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Trump has vowed to stage the “largest deportation in American history.”
The Guardian reports that raids and mass deportations lie at the heart of former President, Donald Trump’s second term vision -a web of policies so vast that critics say their collective implementation would challenge the very ideal of the United States as a nation of immigrants.
Should he win in November, the Republican nominee has vowed nt only to restore many of his most controversial immigration policies, but to go even further. While a number of his first term plans were stymied by the courts and Congress, immigration rights leaders believe a second Trump administration would likely be more sophisticated and strategic.
Executive director of the immigration advocacy group, America’s Voice Vanessa Cardenas said, “It is different this time. There’s a plan. There’s a sense of urgency that they’ve created around this issue. And they know how to use te levers of government in a way that they didn’t in 2016.”
Trump would also be operating in a changed political landscape. Since leaving office, the political center of gravity has shifted rightward, amid a post-pandemic rise in global migration that saw a record number of people arriving at the southern border and claiming asylum. Americans have become less tolerant of illegal immigration while a growing minority is increasingly concerned about its impact on the country’s economy and national identity.
Border crossings have plummeted this year after the president’s asylum clampdown. But a sense of disorder persists. Voters continue to broadly disapprove of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the situation. Trump and his team are confident immigration remains a potent political issue for voters – and one that he has long played to his advantage.
When he first descended a golden escalator in 2015, Trump pledged to construct a “great wall” along the south-west border with Mexico to keep out immigrants he disparaged as “rapists” and drug dealers. Now, in the final weeks of his third presidential race, he has again escalated his threats against migrants, but this time he is turning his vitriol inward toward those already in the United States.
In a ra;;y in Atlanta, he claimed, “The United States is now an occupied territory. But on November 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”
The former president has not only repeated the pledge to stage the “largest deportation operation in American history”, so frequently, it has become a campaign rallying cry. at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee this summer, his supporters waved signs that read, “Mass deportation now!” and chanted: “send them back.”
Trump has offered few concrete details about his plans, but in public remarks and interviews, he and his allies, including Stephen Miller, the architect of trump’s harsh immigration agenda and an influential adviser, have sketched out an expansive vision that dovetails with the plans laid out in Project 2025, a 900-plus page presidential transition blueprint led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The strategy, as Trump has described it, may involve the extraordinary use of US troops for immigration enforcement and border security and the application of 18th century wartime powers.
Trump has likened his mass deportation plan to the campaign carried out under President Dwight D Eisenhower in 1954. Known by the ethnic slur “Operation Wetback”, hundreds of thousands of people with Mexican ancestry, including some US citizens, were rounded up and deported. Trump’s ambition is vastly more draconian, immigration advocates say.
He has pledged to expel “maybe as many as 20 million” people from the US, though he often fails to distinguish between those who are in the country unlawfully and those who have legal residency
As of 2022, there were eleven million undocumented immigrants in the US. The vast majority of them had been in the country for more than a decade. There is an estimation that over two million new arrivals encountered at the southern border since Biden took office remain in the country. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants granted permission to temporarily live and work in the US for humanitarian reasons are also vulnerable and could see their status revoked.
The president of FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group Todd Schulte said, “The totality of it is so cruel and to make life so hard for immigrants today that they are left with two options: stay in the United States and be subject to presidential demagoguery … or leave their lives here, no matter how long they’ve been here, and go someplace else.”
Trump has said he could invoke the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1978, which allows for summary deportations of non-citizens from a foreign country with which the US is at war. In his rationale, he would use it “to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil”, though it remains an open legal question to whether the supreme court would allo a president to apply the law in this manner. His plans also include the construction of enormous detention camps that Miller who is expected to serve in a second Trump White House, has declared would be “greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”
Trump has also vowed to “terminate” everyone of Biden’s “open borders” policies. He says he would reinstate a policy requiring people seeking asylum in the US to remain in Mexico while their claims are processed and would again invoke the emergency health authority, known as Title 42, that allows US officials to turn away asylum seekers at the border.
His platform calls for reinstating a version of his controversial ban on travel from several primarily Muslim countries, which Biden called “a stain on our national conscience” and ended on his first day in office. His allies have circulated legal theories to support ending birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants, a proposal most scholars believe to be unconstitutional.
He has also said he would impose ideological screenings to keep “Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America”. The visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests could be rescinded.
Since courts have held that presidents have wide latitude to act on immigrations, an emboldened Trump, with a deadlocked Congress, could dramatically reshape the immigration system, especially by restricting legal pathways.
“Any president who dreams of one grand operation to round up 11 million people is probably fooling themselves,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Sudden large-scale deportations would fracture families – both citizens and noncitizens -deeply rooted in their communities. As many as 4.4 million children who are US citizens live with a parent who is undocumented, according to the Pew Research Center.
The economic toll could also be jarring. Researchers say mass deportations at the scale Trump is proposing risk exacerbating labour shortages and driving up inflation. The American Immigration Council report estimated that his mass deportation plan would shrink the country’s gross domestic product by 4.2% to 6.8%. Tax collections would also fall. In 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed nearly $100bn in federal, state and local taxes.
Undocumented people often fill low-wage jobs that native-born workers won’t take. Millions of undocumented people worked frontline jobs during the pandemic, risking their health to provide essential services.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s nakedly xenophobic rhetoric has grown more menacing and nativist. Impervious to facts, he has falsely blamed undocumented people for the country’s woes, including inflation, urban crime and a dearth of federal funding for disaster response.
He has even pre-emptively identified non-citizens as the culprit if he doesn’t win in November, amplifying baseless claims that noncitizens are voting en masse.
