Donald Trump's tax plans are highly anticipated by investors. Credit:AP "That's entirely a figment of folks' imagination. This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations." And that gave the exercise another dimension of campaign promise-turned-reality. The announcement, fleshing out the proposed implementation of one of Trump's early executive orders, was a signal of fidelity to his core voters on a key issue – their ill-found belief that illegal or undocumented migrants are stealing their jobs, engage in the most egregious crime and are sucking dry state and federal welfare and aid programs. The plan will, for example, create an office inside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide assistance to the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants. Victims' families were wheeled out in some of Trump's campaign appearances.

An arrest is made during a targeted enforcement operation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) aimed at immigration fugitives, re-entrants and at-large criminal aliens in Los Angeles. Credit:AP But the plan was also an attempt to calm immigrant communities by signalling that it can't happen overnight – it would take months, according to one of the officials. And despite Trump's campaign promises, he has stopped short, for now, of driving out the so-called dreamers, those who were brought to the US as children, and the undocumented parents of children born here, who are citizens of the US. "Off the charts": The coverage of Trump has been unprecedented. Credit:AP Under the Obama rules only serious criminals were thrown out and their numbers were significant – a record 434,000 in 2013, and a lesser tally of 333,000 in the wake of more leniency in 2015. And in tightening the net, Trump concedes another of his lies – his infamous declaration on Mexican immigrants: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Indeed, focusing on rapists and drug dealers wouldn't do a lot to lift the numbers. There is a proposal to revive a much criticised scheme that sees local police recruited as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Credit:AP Despite Trump's fixation on migrant crime, studies reveal undocumented migrants to be significantly more law-abiding than the rest of the country – a census study of over 30 years, from 1980 to 2010, found that among males between the ages of 18 and 49, immigrants were one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as those born in the United States. And they comprise a smaller percentage of the prisoner population than they do of the whole population – 5 per cent against 7 per cent. So now they'll be shown the door for the simplest of offences – traffic infringements, shoplifting and the like. Even a suspicion that they might have committed a crime will be grounds for deportation. And immigration officer will have the authority to deem a migrant to be "a risk to public safety or national security".

Time and distance used to mean something in immigration law, but not any more. Under Obama, a migrant apprehended within two weeks of arriving in the country and within 160 kilometres of the border was eligible for "expedited removal" from the country – by which they were denied an appearance in an immigration court. Under Trump's deal, that time factor becomes two years and there is no distance-from-the-border requirement. And there'll be no more of the Obama-era nonsense of allowing those who have been arrested to live in the community while waiting for as long as a year for their case to emerge from the backlog in the immigration courts. From here in they will be detained, and maybe that means even more job creation for detention centre staff. Early drafts of the plan included a call to mobilise the National Guard to round up migrants. But the only extra help for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aptly abbreviated to ICE, is a proposal to revive an abandoned and much criticised scheme by which the agency recruits local police to double as ICE agents.

Migration advocates warned that the new arrangement would go the same way as Trump's controversial migration crackdown, which blocked migrants and refugees from seven majority Muslim countries. That order is now on hold pending further litigation, but the administration reportedly is planning this week to wheel out a new version of the order that will be tailored to accommodate some of the legal criticism of its earlier iteration. Speaking of the new deportation regime, Omar Jadwat who directs the ACLU's immigrants' rights project, told reporters: "These memos confirm that the Trump administration is willing to trample on due process, human decency, the wellbeing of our communities, and even protections for vulnerable children, in pursuit of a hyper-aggressive mass deportation policy. "However, President Trump does not have the last word here – the courts and the public will not allow this un-American dream to become reality." Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro, deputy vice president of the Latino advocacy group National Council of La Raza, accused the administration of "using the spectre of crime to create fear . . . in the American community about immigrants, in order to create an opening to advance the indiscriminate persecution of immigrants. "This administration is saying, 'Now, everybody is going to be a priority,' and the devil may care."

Loading In a rah-rah conclusion to the briefing for reporters, one of the Homeland Security officials declared: "The big picture here is that we're executing what the president directed, which is consistent with what Congress put into law. "We will do so professionally. We will treat everyone humanely and with dignity, but we're going to execute the laws of the United States."