Trump’s Sprawling Deportation Campaign

“We have systems in place to address real threats. Our criminal legal system is well-equipped to identify dangerous actors who have committed crimes and bring them to justice. … That’s not the situation that we have here. Here we have somebody’s say so and immediate irreparable consequences as people are being shuffled around detention facilities and potentially shipped overnight to detention centers from which the [Trump] administration says it cannot bring people back.”

— David Donatti, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Texas, and Adjunct Lecturer, Rice University

About the Episode

With its sweeping mass deportation campaign, the Trump administration is attempting to reshape long-standing U.S. immigration policy — and increasingly defying constitutional guardrails in the process.

On this episode of the “Baker Briefing” podcast, experts examined the legal and social implications of the administration’s targeting of legal permanent and temporary residents, asylum seekers, and foreign students, as well as its challenges to judicial authority and due process protections.

Host David M. Satterfield was joined by Tony Payan, director of the Baker Institute Center for the U.S. and Mexico; Luz Maria Garcini, assistant professor of psychological sciences at Rice University and director of the Center for Community and Public Health at Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research; and David Donatti, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas and lecturer at Rice.

This conversation was recorded on April 21, 2025, in front of a live studio audience. Learn about future live recordings of the “Baker Briefing” podcast by subscribing to our “Events Digest” newsletter.

Subscribe and listen to “Baker Briefing” on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

A full transcript of this episode is available here. This transcript was AI-generated and has not been through editorial review.

About ‘Baker Briefing’

Hosted by David M. Satterfield,  the “Baker Briefing” podcast delivers timely analysis on breaking policy developments and other critical policy issues of the day in conversations with experts at the Baker Institute. New episodes are released weekly.

Select episodes of “Baker Briefing” are recorded in front of a live audience at Rice University in Houston, Texas. These recordings are free and open to the public. To learn about upcoming recordings and other public programming from the Baker Institute, subscribe to our “Events Digest” newsletter, delivered weekly.

This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author(s) and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the individual author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.