Mass Deportations
This is what we’re doing now, I guess: At 4 a.m. on Monday night, President-elect Donald Trump responded to a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, authored by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch. Fitton said that Trump would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to handle illegal immigrants “through a mass deportation program.” Trump responded: “TRUE!!!”
We knew this was likely to happen. All throughout the campaign, Trump would talk up how he wants to mobilize the National Guard to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with deportations. Now, with his rather telling administration picks—Kristi Noem, who has been selected to lead the Department of Homeland Security; Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy; former ICE head Tom Homan as border czar—make clear how much he meant that.
Of course, plenty of right-wingers have made the case that there are other means of deporting the roughly 11 million people who are in the country illegally—less egregious means. Gentler deportation. In some sense, this is true. Crackdowns on businesses who hire illegal immigrants could be part of it—which would punish the most industrious and productive newcomers. It’s also possible that a mass deportation scheme would reduce demand to enter the country, thus reducing total number of entries for 2025 (and beyond). And some number of people would surely self-deport.
Why are people pretending the only way to deport people who are here illegally is to go door to door in the most intense way possible? I can think of any number of policies short of that scenario that would have an enormous impact:
– prosecuting businesses that hire illegally,…— Inez Stepman ???? (@InezFeltscher) November 11, 2024
But for right-wingers to act like this is how it will be done is magical thinking, when Trump himself has contradicted this at every juncture. Mass deportation—the show of muscle he very much wants—will be costly and brutal. Some people will cling to their homes, their jobs, their communities, and attempt to evade deportation to the greatest degree possible. State force will be required.
And it’s not just that. The administration also “plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship,” per The New York Times.
“In order to estimate the costs of a longer-term mass deportation operation, we calculated the cost of a program aiming to arrest, detain, process, and deport one million people per year—paralleling the more conservative proposals made by mass-deportation proponents,” writes the nonprofit (and obviously pro-immigration) advocacy group American Immigration Council:
“Even assuming that 20 percent of the undocumented population would ‘self-deport’ under a yearslong mass-deportation regime, we estimate the ultimate cost of such a longer operation would average out to $88 billion annually, for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade. This is a much higher sum than the one-time estimate, given the long-term costs of establishing and maintaining detention facilities and temporary camps to eventually be able to detain one million people at a time—costs that could not be modeled in a short-term analysis. This would require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists. The government would also be required to establish and maintain over 1,000 new immigration courtrooms to process people at such a rate.”
Trump’s policy wonk sidekicks, like his veep J.D. Vance, keep sticking to their talking point that deportations will be done in a very orderly way, going with the most deserving first, i.e., criminals sitting in jails and prisons. And “a lot of people will go home if they can’t work for less than minimum wage in our own country,” says Vance, sticking with a palatable talking point about self-deportation. The productive, sympathetic, church-going abuelas won’t be caught in the crosshairs, in other words.
Vance and Trump should ge
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