The Logoff: The truth about “mass deportations”

The Logoff is a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff — the newsletter that gives you the Trump news you need so that you can log off and get back to the rest of your life. A quick request: If you’ve found this newsletter useful this week, please forward it to a friend and tell them to sign up — it really helps us out.

President Donald Trump made headlines today with a threat to do something he can’t accomplish on his own: attaching conditions to disaster aid for California. We’ll see if Congress goes along. Instead, I want to focus on an area where he does have power: deportations.

Mass deportations were one of Trump’s most controversial promises. Now, the Trump administration is claiming they have begun, touting deportation flights on military aircraft and ICE’s arrest of more than 500 people on Thursday. 

But deportation flights went out all the time under the Biden administration — all that’s new here is the use of military aircraft. And 500 arrests are, essentially, a normal day for ICE, at or below their daily average during the final year of the Biden administration.

So why am I hearing about this now? A hallmark of the first Trump administration was the president taking something that was already happening and claiming it was the result of his revolutionary leadership. That seems to be what’s happening here.

So were mass deportations an empty threat? No — they just aren’t happening instantly. Throughout the campaign, experts cautioned that  deportations on the scale Trump was promising — and his team wants to deliver — would require massive spending on ICE agents and detention facilities. Republicans in Congress are promising to deliver those resources. But none of that means they can do it right away.

What has changed already? Many things, including a Trump executive order that gives federal immigration agents the authority to raid schools, churches, and other sensitive locations. It remains to be seen how often they’ll use it. (ICE is denying a report of agents attempting to enter a Chicago public school, and it’s not clear yet what happened.)

And with that, it’s time to log off …

I finished today’s edition and started to doomscroll immediately — but numbly reading social media doesn’t change the future and it doesn’t make me happy. So I was grateful when I remembered this good Vox piece about the mental and physical health benefits of a short walk. I hope you find it useful too. See you back here on Monday.