Former President Donald Trump says he will conduct the largest deportation program in U.S. history if he wins Tuesday’s election.
Illustration:J ianan Liu; Photos: Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump’s most significant policy plank in his third presidential campaign is to implement a system of mass deportation to remove up to 20 million noncitizens from the United States, a plan that apparently aims to not only remove people living here illegally but also to chase away ― or accidentally round up ― U.S. citizens as well.
He is promising to deploy the military and deputize local police officers to round up millions of people, detain them in makeshift camps and then ship them off to other countries ― whether or not the destination is the person’s country of origin.
This plan is billed as targeting only those who have come to the country or reside in it illegally, with a special emphasis on supposed migrant gang members. It offers a story of those who deserve to be here and those who don’t. Those who are part of the national community and those who exist outside its bounds and, perhaps, its laws.
But 79% of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. have been living and participating in American communities for more than 15 years. They have married U.S. citizens, hold jobs that prop up their local and national economies and have children and grandchildren who are citizens. Ripping these people out of the country and away from their families will ripple through every community in the country.
“Communities are like a fabric ― the way that the threads are interwoven,” said Heidi Altman, federal advocacy director for the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund, an immigrant rights nonprofit. “If you snip at one, eventually the whole of the fabric comes loose.”
This plan to tear communities apart will also ensnare U.S. citizens, green card holders and others here legally, either by accident or with intent. Trump and his advisers are already saying that’s what they’ll do.
Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was asked in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday whether there is a way that Trump’s mass deportation plan could remove undocumented people without separating them from their families.
“Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”
What Homan is saying, without saying it directly, is that mixed-status families, with some family members who are U.S. citizens and others who lack legal status, can choose to self-deport if they wish to remain together.
“Mass deportation now” signs dot the floor of the Republican National Convention on July 17.
Andrew Harnik via Getty Images
There are currently 4.7 million mixed-status households in the U.S., according to the Center for Migration Studies. Among those households are 5.5 million U.S.-born children living with one undocumented household member and 1.8 million U.S.-born children living with two undocumented adults. In total, there are 9.7 million Americans who live in households with at least one undocumented resident.
Trump and Homan propose an impossible choice: your citizenship and your home or your family.
Similar mass deportations and detentions in the country’s history have done the same.
The incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans during and after World War II ensnared citizens and noncitizens alike. So, too, did the imprisonment of Germans, Italians and people born under the Austro-Hungarian Empire during both world wars. Trump’s inspiration for his mass deportation program, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, similarly resulted in the deportation of significant numbers of U.S. citizens to Mexico.
But none of those programs was of the scale or scope that Trump imagines. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., according to the 2022 American Community Survey. Other surveys and estimates have found similar numbers. But Trump and his allies talk about deporting 20 million to 30 million people. There is no source for such a number. That would invariably mean targeting people with some kind of legal status, whether temporary or permanent.
“They seem to be gleefully suggesting that they would include people here with some legal status in these roundups,” said Matthew Lisieki, a senior research and policy analyst at the Center for Migration Studies, a think tank that focuses on global migration.
A deportation program that removes 11 million people or even more than 20 million would affect every single community in the country, invariably sweeping up even larger numbers of U.S. citizens and legal residents, taking them away from their families and putting them into jails, incarceration camps and, potentially, off to another country. As Homan’s answer on “60 Minutes” indicates, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Trump has already proposed invoking laws that could be used to sweep up unnaturalized U.S. residents who have legal status.
“Families can be deported together,” Tom Homan, the former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said on “60 Minutes.”
DOMINIC GWINN via Getty Images
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which Trump says he will use, allows the president to effectively suspend due process for anyone of a particular nationality or national origin when the U.S. is at war or is invaded by that nation.
Invoking this law may prove challenging since the U.S. is not currently in a declared war, much less one against any of the Latin American countries that represent the point of origin for most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. And though Trump claims that the migration of people into the country amounts to an “invasion,” federal courts since the 1990s have largely rejected efforts by states claiming that the word “invasion” in the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted to include the voluntary migration of people across borders.
Still, it is possible that the courts today would take a different approach and declare that the president’s invocation of an invasion by immigrants is a “political question” that the judicial branch will not interfere with. That could give Trump a free hand to implement a brutal and sweeping deportation program.
The law has been invoked three times during conflicts with actual foreign nations: during the War of 1812 and both world wars. In each conflict, the president has not only directed deportations and detentions but also promulgated restrictions on noncitizens who had come from the foreign belligerents.
During the War of 1812, noncitizens of British descent were banned from living along the East Coast and were forced to move inland. Those of German and Austro-Hungarian descent were banned from living in or entering Washington, D.C., during World War I. And during both World War I and World War II, noncitizens of Japanese, German and Italian descent were subject to extreme levels of surveillance, including the opening of their mail.
These are just some of the things that the Alien Enemies Act would seemingly allow a president to direct the executive branch to do ― without due process and without discrimination of legal status. The law’s focus on nationality and countries of origin also makes its application prone to sweeping up U.S. citizens and permanent residents based on their heritage or race.
“The Alien Enemies Act is not concerned with the legal status of an unnaturalized immigrant,” Yon Ebright said.
The invocation of the law would mean “anyone who isn’t a U.S. citizen would be vulnerable to an abuse of this law,” she added. But, as history shows, it wouldn’t spare U.S. citizens.
“What we’ve seen historically when the Alien Enemies Act is invoked is U.S. citizens accidentally, and also incidentally, getting swept up into internment or expulsion,” Yon Ebright said. “It creates this risk that if you are of the ethnicity that’s being targeted and the government is moving quickly, it could mistake you for someone who isn’t naturalized, and they could try to deport you based on that mistake.”
Fernando Arredondo of Guatemala hugs his daughter Alison at Los Angeles International Airport after they were separated during the Trump administration’s wide-scale separation of immigrant families.
Ringo H.W. Chiu via Associated Press
This gets at another major reason why Trump’s mass deportation plan would ensnare permanent and temporary legal residents and U.S. citizens. And that is how the government knows who has legal status and who does not.
“Generally speaking, it’s very difficult and very hard to identify who’s in the country legally or not,” said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights nonprofit.
The most common way status is currently identified is through the use of inter-operable local and federal law enforcement databases that collect information on people who have had some contact with government agencies. This can occur through being arrested, paying tickets or other legal interactions with government offices where legal status is indicated. Local law enforcement shares arrest and interaction data with federal agencies, which can then identify the legal status of individuals who have had encounters with government agencies or police officers.
There are significant problems with relying on these databases, particularly at the scale and speed Trump talks about.
“What we already know from many years of having seen ICE utilize those databases is that there are often errors,” Altman said.
They are “prone to racial profiling” and “other unconstitutional police practices” without any “effective safeguards or checks put in place,” according to Altman.
“We already know that to be a fairly chaotic system of enforcement that ICE utilizes today that could be supercharged,” Altman added.
Already, these databases produce false positives that lead to arrests, detentions and deportation proceedings. False positives arise when two or more people have the same name, and possibly the same birthdate, or if a person who once was entered into a database as undocumented has since obtained legal status or become naturalized.
A federal judge in California ruled in the 2019 case Gonzalez v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the databases ICE uses to detain people ahead of deportation proceedings were so riddled with errors that they could not be used without violating the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
A temporary detention center for underage immigrants in Tornillo, Texas, on June 18, 2018. It was used during Trump’s family separation program.
HERIKA MARTINEZ via Getty Images
“Errors in the databases ICE reviews to make its probable cause determinations for removal have, on multiple occasions, led to arrests of U.S. citizens and lawfully-present non-citizens,” the judge’s decision states.
The decision shows that the use of these databases led to ICE issuing orders to detain 771 U.S. citizens from May 2015 to February 2016. Many of the errors resulted from sloppy recordkeeping by local law enforcement officers and the failure to keep federal databases updated.
This failure to update databases or check them against databases that do have updated legal status information is why multiple Republican secretaries of state purged the voter registrations of thousands of actual U.S. citizens when they claimed to be removing noncitizens from the rolls.
Similarly, when a parent is naturalized, their minor children also gain legal status, but those children may not have any documentary proof of this status. This has already led to people being improperly detained for extended periods as they face great challenges to prove their citizenship. For example, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen claimed in August he removed 3,200 noncitizens from the rolls who had illegally registered to vote, but a court found more than 2,000 of those registrations belonged to U.S. citizens. Similar problems have been found in Ohio, Texas and Virginia.
Databases of gang members that are maintained by local law enforcement pose even greater problems for identifying undocumented residents. These databases are notoriously inaccurate, with people put on them for wearing particular hats or colored clothes, appearing in photographs or hanging out with gang members, living in particular neighborhoods, being of a particular race or even being assaulted by gang members.
When Trump was in office, immigration officials ramped up the use of these inaccurate gang databases to identify and deport undocumented residents. Considering Trump has falsely claimed in his campaign speeches that “migrant gangs” have “conquered” entire cities, such an effort would likely be radically scaled up.
This could lead to removal of people with legal status as well as those who don’t. Residents who have legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program ― so-called Dreamers who were brought across the border by their parents as children ― have been incorrectly identified as gang members by local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That would be one way to strip them of their legal status.
Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, has promised to “turbocharge” efforts at denaturalizing U.S. citizens. When in office, Trump ramped up denaturalization efforts with one Homeland Security budget document proposing up to 700,000 investigations into naturalized U.S. citizens. Civil denaturalization can be done to people who obtained their legal status illegally or are the child of someone who did so, who deliberately lied about a fact in their application for citizenship, obtained citizenship through military service but was then dishonorably discharged or by becoming a member of a subversive group. This last reason could implicate U.S. citizens incorrectly placed on gang databases or otherwise identified as gang-affiliated by law enforcement.
Databases can only be used to identify the legal status of residents who have had interactions with law enforcement or certain government agencies. If Trump intends to ramp up deportations to the level he claims, his efforts would need to target workplaces and neighborhoods. This would, invariably, involve racial profiling by placing checkpoints or performing sweeps in heavily Latino neighborhoods or worksites. Such sweeps would undoubtedly ensnare U.S. citizens and inflict fear in everyone ― citizens and noncitizens alike ― within these communities.
Former President Donald Trump promises the largest deportation effort in American history if he is elected to a second term.
Evan Vucci via Associated Press
The economic and social costs of these plans would be dramatic and touch all Americans.
Nearly 5 million families would be torn apart or forced to self-deport with their loved ones, leaving behind the communities they share and participate in with citizens and noncitizens alike. The remaining households would see a 48% drop in income, with many falling into poverty, affecting the larger community around them. A substantial percentage of the 1.5 million mixed-status households with a mortgage would be forced into default, which would prove a shock to the broader housing market.
“We are seeing at the raising children level and at the overall median household income level that this program would have economically devastating impacts, in addition to the moral and social devastation of kids losing families, siblings losing siblings, and parents losing other members of their support system,” Lisieki said.
This would all ripple out into local economies as businesses that the targeted residents operate would shutter and as positions in the essential jobs that 74% of undocumented immigrants hold ― in sectors such as health care, construction and agriculture ― would be left vacant amid what is already a shortage of labor in the country. And the loss of jobs in these critical sectors would explode inflation for things like housing and food as the industries would lose swaths of their workforces.
Federal, state and local governments would lose nearly $100 billion in tax revenue that had been paid by undocumented workers.
Your Support Has Never Been More Critical
Other news outlets have retreated behind paywalls. At HuffPost, we believe journalism should be free for everyone.
The economic effects are just one element of removing large numbers of people who have been living in the country for years, if not decades. There is a social dynamic that is often left unsaid.
The mass deportation of millions of people would create a domestic enforcement regime never seen before in the United States. Deportation camps and processing facilities would appear across the country. As happened during Trump’s first term, when ICE conducted raids, fear would spread through communities, with children afraid to go to school and parents afraid to go to work ― whether or not they are here legally. This would severely affect the mental health of children, which could lead to drug and alcohol abuse and suicidal ideation. It will inevitably be marred with violations of due process and human rights and almost certainly with violence.
This is what Trump is promising, after all: “Getting them out will be a bloody story.”
