Trump’s rhetoric focuses on mass roundups as a spectacle of fear, but the criminal legal system remains the primary tool for carrying out deportations. The new administration has already stated its intention to expand 287 (g), agreements that deputize local police as immigration enforcers.

Some of them were murderers. Some of them were rapists. Some of them raped a child. Some sexually assaulted a child,’ the border czar said.

The Trump administration has moved with lightning speed to roll out the president’s immigration agenda, effectively closing off the US southern border to asylum seekers, severely limiting who’s eligible to enter the United States and laying the groundwork to swiftly deport migrants already in the country.