Border chaos is the Republican Party's biggest challenge, with the party's leading candidate promising to launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in history.”
As his aides reportedly seek land for detention camps, Donald Trump and his allies have not hesitated to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to allow the military and federal National Guard to help with their envisioned mass removal of illegal immigrants.
If such a plan were to go ahead, it would cause enormous disruption to communities across the country and increase the federal government's influence in people's lives in a way that runs counter to a party that prides itself on small government.
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The plan as outlined is “very brutal and completely unrealistic”, said Ranae Erickson of the centrist progressive group Third Way.
During the Trump administration, deportations peaked at 267,258 in 2019, but now Trump is claiming that if elected to a second term, he would deport some 10 to 12 million people who are in the country illegally. While deporting 16 times the number of people he accomplished only once during his time in the White House is highly unrealistic and extremely disruptive, Erickson told The Daily Beast, “He certainly will do it, and it is incumbent on us to consider what that would be like in reality.”
First, how will a second Trump administration identify the people it wants to deport?
“You don't have a list of where 11 to 12 million people live,” Erickson says. Would you check people at their schools or workplaces? Would you go door-to-door asking for documentation? “That's a very intrusive undertaking,” she says.
About 1 million of the 11 million people living here are married to U.S. citizens, according to statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security in 2022. Two-thirds live with a U.S. citizen, often as caregivers for elderly people or young children.
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“They've been here an average of 16 years,” Erickson said. “These are people with deep roots in their communities, and we would need to build large camps. We can't just fly a group of them to another country and drop them off. We would need to make an agreement with the government to repatriate them, and those countries often don't have good relationships with us.”
When asked about the detention centers in a recent interview with Time magazine, President Trump tried to downplay them, saying large numbers of people wouldn't be held there for long periods of time because his administration would deport them quickly. “We're not keeping them in the country. We're getting them out of the country,” he said, as if that was fact.
There are checks and balances in place to curb what Trump wants to do: “To deport someone, you need a removal order, and there's a legal process for that,” said Tom Jawetz, a senior fellow on the immigration policy team at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
Jawetz, a former deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, noted that of the 11 million illegal immigrants, more than 1 million, and perhaps as many as 2 million, have Temporary Protected Status and are in the U.S. legally. Biden has used the provision to his advantage, for example, in responding to the recent influx of Venezuelans.
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He expects a second Trump term to expand the scope of low-ranking border patrol agents' ability to expedite removals of people deemed ineligible for asylum, up to the “legal limit.” He expects a return to the “big, flashy” shock-and-awe raids on labor sites that took place under George W. Bush. (In May 2008, a SWAT team from helicopters descended on the small town of Postville, Iowa, and arrested about 400 workers who were in the country illegally, making up 20 percent of Postville's population.)
The use of the military is a key feature of Trump's plan, and in an interview with Time, Trump dismissed concerns that the military would overstep its role by involving itself in enforcing domestic immigration laws. The military is prohibited from acting against civilians without congressional authorization. “These are not civilians,” Trump told Time. “These are people who are not in our country legally. This is an invasion of our country.”
At other times, he calls immigrants “animals” and “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump seems to think he can mobilize law enforcement agencies across the country to join him in a campaign to stamp out illegal immigration. While he will likely find partners in some places, in many places local law enforcement officials are reluctant to enforce existing immigration laws, and rightly so, saying it's not their job.
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“Police are saying they don't want baby seats in their patrol vehicles,” Jawetz said, adding that police need the trust of the community and that playing a role in immigration control goes against their mission.
The easiest target for Trump would be the Dreamers, hundreds of thousands of people brought to the country as children and protected by President Obama's executive order. “They're the easiest people to find, because they come out of the shadows and we know where they are,” Erickson said.
Arresting them en masse would draw a backlash, but arresting farm workers and hospitality workers en masse would draw a backlash, as would other aspects of Trump's plan. But that doesn't mean he won't try to follow through on it. He promised mass deportations in 2016, and if there's a next time, we'd better take him seriously, even if it's literally.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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