After months of Donald Trump’s election campaign based on repeated promises of mass roundups and deportations of immigrants, using the military, you would think we were ready to see beyond the general outlines of how it all will work.
It’s a program to shut the border doors, effectively end the asylum program, lower the number of allowable legal immigrants, and to forget about legal paths to naturalization and citizenship even after years of waiting. The deportation program, which Trump insists will result in housing and price reductions for American voters, is an attempt to reverse arrivals into the U.S., particularly by those who come in without permission and turn themselves over to authorities for a years-long wait for adjudication on asylum claims.
Despite the repetitions linking migrants and excessive crime (not borne out by various studies), the claims of “invasion” and the apparently invented reports of eating neighbors’ pets, the constant, racially tinged disparagement of those who are “poisoning the blood of the country,” and the promises of a Day One campaign, there is no practical plan in place other than a basic law enforcement approach to add cops and walls.
To be fair, Trump still must name his White House team and to decide how much of the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 recommendations he plans to follow, On Sunday, Trump named Thomas D. Homan, a senior immigration official in his last administration, as the “border czar” in charge of the nation’s borders and its maritime and aviation security — a position that does not require Senate confirmation.
Homan’s recent interviews reflect that there is no plan yet in place to carry out Trump’s deportations but that he intends to target those with criminal records first, which is current policy. To avoid splitting families, Homan, who has spoken at white supremacist meetings, suggested deporting whole families. Then Trump named immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, giving him an undefined, wider berth than in the previous administration, and capped it with tapping South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary. Together, it’s a statement that going after immigrants is real.
From all reports, various states, the Pentagon, immigration groups and other countries of origin are already in turmoil about what to expect, and moving to “Trump-proof” their programs, already drawing Trump’s ire. And, naturally, migrant groups still in Mexico and other staging points and the smugglers who sell passage to the United States are reportedly working on an all-out push for a surge before Trump takes office. Military leaders are meeting about responses to laws they fear may be unconstitutional.
The New York Times reports that lawyers for immigrant groups say they have been preparing for months for the possibility of large-scale workplace raids, roundups in immigrant enclaves, new restrictions on asylum, the expansion of detention and the termination of programs temporarily shielding some people from deportation. Some reflect on the Japanese-American experience during World War II in which 110,000 were moved to 10 large camps in the West.
Democrats and Republicans have agreed the border needs more solutions, but we have yet to hear a full debate on how making deportations of millions will provide a lasting solution.
Deportations as Solution
Just to refresh, Trump’s plan responded to record-high migration numbers during the Joe Biden years, numbers that have since reduced to below entries when Trump left office. Indeed, the parties were ready to accept a bipartisan bill to address enforcement needs until Trump ordered Republicans to abandon the plan earlier this year.
As an odd point of reference, when he became president, Trump recast programs by Barack Obama who was focused on migrants with criminal records to anyone entering the country illegally.
The overall Trump plan is to locate and round up migrants who have committed crimes first, a group that Trump insists has run into the thousands over time. He will largely rely on local police departments, but will use the National Guard, who normally are dispatched by governors, or the U.S. military, which is barred from immigration operations, to bolster specialized border and customs officers, and he will draw from the ranks of other federal agencies to help.
Those caught will be taken to huge camps that do not yet exist and must be built to be held until they can be sorted into planeloads that will carry them back to countries of origin. Trump assumes that these countries of origin will take them back, or he vaguely suggests that there will be U.S. pressure to do so.
An MSNBC report surveyed owners of private prisons who are maneuvering to make their institutions available as deportation sites and Bloomberg reported that stock prices for private prisons were soaring at the prospect of a financial bonanza.
If the roundups happen to catch families, the family members will be deported as well, though nothing has been written down or explained. The numbers of people involved vary widely with each Trump utterance but start at tens of thousands and rise to 11, 15 or 20 million people.
Any questions yet about the practicalities, law, morality or humanity involved in all this?
The Tumult Unfolding
I used to teach English as another language to the newly arrived, with free classes at my local public library. When former President Trump threatened to round up anyone here illegally, the classes emptied out for fear of capture regardless of immigration status. Hiding is a natural resistance to fear. Where will the raids come this time? Community centers? Schools? Workplaces? Will plant owners be held responsible?
The journalistic stories are just starting. Expect lots of light to be shined on these programs, especially if the details are not spelled out in the coming weeks. Human stories will follow about the impact on individuals and families before the story line turns to the various costs and wrenching effects, intended or not, that a program of such scale.
Let’s start with scale. The entire state of Ohio has 12 million and Pennsylvania 19 million. The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program currently protects more than 500,000 “dreamers.” The Temporary Protective Status program covers about 900,00 from 16 different countries. In the modern immigration enforcement era, the United States has never deported more than half a million immigrants per year—and many of those have been migrants apprehended trying to enter the U.S., not just those already living here.
Current deportations can take a few weeks or years. An immigration court hears the case. If a judge rules that the deportation should proceed, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carries out a removal order in targeted ways that involve identifying, locating, surveilling and arresting the migrant. Commonly, ICE targets those who have committed a crime in the U.S. It’s all on the U.S. taxpayer tab.
Trump told NBC News that “there is no price tag” when it comes to his mass deportation plan, that his administration would have “no choice” but to carry out the plan in a mandate “to bring common sense” to the country. Nevertheless, estimates have run in the scores of billions of dollars per year, or about a trillion dollars over ten years.
Immigration advocate groups see a different picture, naturally. An opinion piece in The Washington Post noted that as planned, the deportations would leave nearly 4½ million children in the United States partially or wholly orphaned, for example. In Florida alone, nearly 2 million U.S. citizens or non-undocumented residents live in households with at least one undocumented person. In California, it’s more than 4 million.
Conservatively, the sudden disappearance of a parent or a main provider will push an estimated 900,000 households with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen below the poverty line.
A report in Huffington Post noted that many questions remain about how Team Trump would identify immigrants, find them, detain them or find the officers to carry out the deportations. What if their countries refuse to take them back?
Since migrants are overrepresented in work forces in the agriculture and meat packing industries, we should expect that as deportations widen, there will be significant cost to those industries that will be passed along to consumers. Mass deportation plans could reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 to 6.8 percent and reduce tax revenues for the government. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.
Just as in Springfield, Ohio, site of the made-up pet-eating mess, mass deportation would almost certainly threaten the well-being of immigrants who are legally in the United States. And all citizens would be living with the consequences of local police turned immigration officers.
In the zeal to bring order to the border, we have a concept of a plan for mass deportations without consideration of what the human, moral, legal and financial costs will be.
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