Trump Needs a New Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I Volunteer.

I can triple the current deportation rate. Here is how.

On February 21, Donald Trump removed Caleb Vitello, the Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, out of dissatisfaction with the current pace of deportations.

President Trump needs a replacement. I volunteer. I have the leadership ability, intelligence, and drive to deliver results.

ICE has not had an actual, Senate-confirmed director since 2017. For eight years, the agency has shuffled through 11 acting directors. In order to deliver on his promise of mass deportations to the American people, Donald Trump needs someone in the director position that he can trust, someone who can deliver results.

I am the man for the job.

The red power tie shows I mean business.

President Trump deported 37,660 in his first month in office, an average of a little over 1,000 deportations a day. My promise to President Trump is simple: I will triple the current rate of deportations to 3,000+ a day within three months of taking office. My basic aim is to remove a million illegal immigrants a year.

This is a modest goal—it will take years (if not decades) of effort at this rate to remove a majority of illegals from this country. But that is still a good start. It is much better than what we have now.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Mass deportations are possible. ICE has the resources it needs right now to deliver on the President’s intent. We have the legal tools, money, and personnel to begin removing one hundred thousand illegals a month.

So why isn’t this happening?

At core, the answer is this: the willpower to enforce immigration law against illegal migrants simply does not exist. The bureaucracy at the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and even within ICE itself is not set up to enforce the law. “The System” has set up a series of unaccountable institutional roadblocks and “ways of doing things” that prevent sharp decisive action from being taken against unlawful foreign residence in the United States.

In order to overcome that internal friction, a major mindset shift is required. The next director of ICE needs to be an outsider with the sheer determination to see through serious institutional reforms.

The first and most important truth to recognize is this: Deportations are easy. Identifying illegal immigrants and taking them into custody is not hard. Removing people from the country is cheap and simple. 2.9 million Americans get on a plane every day. If just 1% of these people were illegal immigrants heading home, we could deport 10 million people a year.

Put simply, a lack of logistical prowess and resources is not the problem.

For instance, the Department of Justice has, right now, 1.5 million final deportation orders that have been issued but unfulfilled. This means that there are 1.5 million illegal immigrants in America today who have already gone through administrative removal proceedings and could be immediately booted from the country if they were re-apprehended.

There are another 6 million deportation cases open before the administrative law judges at the Department of Justice. Internal estimates from my sources maintain that 98% of the individuals in this system are self-admitted illegal immigrants. This means that the American government has already made contact with more than 7.5 million illegal immigrants.

We know where these people are. They are not hard to find!

The reason they have not been deported is not because illegal migrants are ever so clever but because the American government simply refuses to enforce the law. For one, ICE currently releases some 90% of all illegal immigrants it arrests.

Instead of rapidly processing these invaders for removal while keeping them in detention, ICE releases them while they go through deportation proceedings. Once they are back out on the streets, many never show up for their immigration hearings, roughly a third. An even greater percentage simply never comply with their final deportation order!

These deportation proceedings, mind you, are entirely fake—they represent the Executive Branch arguing with itself, which is absurd.

Illegal immigrants do not have access to Article III courts under federal law. Nor do they have ordinary rights under the Constitution. They have no right to free speech, no right to own and bear arms, no right to a trial by jury, and no right to protection from warrantless search and seizure!

This is because illegal immigrants are not members of the American social compact. They are not subject to our laws in the same way that legal migrants and citizens are. They have neither the duties nor the rights of American citizens.

This is an obvious point. If the Constitution gave rights to everyone on the planet, then American citizenship would have no meaning. We would not give a trial to a member of a foreign military who crossed our border in hopes of conquering our country. We would simply shoot him.

Illegal immigrants fall in the same category as enemy troops. They have crossed our border contrary to law. They represent an existential threat to our sovereignty. Thankfully, however, we do not need to use lethal violence to protect ourselves from illegal Mexican farmworkers.

We can meet the threat they pose simply by loading them onto planes and placing them (gently) back in their countries of origin.

To begin mass deportations, we simply need to process illegal immigrants much more quickly than we do now. Thankfully, this is easy to do since deportations are an entirely administrative matter.

Under 8 US Code §1225(b)(1)(A), an immigration official—meaning an ICE or Border Patrol agent—may issue a final deportation order unilaterally in cases that qualify for expedited removal. Right now, under President Trump, any illegal immigrant who has been in the United States for fewer than two years is vulnerable to removal.

The exception is asylum claims. An illegal immigrant may appeal an expedited removal order to an asylum officer who determines if they have a “credible fear” of returning to their home country.

If that credible fear standard is not met in the eyes of the asylum officer, the illegal alien can appeal that decision to an immigration court. Illegal immigrants who have been here for more than two years jump immediately to this step.

It is right here, at this point of the process, that all of the problems begin. First, an immigration court is not a real court. These courts were not created under Article III of the Constitution.

Rather, immigration “courts” are located in the Executive Branch! The “judges” who serve on these tribunals are simply lawyers from the Department of Justice who have been assigned by the attorney general to review immigration removal cases under 8 US Code §1229a.

Immigration removal hearings are a form of administrative adjudication. In a removal hearing, lawyers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement make the case before lawyers from the Justice Department that an illegal alien should be removed.

This entire charade is absurd, of course. The executive branch is arguing with the executive branch about whether the executive branch can enforce the law!

Here is the source of all of our problems. Administrative law as such is simply unconstitutional. The courts and Congress, for decades, have acted as if executive branch officials possess wills independent of those of the president. This was done for ideological and institutional reasons. Allowing the president to exercise his constitutional powers makes the functioning of the federal government accountable to the people through elections.

Liberals absolutely do not want this to be possible. As the first month of Trump’s second presidency has shown us, the president’s powers as chief executive are very dangerous to the patronage network and institutional power structures created by the left to accomplish their political will.

Civil servants are unelected, cannot be fired, and have wide-ranging powers to make rules and enforce judgments against Americans and foreigners alike. This, at least, is the unconstitutional legislatively and judicially-imposed framework that has dominated Washington, DC, since the FDR administration.

In reality, the Constitution clearly specifies the president’s powers. Article II, Section 1 states that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” There are no exceptions. There is no such thing as an “independent agency” that does not fall under the president’s powers. The president is the chief executive. Article II, Section 3 states that he “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

In light of this fundamental legal reality, the president is well within his rights to remove any and all executive branch personnel who fail to implement his will. If President Trump were a god with a thousand arms, then the large federal bureaucracy would not be necessary. He could enforce the laws himself.

Since he is a mortal, the president requires subordinate agents to carry out his will. The idea that these subordinates have a right, from Congress or the courts, to ignore or countermand the president’s orders is impossible and unconstitutional.

Congress specifies that illegal immigrants must undergo certain procedures in order to be deported. This is the letter of the law. President Trump, however, is well within his rights to determine the outcome of these procedures.

For instance, §1229a(a)(1) states that “An immigration judge shall conduct proceedings for deciding the inadmissibility or deportability of an alien.” There are certain procedural rights that Congress has given to illegal aliens in these proceedings. They are, for instance, allowed to hire counsel at their own expense and to cross-examine witnesses.

However, the law does not specify how long these hearings must last, nor does it require them to be in person. If President Trump wishes that they last only five minutes a piece and that a deportation order be rendered in line with an ICE agent’s initial recommendation for deportation in all cases, he is well within his rights to make such an argument. He is, after all, the ultimate “immigration judge.” These lawyers serve at his pleasure to carry out his will as he sees that the laws are faithfully executed.

In order to achieve mass deportations, we need to take this type of action. The attorney general needs to find immigration judges that will quickly and efficiently process deportation orders. A competent judge could easily process 8-10 immigration cases an hour. Currently, there are 700 immigration judges. Having 100 efficient judges, however, capable of processing 50-80 cases a day would be more than sufficient to generate the necessary 3,000 deportation orders a day to triple the current deportation rate.

At a rate of 6,000 deportation orders a day, we could clear up the entire backlog of 6 million immigration cases before the end of Trump’s term. Where there is a will, there is a way.

Any immigration judge who refuses to comply should be immediately removed by the president.

Streamlining this process would be my first and highest priority as director of ICE. Once deportation proceedings are in full swing, all that is required is to round up illegal aliens, detain them until their administrative hearing, and then final removal by aircraft or land transport.

Currently, ICE spends $2.8 billion a year on detentions and only $420 million on transportation costs. Ironically, the agency spends another $421 million on free health care for illegals in custody. Transportation is cheap. Detentions are not. On average, right now, illegal immigrants spend 50 days in custody. In 2008, it was only eight days. With compliance from the immigration judges, we can easily get to those 2008 numbers.

ICE has other powerful tools that it isn’t using. For one, under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, ICE can deputize local and state law enforcement to carry out immigration law. Right now, just 169 jurisdictions in 22 states have signed Memoranda of Understanding with ICE.

Under my leadership, I would deputize law enforcement agents in every single Trump-friendly county and municipality in the country. My aim would be to create the inverse of sanctuary cities—jurisdictions so unfriendly to illegal immigrants that if any unlawful migrant made contact with law enforcement in these places for any reason, they would be immediately arrested and turned over to ICE for deportation.

In this environment, ICE would never need to conduct community raids. The Enforcement and Removal Operations division at ICE would simply act as a chauffeur service picking up illegals from county jails to take them to federal detention facilities on their way out of the country.

Again, the resources necessary for mass deportations are already available. All that is needed is for the administrative law judges at the Department of Justice to get with the program and to issue final deportation orders.

There is no reason to fear intervention by the Supreme Court. Deportations intrinsically fall under the Political Questions Doctrine articulated by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. The Supreme Court has no right to interfere with purely Executive Branch operations. Since illegal immigrants are not American citizens, they have no right to appeal for procedural or substantive relief from the courts.

Here then is a simple plan of action for conducting mass deportations: deputize local law enforcement in jurisdictions that are willing to comply with federal law; find immigration judges who will obey the president’s intent (sideline those who do not), and then load these unlawful foreigners onto aircraft and remove them.

This is easier said than done, of course. There will be a major internal fight within the executive branch in order to carry out the president’s will and the courts will certainly try and interfere in an unconstitutional manner. But the president has the will of the people on his side. With the right subordinates—men like me—at the helm, these problems can be overcome.

Deporting illegal immigrants is an existential imperative. Our sovereignty depends on the ability of the American people to protect our sacred borders and to enforce the law.

Originally published at American Greatness on February 28, 2025.