Every few years the country rediscovers this issue and argues about it like it's a question of willpower. It isn't. I want to explain the part that never makes it into the argument.
To deport someone, you need two things. A final order of removal, and a travel document issued by the country that person came from. The first one is ours. The second one isn't.
That second piece is where the whole thing lives or dies, and almost nobody outside the work knows it exists.
As of November 2024, ICE had roughly 1.4 million people on its non-detained docket who already had final orders of removal. The exact figure was 1,445,549. Read that again. These are not cases waiting on a judge. The judge already ruled. The order is signed. Those people are living here anyway, and a large share of them are here because their home government won't confirm their nationality or issue the paper that lets us put them on a plane.
DHS actually keeps a list. Countries that systematically refuse or slow-walk taking their own people back get classified as uncooperative. As of December 2024 there were fifteen: Bhutan, Burma, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Laos, Pakistan, China, Russia, Somalia, and Venezuela. Eleven more were flagged as at risk of going the
In 2001 the Supreme Court decided Zadvydas v. Davis. The holding is that we generally can't detain someone past about 6 months if there's no significant likelihood of actually removing them in the foreseeable future. That's the law. So when a foreign government simply doesn't answer, doesn't schedule the consular interview, doesn't issue the document, the clock runs out, and we release the person. Not because anyone decided to. Because we have to.
Think about what that means. A foreign government, by doing nothing at all, gets to override an American immigration court. They don't have to refuse. They just have to be slow.
We have tools. Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act lets the State Department cut off visas for a country that won't cooperate, and it has worked. Guyana got hit with sanctions and issued travel documents for 112 of its nationals within two months. But that's 112 people, and it took a diplomatic fight to get them.
Multiply that fight by 1.4 million and you start to see the actual shape of the problem.
I'm not telling you what the policy should be. People can disagree in good faith about how aggressive enforcement ought to be, and they do. What I'm telling you is that anyone promising mass removals without a serious answer on travel documents and receiving countries either hasn't done the work or isn't being straight with you. The paperwork is the policy. It always was and will continue to be.
