This time, Donald Trump's team doesn't need to find its way in the corridors of the federal government, nor is it bothered with respecting traditional procedures. Less than a week after his victory in the presidential election on November 5, Donald Trump wants to move fast on all fronts: his first appointments, bringing Congress to heel, and contact with foreign leaders, as if Joe Biden had already been erased. "Loyalty is everything," summed up Steve Bannon, the president's former special adviser, released from prison shortly before the election and now back as the incendiary host of the highly influential Bannon's War Room podcast.

After the expected appointment of Susie Wiles, his campaign manager, as his future White House chief of staff, Trump is said to have chosen Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, a veteran of the National Guard, as national security adviser, according to the US press. He is also said to be preparing to appoint Senator Marco Rubio, also from Florida, as secretary of state. These two profiles hardly represent a break with the traditional views of the Republican Party.

But Trump's priority right now is to implement his promise: The "largest deportation operation in American history." In this way, the president-elect hopes to reverse the disastrous migratory pressure suffered under the Biden era, long underestimated by the Democrat president, that is, a total of 8.7 million arrests at the Mexican border since 2021, including some people several times.

In a message on his social media network Truth Social on Sunday, November 10, Trump confirmed he was appointing Tom Homan as his top border official. A former director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) federal agency, he will not need Senate confirmation to assume the executive-attached post, confirming Trump's haste on this symbolic issue and his disdain for conventional procedures.

The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is estimated at around 12 million, making a significant contribution to the country's economy. The Trump team sees this issue as a pyramid, with different levels of urgency. According to official ICE figures, in July 2024, nearly 425,000 undocumented people with a criminal conviction were counted, including 13,000 convicted of homicide. They will be the first to be targeted. During the campaign, Trump claimed that they had entered the US under the Biden administration. This is not true, since the figure concerns a very long period (several decades), and therefore also applies to irregular arrivals under his own presidency.

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