is this really in the interests of the United States? The core practical dimensions of the Trump administration’s response make it look highly questionable in those terms, too. 
 
 [Congressional Republicans, do your job or get out of the way] 
 
 On this score, you might be tempted to dismiss what Sandweg says, since he worked for an administration with very different immigration priorities. But regardless, the line of questions he has articulated provides a way to evaluate Trump’s deportation regime going forward: Will the increased focus on low-level offenders divert resources from the focus on serious criminals? Will that make us less safe? How much more will it cost to boost our enforcement resources to the point where deporting lower-level offenders does not divert needed resources from serious criminals? Does that expanded expenditure make practical sense? Is the payoff really worth it? 
 
 Over the long haul, it will be worth watching to see whether Republicans actually do appropriate the funds necessary to dramatically expand deportations. It also remains to be seen whether they’ll have the stomach for this if a great deal of press attention focuses on the plight of low-level offenders who are now under serious threat of deportation. 
 
 One last point: The current memos do not rescind Obama’s executive action protecting “dreamers” from deportation and awarding them work permits, under the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for DHS, tells me that for the foreseeable future, work permits will continue to be given out to DACA recipients. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “will continue to process DACA benefits as usual,” Christensen says. 
 
 So Tuesday’s outcome is not a total victory for the immigration hard-liners.
– The Trump administration's massive overhaul of how the US targets and deports undocumented immigrants is becoming clearer after two memos from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly were released Tuesday. The policy changes in those memos could open the door to millions of deportations thanks to classifying most undocumented immigrants as "priorities." Here's what you need to know: Department of Homeland Security officials tells Pro Publica the plan is to send migrants illegally entering the US from Mexico back to Mexico regardless of what country they're actually from. Seeing the reaction to the memos, the Trump administration is currently trying to avoid a "sense of panic" among immigrants, insisting the goal isn't "mass deportations," the Washington Post reports. Officials say undocumented immigrants brought to the US as young children, also known as Dreamers, will only be targeted for deportation if they commit a crime, according to the New York Times. But the Guardian reports undocumented immigrants no longer have to be charged with a crime or convicted of one to become priorities for deportation; just being suspected of a crime is enough, even for minor offenses like shoplifting or traffic violations. The new policy makes detention mandatory for anyone illegally entering the US, which could make it a lot harder for people escaping violence in their home countries to plead their case for asylum, according to Vox. It remains to be seen whether the Republican-led Congress will be willing to pay for the massive expansion of deportation efforts. The administration wants 10,000 new ICE agents, which could cost between $1 billion and $2 billion in the first year, the Washington Post reports. Other cost estimates for Trump's deportation plan are even higher.