Baumgartner, Crapo and other NW lawmakers weigh in on Trump’s first 100 days of deportations

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans won control of the House, Senate and White House in 2024 on a campaign promise to conduct “mass deportations” unlike the United States has ever seen.

While Trump pledged to deport “millions and millions” of immigrants in his address to Congress in March, his administration got off to a relatively slow start, with fewer deportations in February than under former President Joe Biden a year earlier, as NBC News reported based on data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But after the number of migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally reached a historic high under Biden, that number fell in March to its lowest level since the government started releasing the data in 2000.

In an interview at the Capitol on Thursday, Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, attributed that dramatic reduction in illegal border crossings partly to the high-profile arrests and deportations the administration has carried out, with broad support from Republicans even as judges appointed by Trump and previous GOP presidents find many of the moves unlawful.

“I think if the Trump administration was elected to do anything, it was to crack down on illegal immigration,” Baumgartner said. “In the big picture, they’re making a lot of success on that. If you want the signature accomplishment of the Trump administration in the first 100 days and why people put Republicans in charge, it was to try to bring some common sense and some reasonableness to this out-of-control illegal immigration situation.”

Democrats see Trump’s policies as lawless, immoral and authoritarian – anything but common sense – even while some Democratic politicos have been reluctant to engage in a political battle over immigration, an issue they worry is favorable to Republicans. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., showed no such reluctance when she took to the Senate floor for a speech on Wednesday.

“Over the past month we have seen a wave of righteous outrage across the country in response to President Trump’s completely lawless move to disappear hundreds of people to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, without even the barest semblance of due process,” Murray said, before enumerating some of the recent cases that have enraged Democrats, stoked fear among immigrants and reinforced the strongman image that drew many supporters to Trump.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to the prison in El Salvador, claiming without presenting evidence in court that they are all gang members and “terrorists” and invoking an 18th-century law and claiming that their unlawful entry into the United States constituted an act of war by their home country. A Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas rejected that argument in a ruling Thursday, after the Supreme Court in April blocked the administration from using the wartime authority to deport others and ruled that the men have a right to appear before a judge.

It sent a Salvadoran man to that same prison despite a judge’s order barring his deportation there, then admitted the mistake, but has refused to let him return to his family in Maryland even after the Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” his return and Trump admitted he had the power to do so, contradicting his own administration’s position. The government has claimed the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is a member of the MS-13 gang but hasn’t presented evidence in court to back up the allegation, which he denies.

It sent three U.S. citizen children to Honduras when their mothers were deported, including a 4-year-old with cancer who was removed without access to vital medicines, according to the families’ lawyers, who denied the government’s claim that the mothers wanted to take their children with them. Another of the American children was sent to Honduras despite the 2-year-old girl’s father filing an emergency petition to keep her with him in the United States, prompting a Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana to say he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The administration’s crackdown on immigrants has extended beyond those living in the country illegally, encompassing foreign students with lawful permanent resident status who protested Israel’s war in Gaza.

Trump has signed 181 immigration-related executive orders in the first 100 days of his second term, compared to just 30 such actions in the same period of his first term, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Some of those actions have sought to remove protections for as many as 4 million immigrants who have been allowed to live in the country under humanitarian parole, Temporary Protected Status and other programs, according to MPI.

Crackdown, but possible reform

The pace of the deportations and the lack of court hearings for the affected immigrants have raised concerns among civil liberties advocates that the rights of immigrants and even U.S. citizens could be violated in Trump’s aggressive push to fulfill a signature campaign promise. But Republicans from the Northwest and across the country have largely dismissed concerns about the lack of due process.

In a brief interview at the Capitol on Thursday, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho Falls, called the recent removals of U.S. citizen children “pretty technical problems” and said that anyone who comes to the United States illegally should be deported.

“Not really,” Simpson said when asked if he was concerned that immigrants aren’t getting their day in court. “Due process is for American citizens.”

Simpson has long been an advocate of immigration reform for farmworkers, about half of whom are unauthorized immigrants, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates. The Idaho Dairymen’s Association has estimated that as much as 90% of the workforce in the Gem State’s dairy industry doesn’t have legal status, largely as a result of Congress failing to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws for nearly 40 years.

Simpson said he had met on Wednesday with representatives of agriculture and labor groups and expected that legislation would be introduced “in the next couple of weeks.” The GOP lawmaker said he had urged the groups not to back away from the compromise they had reached years earlier – a bipartisan bill that passed the Democratic-majority House in 2021 – and suggested that Trump’s success in reducing illegal border crossings had removed the biggest sticking point to getting the bill passed in the Senate.

“The biggest problem was anytime you brought up the word ‘immigration,’ the border killed you, what was going on down there,” Simpson said. “That’s kind of been put behind us now, and I think people are willing to sit down and talk.”

Baumgartner said he sees “sanctuary” policies – such as the Keep Washington Working Act, which limits how state and local law enforcement agencies cooperate with federal immigration authorities – as the biggest impediment to Congress getting back to the negotiating table to reform the nation’s immigration laws.

“It would just be better for the entire country to listen to the will of the voters, get serious about this issue, and once you secure the border, then we can have comprehensive immigration reform,” the Spokane congressman said.

Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, agreed that reforming immigration law for farmworkers is important and said Trump’s actions have shown that cracking down on the border doesn’t require Congress passing new laws. But he said in a brief interview Thursday that although agricultural workforce reform is “really needed,” it’s also “so political and so polarized that it’s unlikely.”

Risch, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he isn’t concerned about the deportation and imprisonment of Abrego Garcia, whom he called an MS-13 gang member. The Salvadoran man entered the United States illegally at age 16, citing fear of gang violence in his home country, and a judge later gave him a legal status that specifically barred his deportation to El Salvador.

“It’s exactly where he should be,” Risch said of the prison in El Salvador, which is notorious for its inhumane conditions. The senator said he had no doubt that Abrego Garcia is a gang member – a claim the government has never proven in court – but said that’s irrelevant to the deportation.

“He was here illegally,” Risch said. “It’s not whether he was a gang member or not a gang member. You cannot come to America illegally. It’s against the law. We are a nation of laws. Period.”

Asked about the U.S. citizen children who were sent to Honduras, Risch said the children hadn’t been deported but rather were taken by their deported Honduran mothers. Lawyers for the two families have said the mothers wanted their children to remain with relatives in the United States, contradicting the Trump administration’s claims.

“Everybody’s entitled to due process, but due process is different for different people,” Risch said. “I mean, when you’re talking about immigration removal, that due process is much, much more attenuated than a United States citizen gets when they’re charged with a crime and get a jury trial and everything else.”

Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an immigration expert at the Migration Policy Institute, said that what constitutes due process in immigration court does indeed differ from civil and criminal court. But even in expedited removal proceedings, she said, a detained immigrant has the right to appear before a judge.

In a 7-2 decision April 19, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing more Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. Earlier in the month, the high court ruled that noncitizens have the right to challenge their detention and deportation in court, which wasn’t possible for many of the men imprisoned in El Salvador.

Asked for his position on the controversial deportations, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said in a statement that he supports Trump’s actions.

“Millions of Americans are rightly concerned with the explosion of illegal immigration our country saw under the previous Administration, which contributed to an influx of deadly fentanyl into our country and an untold number of unvetted criminals,” Crapo said. “We must use all available tools to secure our borders and enforce immigration laws. I support the Trump Administration’s efforts to do so.”

Immigration politics

Deportations from the United States reached their high-water mark under former President Barack Obama, a Democrat who focused his administration’s enforcement efforts on immigrants with criminal records. Pointing to that fact, Baumgartner lamented that immigration enforcement is no longer a bipartisan issue.

“As the Democrat base has become more extreme on the issue – in part, I think, as a reaction to President Trump, where they felt they had to oppose Trump on all levels – the Biden administration came in and essentially opened the border and let in somewhere between 11 and 12 million folks into the country, or more,” he said.

The actual number of unauthorized immigrants who entered the United States during Biden’s tenure is a matter of some dispute, partly because official numbers don’t include so-called “gotaways” who evade law enforcement after crossing the border. The Migration Policy Institute found that about 5.8 million migrants were allowed into the United States under the Biden administration. During the same period, U.S. Border Patrol recorded 8.6 million migrant encounters, a statistic that counts people more than once if they try to re-enter the United States after being deported.

Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, a Democrat whose southwest Washington district voted for Trump in each of the last three presidential elections and has occasionally voted with Republicans on immigration-related bills, said in a statement that a “false choice is being perpetuated in Washington, D.C. between fighting organized criminal activity and protecting due process.”

“Fear is being stoked on both sides to drive us apart, when most folks in Southwest Washington agree that we can both fight for public safety and ensure criminal convictions come from courts, not presidential decrees,” she said. “Just as we need to know who is entering our country, we also need to know who we’re sending out and why. We have courts for a reason, and with our system of due process, the courts are able to effectively assess allegations and reach fair adjudications under the law.”

Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, who has led immigration reform efforts for farmworkers and is one of the few Republicans who has backed legislation to give legal status to so-called “dreamers” who entered the United States unlawfully as children, said in written responses to a series of questions that Abrego Garcia’s legal status should be left to the courts.

“If Mr. Garcia was here legally and has committed no crimes, he has rights under the laws of the United States,” Newhouse said.

Newhouse said he opposed the imprisonment of U.S. citizens in El Salvador, an idea Trump has suggested publicly, but said that unauthorized immigrants should be deported.