Some parts of Trump’s deportation plan may be ‘Obama-esque.’ There’s a reason for that

President-elect Donald Trump promised mass deportation on the campaign trail, and while the scale of it remains vague, the elements of the plan are an unlikely call back to former President Barack Obama who was billed the “deporter-in-chief” by Democrats and immigrant advocates.

President-elect Donald Trump promised mass deportation on the campaign trail, and while the scale of it remains vague, the elements of the plan are an unlikely call back to former President Barack Obama who was billed the “deporter-in-chief” by Democrats and immigrant advocates. While Trump’s allies have floated draconian measures to detain and deport people residing in the US illegally, the plans are, in many ways, consistent with the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement has often carried out operations. And the person at the helm is Tom Homan, a veteran of immigration law enforcement who served under the Obama administration and has been tapped by Trump to serve as border czar. “A lot of the same tactics are being dusted off. What Tom is talking about are Obama-esque things,” said John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director under Obama, cautioning that it’s likely going to be a “harsher version” of what was done in the Obama-era. “He’s going to have to do more draconian things to do a million deportations in a year,” Sandweg said. Trump has previously cited the Eisenhower administration’s wide-scale deportation program, an aggressive and unprecedented sweep that resulted in the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A program like that would mark a dramatic shift in interior enforcement compared to recent years. But publicly, Trump aides have described a plan that emulates previous administrations.