 The Trump administration on Tuesday sought to allay growing fears among immigrant communities over wide-ranging new directives to ramp up enforcement against illegal immigrants, insisting the measures are not intended to produce “mass deportations.” 
 
 Federal officials cautioned that many of the changes detailed in a pair of memos from Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly will take time to implement because of costs and logistical challenges and that border patrol agents and immigration officers will use their expanded powers with care and discretion. But the new directives released on Tuesday seek to expand partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to apprehend undocumented immigrants, hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, and broaden expedited deportations, currently limited to those in the country two weeks or less, to those who have been in the country for up to two years. “We are simply trying to execute what Congress has asked us to do.” 
 
 Among them was the Mexico part of the plan, for example, which calls for returning undocumented immigrants “to the foreign contiguous territory from which they arrived.” The memo goes on to point out how foisting the immigrants onto Mexico would benefit DHS’s budget, saying that it would, “save the Department’s detention and adjudication resources for other priority aliens.” 
 
 However, former senior Mexican and American immigration officials said it could very well create new security problems along the border, as authorities in each country push unwanted migrants back and forth. Now that is no longer the case, as Dara Lind explains: 
 
 Under the Obama administration, this meant “prioritizing” ever-more-narrow categories of unauthorized immigrants for deportation; by the end of the Obama administration, unauthorized immigrants living in the US who hadn’t been convicted of crimes were at pretty low risk of being deported. And the Trump administration is reinvigorating a program known as 287(g), after the relevant provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, that allowed ICE to deputize local law enforcement agents to enforce immigration law, including arresting unauthorized immigrants as part of immigration “task forces.” The memos signed by Kelly direct ICE “to engage immediately with all willing and qualified law enforcement jurisdictions that meet all program requirements” for 287(g) agreements.
– The Trump administration's massive overhaul of how the US targets and deports undocumented immigrants is becoming clearer after two memos from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly were released Tuesday. The policy changes in those memos could open the door to millions of deportations thanks to classifying most undocumented immigrants as "priorities." Here's what you need to know: Department of Homeland Security officials tells Pro Publica the plan is to send migrants illegally entering the US from Mexico back to Mexico regardless of what country they're actually from. Seeing the reaction to the memos, the Trump administration is currently trying to avoid a "sense of panic" among immigrants, insisting the goal isn't "mass deportations," the Washington Post reports. Officials say undocumented immigrants brought to the US as young children, also known as Dreamers, will only be targeted for deportation if they commit a crime, according to the New York Times. But the Guardian reports undocumented immigrants no longer have to be charged with a crime or convicted of one to become priorities for deportation; just being suspected of a crime is enough, even for minor offenses like shoplifting or traffic violations. The new policy makes detention mandatory for anyone illegally entering the US, which could make it a lot harder for people escaping violence in their home countries to plead their case for asylum, according to Vox. It remains to be seen whether the Republican-led Congress will be willing to pay for the massive expansion of deportation efforts. The administration wants 10,000 new ICE agents, which could cost between $1 billion and $2 billion in the first year, the Washington Post reports. Other cost estimates for Trump's deportation plan are even higher.