Trump has promised to triple the number of ICE deportation officers, the people whose job it is to remove illegal aliens already in America, the ones that made it past the border regions.

Since public servants can never be fired, the ICE deportation officers (ERO) are still there, and are still theoretically deportation officers, but their status has been systematically lowered, and these days they push paperwork in circles rather than actually deporting anyone.

If you catch someone near the border, you can deport them pretty easily, but the huge problem with ERO is that in order to deport anyone, they have to go before a judge, and judges are extremely reluctant to deport anyone. There is an unending due process legal labyrinth in which illegals, even criminals, even murderers, circulate forever. If Trump empowers ERO officers, judges will continue to disempower them. Trump not only needs to triple the number of ICE deportation officers, he needs to empower them.

The Australian solution to this problem was to just deport illegals and completely exclude judges from the process altogether. In Australia an “unlawful person” (Aussie for illegal immigrant) is just administratively sent to Villawood Detention center. From there, they can get a ticket home. Or if they cannot get a ticket home, they are sent to an “Offshore processing center”. (Australia’s equivalent of Gitmo.) This tends to highly motivate them to get a ticket home. Some, who it seems were insufficiently motivated, have just been dumped by the Australian navy on some foreign country’s beach between the high tide and low tide mark.

In Australia, whenever someone in authority encounters an “unlawful person” inside Australia, for example at a police stop or a hospital visit, they are supposed to rat them to border control, and they generally do rat them to border control. And from border control, to Villawood Detention center. Trump has to make sure that police stops, hospital visits, welfare applications, and so on and so forth, rat illegal immigrants to ERO, and that ERO has a nice convenient prison in which they can throw people and leave them to rot without pesky judges bothering them. If all ERO can do is take them before a judge, the judge will let them loose, even murderers and rapists. An unlawful person is likely to become a whole lot more cooperative if his only way out of his oubliette is to go home.

Let us call the wall, “The Great Wall of Trump”, and the prison, “The Trump Archipelago”.