Under the administration of US President Donald Trump, there has been an unprecedented convergence of the issues of immigration and transnational organized crime in rhetoric, policies, and enforcement strategies. The first six months of his presidency have seen policy declarations such as the “Take Back America” initiative that bring together immigration enforcement with efforts to tackle transnational organized crime, and the rollout of mass deportation campaigns that officials claim prioritize members of transnational trafficking networks and gangs with roots in Latin America, such as MS13, or Mara Salvatrucha, and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua.
To find out more about how this is playing out in the United States, InSight Crime spoke to Doris Meissner, a former Commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, an independent, nonpartisan think tank that researches and analyzes immigration and integration policies.
InSight Crime (IC): We’ve seen this rhetoric from the Trump administration really focusing on organized crime as an immigration issue. How have you seen that from a policy standpoint from what we’ve seen of the administration so far?
Doris Meissner (DM): In the final weeks of the election campaign, Trump increasingly focused on immigration as a threat to national security and the well-being of Americans, and he constantly painted criminality among migrants with a very broad brush. There certainly is a criminal dimension to migration, but he conflates the serious criminality of cartels and gangs and transnational crime with people who have been in the United States and have possibly committed crimes in the US, but certainly are not part of any sinister international conspiracy.
Coming into the inauguration and into the presidency itself, he continued to say “mass deportation is among my highest priorities,” and certainly now we see the mass deportation initiative unfolding. There definitely are people that have criminal backgrounds that are being arrested and removed, but for any particular month or any set of data that we have, it’s about half. Sometimes it’s 60% of people that do not have a criminal background, sometimes it’s 40%, 45% — it varies. But the criminality is often for much lesser crimes than belonging to Tren de Aragua or MS13. In general, our research shows that migrants commit crimes at a lower level than native-born Americans, but even to the degree that they do commit crimes, there is a smaller number within that who would actually be proven to be members of gangs or cartels. Now, that’s not to understate the danger and the viciousness of what some of these gangs have done and the crimes that they have committed in the United States, as well as transnationally. But that is by no means representative of migrants overall or even of the migrants that are being deported.
IC: The administration has also claimed a certain percentage increase in arrests and deportations of gang members. Is that something that’s differentiated in the statistics?
DM: No, that’s not how the numbers are being reported, so we don’t have any visibility into that. There will be press releases along the way of a particular operation, but in general, it’s hard to know what the share of gang members would be from the people arrested and removed that are termed “criminals.” Then there is this whole discussion of what makes somebody a gang member. Even if they are reporting detained gang members, how they derive who actually is a gang member also does raise questions.
IC: There also doesn’t seem to be any ability to appeal or challenge that decision once they have come to the conclusion that someone is a gang member. Is that something that you would say is different or particular to this administration?
DM: That is different, and it is connected to this whole idea of returning people to prisons in other countries. One of the things with deportations in the past is that when you do have dangerous criminals and you return them to their country of origin, one of the concerns has always been, will that country just set the person free, in which case a dangerous person who may continue to commit crimes is not being in any way punished or tracked. But those have been much more discrete kinds of cases. What’s happening with this administration is there’s an enormous amount of publicity surrounding it all and an enormous effort to use these kinds of returns, certainly to El Salvador and places like CECOT [The Terrorist Confinment Center – Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, where Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua were sent] as a way of encouraging people to self-deport and encouraging fear within immigrant communities. And that is part of the policy goals of this mass deportation initiative.
IC: Another thing that seems different is the extent to which they’re involving other agencies that might otherwise be typically investigating transnational organized crime and criminal groups in immigration enforcement. Is that something that you’ve encountered before, or again, is that something particular to this administration?
DM: In prior administrations, there definitely were efforts to involve other agencies, but they would not have been this kind of street-level enforcement, they would have been through task forces that were multi-agency in order to investigate serious conspiracies. And those were the kinds of cases that sometimes take years to build and require the authorities of a number of different federal criminal law enforcement agencies. So multi-agency cooperation is not a new thing, but not in the way that we’re seeing it now with agents going out on the street who basically are not trained in immigration law enforcement.
IC: If you’re rolling these other forces into immigration enforcement, does that risk weakening the capacity to carry out these more long-term, complex investigations?
DM: I have to infer that they do, because the whole pressure here is for numbers. Just take ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] itself. ICE is made up of two parts: ERO, Enforcement and Removal Operations, and HSI, Homeland Security Investigations. And it’s the Homeland Security Investigations part of ICE that would be building much deeper cases. I don’t know how much of that workforce is being tapped to do street level enforcement as compared to building cases, but I have to imagine that some of it is being redirected, because the whole effort here is numbers. It is not an effort aimed at the standard forms of deterrence, which is to tackle the underlying drivers of some of these criminal activities.
SEE ALSO: Could US Deportations Compromise Trump Administration’s MS13 Crackdown?
IC: There’s a long history of the evolution of criminal groups being related to these cycles of deportation and immigration. Do you see any signs that this kind of feedback loop of deportations and immigration is being factored into these strategies?
DM: This feedback loop is incredibly interesting and troubling. So much of this gang activity, at least the gang activity coming out of El Salvador, does go back to the 1980s and 1990s and gang activity in the United States, particularly in Los Angeles and Southern California, and the efforts of earlier administrations to deport criminals. Well, many of those criminals that were deported from Southern California to El Salvador were the seeds of what are today very well developed transnational criminal organizations. So it does raise the much bigger, broader historical question. One of the answers that the Trump administration is giving is that you return people to third countries where they don’t have any connections and where they don’t have an established network to fold back into. But I don’t believe that is the reason for that. I think that the reasoning for the idea of returning people to third countries is to increase fear and to increase incentives for people to self-deport on their own.
Featured Image: People wait in line to board a flight deporting migrants from the United States, May 24, 2025. Credit: US Government / Wikimedia Commons