JD Vance Says Trump Immigration Policies About Numbers, Not Rights

Vice President JD Vance has confirmed the driving force behind the Trump administration’s immigration policy is achieving a high level of deportations. Concerns about due process or economic impacts are of secondary importance if they hinder progress toward that goal. The Trump administration has not focused enforcement on individuals with criminal convictions but cast a far broader net in pursuing deportations.

JD Vance’s Defense Of Trump Immigration Policies

On social media, Vice President JD Vance stated that Trump officials view deporting large numbers of individuals as its top immigration priority without regard to due process.

“To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors,” said Vance on X.com on April 16, 2025. “To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin. When the media and the far left obsess over an MS-13 gang member and demand that he be returned to the United States for a *third* deportation hearing, what they’re really saying is they want the vast majority of illegal aliens to stay here permanently.”

A key passage discusses the tradeoff between achieving an administration goal of deporting millions of people vs. addressing concerns about due process. “Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals,” wrote Vance. “And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year? If the answer is no, they’ve given their game away.”

Vance wrote that people asking for more due process “don’t want border security.” He said, “They don’t want us to deport the people who’ve come into our country illegally. They want to accomplish through fake legal process what they failed to accomplish politically: The ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.”

Trump Immigration Policy Has Been About Numbers Rather Than Deporting Criminals

While Vance discussed deporting gang members on social media, the Trump administration has not focused deportation on dangerous criminals. About one week after Donald Trump started his second term, government officials made clear that generating large numbers of deportations took priority over targeting criminals. On January 26, 2025, Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti of the Washington Post reported, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been directed by Trump officials to aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500, because the president has been disappointed with the results of his mass deportation campaign so far, according to four people with knowledge of the briefings.”

White House officials told ICE field offices to arrest at least 75 people daily. (At the state level, arrest quotas have been discouraged because they can lead to questionable police tactics.) An earlier article predicted an emphasis on numbers: “A top priority for U.S. officials involved in the Trump administration’s deportation efforts will likely be to generate large numbers. Analysts expect efforts at targeting criminals or convicting a business owner in a workplace raid will be secondary to the bureaucratic goal of driving up deportation numbers.” (Stuart Anderson, Forbes, January 20, 2025)

The Trump administration has not updated its removals page, nor has it reported on the percentage of deportations that involve people with criminal convictions.

In past administrations, limited resources led Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus on people with criminal convictions. In FY 2024, ICE reported, “Over 81,312 (71.7%) of the 113,431 arrests were of noncitizens with criminal convictions or pending charges.” Even during its first weekend, when the Trump administration wanted to highlight bad actors, only 52% of the 1,179 ICE arrests were considered “criminal arrests,” according to government data obtained by NBC News. Since then, the drive for numbers escalated, and the percentage of criminals arrested likely trended lower.

“About 90% of Migrants Deported to El Salvador Had No U.S. Criminal Record,” headlined a Bloomberg article about a government flight to the Central American country. “The reality is that of 238 migrants—mostly Venezuelan—that officials accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang and expelled to the Central American country in mid-March, just a small fraction had ever been charged with serious crimes in the U.S,” according to Bloomberg.

CBS News reported that the Trump administration intends to send immigrants without criminal convictions to a U.S. prison in Cuba. “A government memo obtained by CBS News shows the Trump administration created broad rules outlining which migrants can be held at Guantanamo Bay, allowing officials to send non-criminal detainees there despite a vow to hold ‘the worst’ offenders at the naval base.”

In remarks reported in April, “The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages,” according to the Arizona Mirror. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”

A Wider Net And Cutting Corners To Reach Immigration Goal Of One Million Deportations

The Trump administration has cut corners and limited due process in a rush to achieve its goal of deporting at least one million immigrants in 2025. “As the Trump administration aggressively pushes to deport more immigrants during the president’s first year back in office, one aspirational number keeps coming up in private conversations, according to four current and former federal officials with direct knowledge of the plans: 1 million,” reported the Washington Post.

Trump officials have adopted policies that make more sense when viewed from their perspective in light of their goal to reach one million deportations. These include limiting due process to speed deportations and expanding the pool of potential deportees by ensnaring people in the country lawfully. That may explain the administration’s eagerness to deport international students with minor infractions and to end deportation protections for people with humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status.

The administration may have stretched the law by asserting it could deport individuals without due process by declaring members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua subject to the Alien Enemies Act. Administration officials wanted to use the Alien Enemies Act to facilitate quicker deportations. Many attorneys question whether a gang member qualifies as an “alien enemy” since the law requires a “declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.”

A second issue relates to sending individuals to a Salvadoran prison, potentially for life, paid by U.S. taxpayers, based on the judgment of American government officials that the men are members of Tren de Aragua. The Trump administration did not provide hearings to allow the individuals to refute they were gang members or challenge the constitutionality of the president invoking the Alien Enemies Act. It appears ICE officers claimed people were gang members based largely on tattoos or other evidence that attorneys may have rebutted.

Several relatives have asserted their son, sibling or spouse are not gang members. The news program 60 Minutes highlighted the case of Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist sent to El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center because of his tattoos.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has said the Trump administration will not bring back to the United States Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran sent to El Salvador in what the Trump administration concedes was an administrative error. “The Trump administration has accused Garcia of being a MS-13 gang member, a charge he denies,” reported BALTV News. “Garcia has never been convicted or charged with a crime and in 2019, a judge in Maryland granted him a ‘withholding of removal’ status.” He is married to a U.S. citizen.

In effect, the Supreme Court asked a district court to work with the Trump administration on returning Garcia. However, Trump officials have said a court cannot tell a president how to conduct foreign policy, even though the U.S. government is paying the president of El Salvador to house individuals deported from America.

The implications of the case have raised concerns across the ideological spectrum. The Wall Street Journal editorial page cited a concurrence to the Fourth Circuit decision by Reagan appointee Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who believes District Judge Paula Xinis’s order to the Trump administration did not violate the president’s control over foreign policy.

“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” wrote Judge Wilkinson. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”