If you talk to the experts, they’ll tell you that Trump’s plan for mass deportations has little chance of succeeding.
Doing what some of Trump’s closest allies, like Stephen Miller, say would be a mammoth undertaking. There are millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. And, besides, Trump and Biden both essentially maxed out the country’s deportation capacity: ICE only has so many planes, busses, and personnel to identify undocumented immigrants, and the agency’s budget is set by Congress; there’s only so much ability to persuade other countries to receive their nationals. There are only so many beds available for detainees; only so many immigration judges in an already-overburdened court system.
That, in the plans of Trump officials, is where the military comes in.
Unlike previous Trump plans for immigration crackdowns, Trump allies squarely address the resource constraints that limit the federal government’s deportation capacity, and bring in a simple answer: use the military to do it.
“Last time, they came in in 2017 and they thought just throwing out a bunch of Obama rules would allow them to do mass deportation,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the CATO Institute, told TPM. “Now, they understand that actually, the game is all about resources. The only way to get the resources is from the military. There’s no way they’re getting it from Congress.”
But enforcing immigration laws is not a mission for which the military trains, and bringing in troops to detain undocumented migrants and using military assets to remove them raises a host of difficult questions. It suggests the chaos is part of the point, as is the way in which the scheme would be a testament to the willpower of handpicked Trump appointees over an experienced bureaucracy.
The plans as previewed by Trump’s allies also suggest a shift in approach, reflective of a Trump campaign that’s reviewed its first term in office and adapted.
TPM spoke with former DHS officials and experts in immigration policy. They treated the Trumpworld plans as ambitious, but achievable, if not without a massive amount of chaos.
What we know of these plans tends to come less from the kind of detailed policy memos more familiar to Washington D.C., and more from scattershot appearances by Trump allies in right-wing media. There’s a Project 2025 entry on what to do with immigration and the Department of Homeland Security; both Trump and JD Vance have spoken about their vision of mass deportations.
But arguably the most detailed canonical text is a podcast interview that Stephen Miller gave last year to Charlie Kirk, titled “Sweeping Raids, Mass Deportations: Donald Trump’s 2025 Plan to Fix the Border.”
In the podcast, Miller says that a second Trump administration would immediately reinstate all of its policies from the first term — including a dramatic expansion of expedited removals that lasted into the Biden administration.
“One of the things that a lot of people talk about is deportation, but not a lot of people know about the logistics that go into deportation,” Miller observed in the episode.
For the plan, resources are key. Miller envisioned that a future Trump administration would start identifying and detaining more undocumented immigrants by adding personnel. This force would largely be composed of National Guard units from red states deputized as “immigration enforcement officers,” Miller said, combined with federal law enforcement officers taken from other agencies. From there, Miller continued, the immigration force would identify and detain undocumented immigrants in the states from which the National Guard troopers originated.
“And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close, very nearby,” Miller said.
There are, of course, a lot of unanswered and unaddressed details and questions raised by this plan.
In the world of this plan, there would be many, many new detainees taken in what Miller described as “large-scale raids.” Their cases to would have to be processed by immigration courts. If they are unable to prove that they had resided in the United States for more than two years, they would be subject to expedited removal.
From there, Miller said that a future Trump administration would call upon another military capability: housing detainees on military bases or in “large-scale staging grounds near the border.”
Trump advisers have suggested that a future Trump administration would employ diplomatic pressure to get countries to accept these undocumented immigrants back en masse; the administration would use military transport airplanes to return undocumented immigrants to their countries of origin.
It’s a plan that requires a significant degree of suspension of disbelief: other countries would have a say in how many people to accept; national guardsmen or other troops lack immigration enforcement training. But, according to former DHS official Tom Warrick, it may be more achievable than it sounds, and than many other experts believe.
During Trump’s term in office, he implemented two plans that were seen as inadvisable and likely to inject a significant degree of chaos into the system: the Muslim ban and family separation.
Through the Trump administration eventually revised and at least partly slinked away from both initiatives amid uproar, Warrick said, they implemented the policies while ignoring internal advice on how to run them more efficiently.
“We’re very mindful that when people proposed good ideas that would’ve made that operation go more smoothly, and the White House turned them down. People did start to reach the conclusion that actually chaos was a part of the plan,” Warrick told TPM.
“For Steven Miller in particular, the idea of chaos and confusion to him, he sees that as a deterrent against people trying to come to the United States,” Warrick said.
Trump spent much of the 2016 campaign making a signature promise that doubled as an immigration deterrent: building the wall, and getting Mexico to foot the bill.
The idea gave rise to catchy slogans, but implementing it proved far more difficult. After years of trying to persuade Congress to fund the wall’s construction, Trump turned to another source of money: the military.
This wasn’t using military assets along the border; nor was it repurposing troops for enforcing immigration laws internally. Rather, it was using military money when other options for the project had been exhausted.
To Bier, the CATO Institute researcher, repurposing the military’s resources for enforcement is similar, low-hanging fruit.
“What they’re planning to do is authorize the military to participate in this, and they’re planning to use military bases for operations and detention and have the military act as the detaining agency,” Bier said. “It’s not at all clear that they wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s one of those things where it’s the courts, court’s likelihood of intervening is kind of low. And so I think they know that and that’s going to be the direction they go.”
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