Headlines on Trump’s deportation policies have been coming fast and furious. But so have court rulings blocking the administration’s actions.
Here’s what Polymarket traders are saying about what comes next:
The El Salvador Deal
The market was surprised on Sunday by news of a program (a Stephen Miller joint) to deport 261 alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador for imprisonment.
To expedite these deportations, Trump invoked the “Alien Enemies Act,” a law previously used in wartime to remove enemy fighters.
While the deportees were en route, District Judge James Boasberg issued a restraining order, but the Trump administration argued that the ruling was invalid since the planes were already out of the country.
On Polymarket, news of the El Salvador deal tanked odds for the Trump administration to transfer deportees to Guantanamo under the Alien Enemies Act from 80% to 30%.
But one mysterious twist comes in a court document filed Sunday by Attorney General Pam Bondi:
Most reporting on the deportations states that the flights originated in Texas, and stopped in Honduras before continuing to El Salvador. But the passage above raises the possibility that some of the deportees may have actually come from Guantanamo, which may be what’s keeping this market at 30%. The DOD reported that 10 alleged Tren de Aragua members arrived in Gitmo on February 5.
Why might Trump want the detainees out of Cuba? While the administration on March 15 won a ruling to allow the Gitmo transfers to continue, the ACLU and a number of other rights groups are aggressively challenging the policy.
The shift to El Salvador, which was done with extreme secrecy and speed to avoid judicial scrutiny, may be an attempt to make it harder for the courts to overturn.
Mahmoud Khalil
One major difference with Trump’s immigration policies this time around is the widening scope of targets. There are reports of spouses of US citizens, H1-B visa holders, and other categories of normally safe immigration being detained and deported.
The highest profile of these cases is Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian campus protests at Columbia University. Khalil, a green card holder and married to a US citizen, was arrested by ICE agents and moved away from his family to a detention center in Louisiana.
Khalil has not been charged with any crime, but is being detained under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act on the argument that his activism could pose a threat to US interests.
A number of legal challenges to Khalil’s detention are pending and there’s only a 17% chance he is deported before July.
Travel Ban 2.0?
In Trump’s first term, he imposed a travel ban that blocked individuals from a number of Muslim countries from entering the country, which remained largely in place throughout his term.
On March 14, the NYT broke a story of a new travel ban in the works that would target 43 countries:
On Polymarket, there is a 92% chance and rising that some form of a travel ban is put into place.
How Many Deportations?
On Sunday, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele shared a highly-produced montage of the deported Venezuelans being herded off planes and into custody and clips surfaced of the prisoners having their beards and heads shaved. Every effort seems calculated to create a sense of shock and awe.
But arguably the most important question - how many people will actually get deported - has been pricing a fairly modest increase in total deportations: 🔮 47% odds for 250-500k deportations in fiscal year 2025.
The resolutions source for this market is the “noncitizen removal” figure published in the ICE annual report, which shows the following recent data points:
271,484 removals in FY 2024
142,580 removals in FY 2023
72,177 removals in FY 2022
59,011 removals in FY 2021
185,884 removals in FY 2020
In Trump’s first month, it was reported that ICE deported 37,660 people, which would put Trump on track for 451,920 deportations in his first 12 months.
Much of the press narrative has been how Trump is “lagging behind” Biden and other presidents in his deportation stats, but there are a number of confounding factors here:
First, ICE reports its figures by fiscal year, which runs from Sept-October and doesn’t line up with presidential terms. And secondly, as the below NYT chart illustrates, there was a massive COVID -related deportation spike spanning Trump 45 and Biden that is not reflected in the ICE removals figure.
Judging by the ICE removals number, Trump does seem to be on pace for an increase in deportations this year, but nowhere near the COVID boom or the >10 million immigrants deported under Clinton and George W Bush.
But it was a simpler time back then, where deportation numbers were calculated much more loosely, including people being denied entry at the border and voluntary returns.
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