On many occasions, President-elect Donald Trump promised to deport immigrants on a scale never seen before. With an estimated 11 million people in the U.S. who lack permission to stay, keeping that promise to the fullest extent possible would be a huge and costly challenge.

We don’t know what the Trump administration will do, but as journalists, we can get ready. In Poynter’s Beat Academy, as with the Scouts, our motto is “Be prepared.” We went to some of the newsrooms and sources that figured large in our immigration webinars and our El Paso workshop, and we asked people how they are keeping their finger on the pulse to capture shifts in their communities.

Seattle Times immigration reporter Nina Shapiro got out of the gate quickly with the. Nov. 10 story What Trump’s reelection means for immigrants in WA.

“I reached out to immigration advocates, lawyers and groups I’ve long been in touch with,” Shapiro said. “I went to places where immigrants and migrants gather — a day laborer site, a church that houses migrants. As I went about reporting for this story, I collected numbers and talked about staying in touch with people. So I have ordinary folks to turn to as things play out.”

If that sounds like textbook beat reporting, it is.

Some of the basics, like pinging the people who provide services to immigrants, don’t take much effort. They just require phone calls, emails and follow-through.

Others get you out of the office, which is where you start earning your paycheck and, as we all know, find the real payoff of being a reporter. Connecting with people who are under no obligation to give us the time of day is when we pick up the threads that make an article not just informative, but engaging. To paraphrase my Poynter colleague Roy Peter Clark, a news report delivers information in the public interest. A story delivers an experience people feel.

The punch list of groups to check on goes beyond the immigration lawyers and service organizations. Employers, especially in certain industries, are more vulnerable to crackdowns simply because they have larger numbers of undocumented workers. Case in point, the USDA estimates that about 40% of nearly 1.2 million hired farm workers are undocumented.

Immigration reporter Dave Harmon at The Texas Tribune has construction, landscaping, agriculture, oil and gas, hotels and restaurants on his list.

Fair warning, though. Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser on immigration at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a Beat Academy panelist, urges caution with numbers. The quality varies depending on the industry.

“We don’t have a lot of really great data to go by,” Brown said.

On the other hand, she noted that “certain industries have already expressed concern over enforcement actions.” During the first Trump administration, there were surprise inspections at poultry plants and similar operations.

If employers are on alert, reporters should be reaching out.

Where to watch for stepped-up enforcement

The obvious starting place in any deportation program is people who are already entangled with the criminal justice system. That’s where Tom Homan said he would begin. Trump named Homan to serve as his “border czar,” a newly created post with responsibility for the northern and southern borders and overseeing deportations.

“You concentrate on the public safety threats and the national security threats first, because they’re the worst of the worst,” Homan told Fox News Nov. 10.

A few points here: This has been happening under the Biden administration for violent crimes but, as he did in his first term, Trump could target people for less serious offenses. For the best data on this, TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, is your go-to website, and research professor Austin Kocher, another Beat Academy presenter, is the man who can walk you through the numbers.

TRAC’s data also tells us that Trump will need to go well beyond deporting people charged with a crime to reach the numbers in line with his promise. Our window into this activity tracks something called a detainer. That’s when ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tells a law enforcement agency to hold someone for removal proceedings.

In the first Trump administration, ICE never issued more than about 170,000 detainers per year. During the Obama administration, the number reached over 300,000 per year. Trump would need to go further to reach the historic levels he talked about during the campaign. As a practical matter, any large deportation effort will require many more people and much more money than is currently at hand.

Also, Homan talked about known criminals and terrorists, but federal law allows the deportation of people who are charged and not necessarily convicted.

“Immigration lawyers come across a lot of people with unresolved pending charges who are in removal proceedings,” said Adriana Heffley, director of legal services at the Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network.

Heffley suggests that reporters connect with public defenders, who often represent these people. She also said ICE has a program to enlist state and local law enforcement in removing non-citizens. Reporters should be in touch with those agencies to track upticks in activity. They might be more responsive than ICE itself.

Court challenges

In the world of deportation, there’s a key difference between border states and states in the interior. In border states, a process called expedited removal is fairly common, especially under the restrictive asylum rules imposed by President Joe Biden. (That order came down just as we brought 25 journalists to El Paso for a 2-day workshop.) With expedited removal, someone who recently crossed the border is quickly sent back, with minimal review and no hearing.

In the interior, a hearing before an immigration judge is the norm. There’s a huge backlog, with some 3.7 million cases in the pipeline. When the first Trump administration tried to get around the hearing process, a federal court blocked it.

“To the extent the incoming Trump administration would seek to clear that backlog, it would require vastly more judges and resources,” said Michelle Mittelstadt with the Migration Policy Institute, another of the key data sources from Beat Academy.

Without those judges, if past is prologue, efforts to bring expedited removals to the interior would trigger court challenges. Similarly, if Trump cancels the temporary protected status of about 780,000 people from Central and South America, legal advocates would react.

“There’s one guarantee,” said Brown with the Bipartisan Policy Center. “He would be sued.”

For more story tips, see Zita Arocha’s guide to covering immigration under Trump.