Chaos at the border is the top issue for Republicans, and their likely nominee promises to launch what he calls “the largest domestic deportation operation in history.”
Aides are reportedly scouting land for detention camps, and Donald Trump and his allies have not been shy about calling for the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to allow the military and federalized National Guard troops to assist in what they envision as a mass removal of undocumented immigrants.
If such a plan were carried out, it would cause enormous disruption to communities throughout the country and increase the weight of the federal government in people’s lives in a way that runs counter to a political party that supposedly prides itself on small government.
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The plan, presented in broad strokes, is “super cruel and also completely impractical,” says Lanae Erickson with Third Way, a centrist progressive group.
During Trump’s term in office, his highest number of deportations was 267,258 people in 2019, and now he’s claiming that if elected to a second term, he would purge the country of some 10-12 million people here illegally. While expelling 16 times the number that he initially achieved just once during his time in the White House is wildly impractical and deeply disruptive, Erickson told The Daily Beast, “He absolutely is going to try, and it’s incumbent on us to think through the kind of reality that would look like.”
For starters, how would a second Trump administration identify the people they wish to deport?
“It’s not like we have a list where 11 or 12 million people live,” says Erickson. Would they check people at schools and in workplaces? Would they go door-to-door and ask people for their papers? “This is deeply invasive work,” she says.
About a million of the 11 million living here as identified by the Department of Homeland Security in 2022 are married to U.S. citizens. Two-thirds live with a U.S. citizen, often as caretakers for the very old or very young.
“They have been in the country an average of 16 years,” says Erickson. “These are people deeply embedded in the community, and you would have to build massive detention centers. You can’t just fly a bunch of people to another country and drop them off. You need an agreement with that government that they will repatriate them, and these are often countries we don’t have good relationships with.”
Asked in his recent interview with Time magazine about detention centers, Trump tried to downplay them, saying there won’t be masses of detained people for long because his administration will be deporting them so fast. “We’re not leaving them in the country. We’re bringing them out,” he said, as if that makes it so.
There are checks and balances in place to restrain what Trump would like to do. “In order to remove people from the country, you need to have a removal order, and there are legal processes for that,” says Tom Jawetz, a senior fellow on the immigration policy team at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
A former deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, Jawetz points out that over a million and maybe as many as 2 million of the 11 million people that are undocumented have temporary protected status (TPS), DACA, deferred action, or some other permission to temporarily remain here legally. Biden has made good use of TPS to accommodate, for example, the recent influx of Venezuelans.
He expects that a second Trump term would expand the scope of expedited removal by lower-level border officials “to the statutory max” of persons they deem not eligible for asylum. He expects a return to “large-scale and spectacular” work-site raids of the shock-and-awe variety that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency. (A raid on a kosher meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa, in May 2008 featured SWAT teams in helicopters that descended on the tiny town and apprehended almost 400 workers in the country illegally, 20 percent of Postville’s population.)
Mobilizing the military is a key feature of Trump’s plans, and in his interview with Time, he dismisses concerns that the military would be overstepping its role by getting involved in enforcing internal immigration laws. The military is prohibited from acting against civilians without the approval of Congress. “These aren’t civilians,” Trump told Time magazine. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country.”
In other settings, he has called immigrants “animals” and “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump seems to think he can mobilize law enforcement across the country to join his crusade against the undocumented. Perhaps he would find willing partners in some communities, but in many places, local law enforcement officers are reluctant to enforce immigration laws that are in place, and they’re right when they say it’s not part of their job.
“They say they don’t want to put baby seats in their patrol vehicles,” says Jawetz. They need the trust of their community, and acting as an arm of immigration control is counter to their mission.
The easiest target for Trump would be the dreamers—hundreds of thousands of them brought to this country as children and granted protected status by an Obama executive order. “They’re the easiest people to find because they came out of the shadows and we know where they are,” says Erickson.
Rounding them up would provoke a backlash, but then so would rounding up farm workers and hospitality industry workers. So would the other aspects of Trump’s plan. That doesn’t mean he won’t try to do it. He promised mass deportation in 2016 and if there’s a next time, best to take him seriously, even literally.
