When Donald Trump won a second term as US president a year ago, members of violent militias and far-right extremist groups who had spent years boosting the lie that the 2020 election was rigged were ready to assist the president with delivering on one of his main campaign promises: mass deportations.
“I’m willing to help,” Richard Mack, a former sheriff who founded the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, told WIRED at the time, claiming he was in touch with Tom Homan, the man Trump installed as his “border czar.” Tim Foley, head of the Arizona Border Recon, which describes itself as a “non-government organization,” also told WIRED he was in contact with administration officials. William Teer, then head of the far-right Texas Three Percenters militia, wrote a letter to Trump offering his help. Homan even met with an affiliate of the Proud Boys after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed. According to reports about the meeting, they discussed deportations.
Despite all of these militia leaders and far-right extremist groups salivating at the prospect of being deployed to the streets of American cities to round up immigrants at gunpoint, the call never came.
Instead, the Trump administration has remade the federal government so completely that it has no need for far-right formations from outside the government to traumatize and terrorize immigrant communities across the country. Instead, it is relying on a vastly increased federal force encompassing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), FBI and DEA agents, state and local law enforcement officers, and others. This newly enlarged force is emboldened not only by a massive influx of cash but also by tacit approval from the White House to do whatever it feels is necessary to meet Trump’s wild deportation goals.
“What we’re seeing right now is the Trump administration effectively realigning the federal government to support mass deportation,” says Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “This has meant diverting law enforcement resources from several agencies that have never before been involved with low-level immigration arrests, so that they are now focused only on profiling and arresting immigrants.”
As devastating as the past 12 months have been for immigrant communities in the US, experts believe the worst is yet to come. Installing CBP, which has a documented history of alleged human rights violations, as the agency at the forefront of the immigration crackdown is a deeply worrying sign, they say.
“I think we’re just at the beginning,” says Naureen Shah, director of government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I think we ain’t seen nothing yet. They will scale up dramatically in the coming [months].”