Donald Trump’s most outrageous pronouncements on immigration are rarely shocking for long; they’re usually eclipsed within days, if not hours, by even more grotesque claims. Last year, in what should have been an enduring political scandal, Trump blamed immigrants for “poisoning the blood of our country.” He has repeated his solution—mass deportation—so often that it’s become a campaign slogan. In a national Scripps News/Ipsos poll last month, fifty-four per cent of those asked agreed, either “strongly” or “somewhat,” with Trump’s call, including a quarter of Democrats. Maybe people can’t imagine what an action like that would entail; or, worse, maybe they can.
Either way, the acceptance of such hostile thinking is, at least in part, a function of how relentlessly Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, lay all America’s problems at immigrants’ feet. Mass deportation isn’t just their immigration platform; it’s their response to questions about affordable housing, the economy, and inflation. Last month, Trump said of undocumented immigrants that “getting them out will be a bloody story.” There was hardly time to parse his meaning before he was standing on a Presidential-debate stage, in Philadelphia, lying about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Those remarks, compounded by Vance, were followed by a period of local terror that has included bomb scares, classroom evacuations, and pleas for sanity from the state’s Republican governor. All the while, Trump continued to fulminate on the stump. “These migrants,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin, “are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Last Thursday, in Michigan, he claimed that the government wasn’t providing relief after Hurricane Helene, because Kamala Harris and the Democrats “stole the fema money” so that they “could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.”
The daily stream of racism and mendacity has had a numbing effect. What hasn’t Trump said at this point? But the question of what he might actually do, should he win, is a prospect that voters cannot afford to ignore. Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, has announced that, if the former President is reëlected, the government will deport a million people a year. Given the expense and the bureaucratic complexity alone, this projection appears unrealistic, yet that scarcely makes it less dangerous.
Last summer, Jason Houser, who served as a senior official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Biden Administration, tried to map out what, logistically, a mass-deportation program might look like. His main focus was on the early days, when Trump wouldn’t have nearly enough detention space to hold those apprehended in nationwide sweeps. While the Administration ramped up its capabilities, it could compensate by instilling fear. If enough people were intimidated, some might feel that they had no choice but to leave the country. The guiding idea, as Houser saw it, would be to weaponize ICE against families in order to inflict maximum pain in the most conspicuous way. “This won’t just be something at the border,” he said. “It’ll be boys and girls in your kid’s classes at school who just stop showing up.”
There are more than eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and government agents have enormous latitude in whom they decide to arrest. Current policy discourages ICE from apprehending anyone at hospitals, schools, or places of worship. As a top adviser at the White House during Trump’s Presidency, Miller wanted ICE, in the words of someone present at a meeting with him, “to pull children out of school.” Career officials at the Department of Homeland Security opposed Miller’s plans, but Trump has since vowed to rid the government of such people in a second term. Enforcement would be indiscriminate and unpredictable, turning anyone who is undocumented into a potential target.
In the final years of the Obama Presidency, immigration authorities developed a policing strategy designed to spare from arrest millions of undocumented immigrants who hadn’t been convicted of crimes. When Trump took office, in 2017, he immediately ended that approach. The primary reason that there weren’t more deportations was the considerable resistance of local and state officials to coöperate with ICE. Joe Biden revived the Obama-era strategy. But, if Trump gets back into the White House, it’s reasonable to expect that he will launch raids in Democratic cities and penalize recalcitrant jurisdictions by cutting off federal funds.
Of all the repugnant statements that Trump and his allies have made, the most revealing may have come from Vance. At a campaign event in North Carolina, he explained why he kept referring to Haitians in Springfield as “illegal” when, in fact, they are here legally, as a result of two federal policies that have been upheld in court, despite Republican efforts to dismantle them. “If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal.”
By that logic, existing legal protections and court judgments would be moot. After the Trump Administration separated some five thousand children from their parents at the border, in 2017 and 2018, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite them, and forbade further separations for the next eight years as part of a federal settlement signed in December. If reëlected, will Trump simply ignore that? Hundreds of parents who were reunited with their children under the court order, but still lack permanent status, might well be deported.
They’re just one group among many that are especially vulnerable. Since Biden has been in office, the federal government has allowed more than a million people fleeing persecution and extreme hardship to enter the country legally, under an executive power known as parole, including seventy-seven thousand Afghans and more than five hundred thousand Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans. Trump has already said that he’d revoke their status and that they should “get ready to leave.” There are nearly a million other people who have Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to work legally while renewing their papers every eighteen months; a large share of them have lived in the U.S. for more than two decades. Several hundred thousand immigrants who came here as children also have a provisional legal status: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
What all these individuals have in common is that they willingly shared information with the U.S. government. Because of the deadlock in Congress, there’s nothing they can do to gain permanent status, so, when Obama and Biden created a legal opportunity, they took it. The outcome of the election may now determine whether such trust in the Presidency was misplaced. ♦
