Under the administration of the American president Donald Trump, there was an unprecedented convergence of questions of immigration and transnational organized crime in rhetoric, political and application strategies. The first six months of his presidency have experienced political statements such as the “Take Back America” initiative which brings together the application of immigration with efforts to combat organized transnational crime, and the deployment of mass expulsion campaigns that claim the authorities of the transnational trafficking members of trafficking networks and gangs with roots in Latin America, such as MS13, Mara Salvatricha and Trèzuela.
To find out more about how this is playing out in the United States, Insight Crime spoke to Doris Meissner, former Commissioner of the American Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and addressed to the Migration Policy Institute, an independent and non-partisan reflection group that is looking for and analyzes Immigration and integration policies.
See also: 5 ways in which Trump’s expulsion plan helps criminals
Insight Crime (IC): We have seen this rhetoric of the Trump administration by really focusing on organized crime as an immigration problem. How did you see this from the point of view of the policy of what we have seen so far from the administration?
Doris Meissner (DM): In the past few weeks of the electoral campaign, Trump has become more and more focused on immigration as a threat to national security and the well-being of Americans, and he has constantly painted crime among migrants with a very wide brush. There is certainly a criminal dimension to migration, but he confuses the serious crime of cartels and gangs and transnational crime with people who have been in the United States and who may have committed crimes in the United States, but who are certainly not part of an international sinister conspiracy.
By entering the inauguration and the presidency itself, he continued to say that “mass expulsion is among my highest priorities”, and certainly now we see the mass deportation initiative take place. There are certainly people who have criminal history who are arrested and deleted, but for a special month or any set of data we have, it’s about half. Sometimes it represents 60% of people who have no criminal training, sometimes 40%, 45% – this varies. But crime is often intended for much lower crimes than to belong to Tren de Aragua or MS13. In general, our research shows that migrants commit crimes at a level lower than that of Americans of indigenous origin, but even to the extent that they commit crimes, there are a smaller number in what would really be proven as gang or cartels. Now, it is not to underestimate the danger and wickedness of what some of these gangs have done and the crimes they have committed in the United States, as well as transnationalally. But it is by no means representative of migrants overall or even migrants who are expelled.
CI: The administration has also requested a certain increase in percentage of arrests and deportations of gang members. Is it something that differs in statistics?
DM: No, this is not how the figures are reported, so we have no visibility on this subject. There will be press releases along the way, but in general, it is difficult to know what would be the share of gang members of those arrested and deleted who are called “criminals”. Then there is all this discussion on what makes someone a gang member. Even if they report members of the detained gangs, how they derive who is actually a member of a gang also raises questions.
IC: Nor does there seem to be an ability to appeal or challenge this decision once it has reached the conclusion that someone is a member of a gang. Is it something that in your opinion, is different or particular of this administration?
DM: It is different, and it is linked to all this idea of making people in prisons in other countries. One of the things with the deportations in the past is that when you have dangerous criminals and you return them to their country of origin, one of the concerns has always been, this country will only release the person, in which case a dangerous person who could continue to commit crimes is in no way punished or followed. But these were much more discreet cases. What is happening with this administration is that there is a huge amount of advertising surrounding all this and a huge effort to use this kind of feedback, certainly in Salvador and places like Cecot (the Center for Terrorist Confining – Centro of Confinamiento del Terrorism Communities. And this is part of the political objectives of this mass deportation initiative.
IC: Another thing that seems different is the extent to which they involve other agencies that could otherwise investigate organized transnational crime and criminal groups in the application of immigration. Is this something that you have encountered before, or is it something special to this administration?
DM: In previous administrations, there had certainly been efforts to involve other agencies, but they would not have been this type of application at the street level, they would have been part of the working groups that were multi-agencies in order to investigate serious plots. And these are the types of cases that sometimes take years to build and demand the authorities of a number of different federal agencies for the application of criminal law. Multi-Agence Cooperation is therefore not a new thing, but not in the way we see it now with agents who go out on the street which are essentially not trained in the application of the Immigration Act.
IC: If you launch these other forces in the application of immigration, does this risk weakening the ability to carry out these complex longer term surveys?
DM: I must deduce that they do it, because all the pressure here is for the figures. Simply take ice (immigration and customs application) itself. The ice is made up of two parts: ERO, application and dismissal operations and HSI, surveys on internal security. And it is the part of the surveys of the internal security of the ice that would build much deeper cases. I do not know how used this workforce is used to apply the street level compared to the construction of cases, but I must imagine that some of them are redirected, because all the effort here is figures. It is not an effort intended for standard deterrent forms, which consists in fighting against the underlying engines of some of these criminal activities.
See also: Could American deportations compromise the MS13 repression of the Trump administration?
IC: There is a long history of the evolution of criminal groups linked to these deportation and immigration cycles. Do you see signs that this type of deportations and immigration feedback loop is taken into account in these strategies?
DM: This feedback loop is incredibly interesting and disturbing. A large part of this gang activity, at least the activity of gangs from Salvador, returns to the 80s and 1990s and gangs in the United States, in particular in Los Angeles and in southern California, and the efforts of previous administrations to expel criminals. Well, many of these criminals who were expelled from southern California to El Salvador were the seeds of what is very well developed today of transnational criminal organizations. It therefore raises the much larger and wider historical question. One of the answers that the Trump administration gives is that you send people back to third countries where they have no connections and where they do not have a network established to fall back. But I don’t think that is the reason for this. I think that the reasoning of the idea of turning people back to third countries is to increase fear and increase incentives for people to relax by themselves.
Featured image: People queue to get on board a flight expelling migrants from the United States on May 24, 2025. Credit: US government / Wikimedia Commons
